Private Exhibitions: Galleries, Art and Interior Design, 1920-1960

My chapter focuses on the private art gallery (or commercial art gallery) as arena for the mediation of Italian design. Current interplay between gallery owners and architects continues a tradition dating from the 1920s, when galleries played a critical role in fuelling opposition to establishment, or merely fashionable, art by exhibiting works carefully chosen by well-informed curators and pioneering owners in appropriately modified interiors. These galleries, which also were hotbeds of debate, represented significant and testing commissions for a number of famous architects, although, unfortunately, many of them no longer exist in built form. The best of these gallery interiors were a far cry from the "au bonheuer des dames" taste that still characterised private exhibition interiors. Some galleries brought in architects to give them a recognisable image, while curators refined their selections of works by cultivating the esteem of artists and art-lovers, and devising ploys to overcome public indifference to art. Almost all the galleries published books and catalogues, and organised lectures; some even had purpose-built publications and meetings rooms for such activities. Furthermore, exhibitions were critical in mediating architecture and interior design to a gallery-going public; exhibition galleries were the test-beds that took modern Italian architecture beyond Rationalism and called for new ways of relating to art. Galleries were an arena for the mediation of design not only through their arrangements of interiors, furniture, and display stands for showing art, but also as intellectual meeting places and sites for the exchange of ideas. This chapter explores an area of cultural heritage forgotten by many design histories; it relates a specifically Italian approach to relationships between interior design and art and find connections with present practice, in which the International ‘white cube’ style can be regarded as a reduction of the design process.