A Renovated Renaissance: Richard Riemerschmid's Modern Interiors for the Thieme House in Munich

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the apparently anti-modern forces that informed German designer Richard Riemerschmid's approach to the design of modern interiors during the early 1900s. It considers his Herrenzimmer (gentleman's study) for Carl Thieme, displayed in 1906 at Dresden's seminal Third German Applied Arts Exhibition, as an example of the defining role that Germany's past played in determining the look and feel of a modern German art–cultural reformer Hermann Muthesius hailed Riemerschmid's interiors as a modern German Volkskunst, or “art of the people.” The article exposes connections between early sixteenth-century German art, including that of Albrecht Dürer, and modern German design–seemingly strange bedfellows that were accommodated through the visual and material culture of late nineteenth-century Munich. The material of wood symbolized the German cultural character, embodying both a rough materiality and a soulful spirituality that was traceable in Dürer's prints, in the Renaissance-revival interiors of 1870s Munich, and in Riemerschmid's modern Raumkunst, or “room-art.”