Furniture

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FURNITURE

people's relations to furniture
crisis of style
bibliography

Furniture framed the everyday domestic lives of Europeans throughout the long nineteenth century. Accumulating enough savings so as to be able to furnish one's home was the dream of the urban working class, whereas the wealthy expended great time and energy on the acquisition of furnishings appropriate to their station. New institutions of distribution arose to supply rich and poor; in addition to the small custom shops and open-air markets of the early modern world, consumers could now also purchase their furniture from distributors ranging from stores selling poor-quality furniture on credit to the most luxurious of specialized and department stores. The work of these new retailers was seconded by that of advertisers and commentators.

By the nineteenth century both specialized and department stores were heavily advertising their wares, providing potential consumers with a vision of what they could acquire. Those advertisements were often bullying in tone, promising social and marital success as well as psychological fulfillment to those who purchased wisely and great ills and troubles to those who did not acquire what was recommended for them. The style in which the homes of the poor, the petite bourgeoisie, and the wealthy were furnished also became a major preoccupation of both government officials and cultural critics. Competitions were held across Europe to encourage designers to imagine affordable, healthy, and appropriate furnishings for each social class. Taste professionals further argued that working-class households that dwelt in homes

furnished with styles originally designed for the palaces of kings would be dissatisfied with their lot and inclined toward revolution. Decorating magazines included long articles on how the country houses of the wealthy should differ from their apartments in town. City dwellers living with furniture designed for rural homes would be ill-adapted for the particular rigors of urban life. Carved furnishings filled with hard-to-clean crevices and too heavy to move would encourage the spread of disease. Furniture, like architecture, was also the site of polemics between nationalists and regionalists, each arguing that from the style of the home emanated a sense of solidarity. Those who sought to reinforce regional identifications argued that people should live in the traditional styles of their region. Nationalists, sought, rather, to create a single style that would undercut those local affiliations and enable those who lived in the same polity to share an aesthetic every day.

people's relations to furniture

This profusion of new institutions, advertisements, and prescriptive commentaries necessarily shaped people's relations to the furniture they acquired, or sought to acquire. While this was not yet a mass consumer society, more people had more choice concerning the appearance of their homes than ever before. With that choice came a new sense of responsibility and possibility.

Europeans in this period used their homes for two, sometimes conflicting, purposes. The first was simply to provide the physical context for domestic life, the second to represent, and even constitute, the social and psychological self. A fundamental goal for all—young and old, single and married, rich and poor, urban and rural—was to create a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing context for their domestic everyday lives. Furnishings provided the props needed for sleeping, eating, dressing, socializing, and often working. There was, then, a functional role for furnishings. Equally crucial, however, was the role they played in the daily reconstitution of the self. Furnishings, like clothing and other elements of material culture, located individuals socially, temporally, and even politically. Throughout this period, for example, domestic interiors were markedly national in inflection. Thus, while German households were quite internationalist, containing goods of German, French, Italian, and English origin, French imports were limited to the British, and English and Italian households also tended to favor national styles (although French furnishings did travel throughout Europe).

Differences in national taste were equaled by differences among social classes. The gap in living standards in this period was vast. Until the second half of the twentieth century most urban dwellers lived in extremely cramped quarters, which often served as the site of labor as well as living. Single room dwellings housing multigenerational families and a workshop were far from uncommon. Those living in the country sometimes had more space, but very rarely the disposable income, or perhaps perceived need, to furnish their homes elaborately. Even those who had little space or disposable income, however, had some access to the posters and leaflets advertising the kind of interiors available to some and every major and most small cities had retailers that specialized in selling furniture on credit. The commercial, industrial, and professional classes, by contrast, came in this period to live in spacious apartments or single-family dwellings. They furnished these homes with great care and great concern for the appropriateness of that decoration to the household's professional and social position and often replaced furnishings as their social situation improved or declined. Tensions arose among these representational tasks. Cherished remnants of a past moment of life could sit uneasily with objects chosen in a later present with an eye toward the future. A subcultural identification—of class, region, or religion—could lead taste in a direction different from that of the national community.

Further complicating this dynamic was the fact that people, even if they lived alone, were also part of families. The families and family homes, however modest or luxurious, in which people passed their childhoods shaped their expectations of domesticity and the domestic environment. Whether they sought to emulate, modify, or escape those settings, they were influenced by them. Homes were often also more literally shaped by previous generations through inheritance. Even if inherited goods were discarded, they maintained a ghostly presence in the home. New families created by marriage or cohabitation were just as complex as those of birth. Husbands and wives came into their joint home with different pasts, and perhaps, different visions for the future. Those differences were often made dramatically tangible in the context of the home.

crisis of style

Due in part to this symbolic and representational weight being carried by furnishings and in part to changing dynamics within the world of production, by the end of the nineteenth century there was a general sense of crisis: no style appropriate to the modern era was understood to have emerged. The stylistic innovations of the end of the nineteenth century known as style moderne, jugendstil, or liberty were most often condemned by commentators as being both in poor taste and, because of their minimal use of machinery, inappropriate styles for the modern age. The British Arts and Crafts movement with its medieval referents and emphasis on hand labor, most famously represented by the English poet and artist William Morris (1834–1896), was also understood to be nostalgic and hopelessly ill-suited to modernity. Consumers were not much more enthusiastic than the critics about these styles, which were, in any case, too expensive for the majority to imagine acquiring. To the horror of design professionals most Europeans on the eve of World War I were still living in homes filled with either second-hand or antique furniture on the one hand or contemporary interpretations of historical styles on the other. The persistent dominance of historicism and eclecticism was understood to pose a threat in three domains: the economic, the political, and the social.

It was not only the perceived aesthetic archaism that worried commentators, however, but a particularly pernicious mode of production that they argued it enabled. Historicist furniture styles, because of their extensive use of carving, turning, caning, inlay, and veneer were very labor intensive. In their efforts to produce inexpensive versions of these intrinsically luxurious styles, furniture distributors (like their colleagues in the clothing industries) turned to outwork and sweated labor. Rather than create large factories, distributors built on the already existing network of small artisans, sometimes advancing materials, sometimes simply buying completed work at a low price. Workers driven

to produce more and more quickly necessarily turned out poor quality items while living in abject poverty. New, modern styles that could be efficiently produced in factories, it was argued, would enable employers to pay decent wages while also providing consumers with durable (and appropriate) furnishings. The immiseration of furniture workers was further feared because of their concentration in particular neighborhoods, like Paris's Faubourg St. Antoine or London's East End, and their history of labor organization and political radicalism.

The industry's continued production of historicist styles was also understood to weaken it on the international market. Since the working drawings and models for these styles were freely available, international competition turned exclusively on a combination of economies and efficiencies in the production process and access to cheap raw materials. Each European nation-state worried about the others' supposed advantages in the domain of production and all were worried about competition from the United States. French and English commentators worried about the greater efficiency of the Germans and the Americans while the Germans thought the British school system and the French craft traditions would enable both to outsell them. Efforts to mandate a new style or to encourage innovation through improved school curricula, access to museums and libraries, or competitions, all proved of limited effect, largely because consumers preferred historicist pastiche to the modernist styles invented for them. However engaged in modernity they were in other domains of their lives, even other aesthetic domains such as the fine arts, music, or literature, the vast majority of European consumers in the long nineteenth century looked to their homes for reassuring links to their familial and national pasts.

See alsoHousing; Popular and Elite Culture.