Studio: international art (90.1925)

INTERIOR DECORATION AND FURNISHING AT PARIS

VIEW IN INTERIOR OF THE
HOTEL D'UN COLLECTIONNEUR
FURNISHING AND DECORA-
TIONS BY J. RUHLMANN

(Internat.Exhn.of Modern Decora-
tive and Industrial Arts, Paris)

THE PARIS INTERNATIONAL
EXHIBITION, 1925. THIRD
ARTICLE: INTERIOR DECORATION
AND FURNISHING. BY GABRIEL
MOUREY. 0 0 0 0 0

IT is unquestionably in the sphere of
interior decoration and furnishing that
the Exhibition can show the largest number
of works worthy of interest, and often of
admiration, and this holds good as well of
the foreign as the French sections. In all
can be distinguished the most charac-
teristic tendencies of the different European
countries in the arrangement of their public
and private decoration, and this is most
instructive from the sociological point of
view in addition to the attraction it holds
out to those interested in the arts. 0 0
It is true that in many respects an
Englishman, a Swede, a Frenchman or a
Swiss would approach the problem of
furnishing a dining room or bedroom from
a similar standpoint. For each of them a
chair would be a chair, and a bed a bed,
but it is none the less true that the furni-
154

ture of a dining room or bedroom designed
and executed for an inhabitant of Liverpool
or Stockholm, or Paris or Geneva, or
Milan would differ in each case, despite
the tendency towards uniformity in meals,
clothes and amusements, which is one of
the features of the present day. And
it is in the design of furniture that we see
the most outstanding and significant
differences. Also, these differences are
due in a much greater degree to variations
of climate than to diversity of aesthetic
tastes, granting that almost everywhere
the will to modernism which dominates
the craftsmen is regulated by the same
essential principles—consideration of the
medium, adaptation of shapes to the
material used and to the purpose of the
object being made, and an almost total
suppression of ornament. There is, how-
ever, a very great difference between the
salient characteristics of the furniture made
by the different countries. We should be
glad of this, for the world would seem too
monotonous if everyone had the same
sort of house, furniture and everyday

FURNITURE BY THE ATELIER
PRIMAVERA (SCREEN BY PAUL
LEVY, ARMCHAIR BY SOGNOT)

(Internal. Exhn. of Modern Decora-
tive and Industrial Arts, Paris)