Event Item: 00043

Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s

Exhibition: 16th Nov 2007 to 11th May 2008

Source: http://www.wolfsonian.fiu.edu

The Wolfsonian-Florida International University will present an exciting exhibition that offers an innovative, in-depth look at the promotion and dissemination of design. Fashioning the Modern French Interior: Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s will open at The Wolfsonian on November 16, 2007 and remain on view through May 11, 2008.

The focus of the exhibition is on the depiction of modern interiors in luxury portfolios created to market the Art Moderne style in France during the 1920s. In order to advance the new interior design aesthetic, French publishers produced limited-edition portfolios using a traditional techniqueknown in France as pochoir. The technique, which involved the hand application of colour to a print using a series of carefully cut stencils (pochoirs), offered efficiency in production and high quality. The luminous, vibrant images that resulted from the pochoir technique were an ideal medium for promoting the new approaches to interior design and decoration, offering a warmth, depth, and richness of colour that could not be captured by photography. These portfolios were highly effective messengers of the modern style, heralds of the new aesthetic for the French elite.

The exhibition brings to light the tensions between traditional and modern design that existed in France during the 1920s. The vibrant images in these portfolios document the furnishings and interiors of the leading French designers of the time, including Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, and Eileen Gray.

"The use of the pochoir technique itself as a means of promoting new design is characteristic of this tension, offering an alternative to drawing and photography to convey designers' conception of the modern interior from the traditional to the avant-garde," notes Wolfsonian curator Sarah Schleuning. The revitalization of the pochoir technique offered a novel graphic approach to depict and disseminate modern interiors and decorative patterns to the public, artfully promoting new design while avoiding commercialization. The spectacular color images from the portfolios present a great variety of solutions that will delight today's audiences.

The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida