Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920 ed. by Claire Moran

Abstract

Reviewed by: Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920ed. by Claire Moran Camilla Murgia Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920. Ed. by C laireM oran. ( Material Culture of Art and Design) New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 2022. xxi+ 343 pp. £81. ISBN 978-1-5013-4169-4. Recent scholarship has increasingly paid attention to the role of interiors and their multiple impacts on arts, literature, design, and visual culture across the long nineteenth century. Claire Moran points out this growing and multidisciplinary research interest in the Introduction to Domestic Space in France and Belgium(p. 1). The book aims to study the interior through different methodological approaches, considering the relation between inside and outside, and to deal with various topics, from literary texts to pictorial representations and architectural units. However, Moran, together with the other scholars in this volume, does much more than that. The collection as a whole combines a discussion of the agency of space with analysis of the ways in which the notions of interior and domesticity intervene in artistic, literary, and cultural practices. Moran highlights the book's purpose of studying the domestic interior as a 'modernist phenomenon' (p. 4), thus significantly widening the discussion of spatiality and domesticity to include literary, architectural, and art-historical contexts. The book consists of thirteen chapters organized in three parts, exploring different aspects of the relationship between space and domesticity. The first part, 'Representing [End Page 139]the Domestic Interior', consists of six chapters discussing the representation of interiors through visual and literary documents and sources. Matteo Piccioni deals with a particular chronological frame—the July Monarchy—examining a rich range of satirical images and 'panoramic literature' (pp. 23–28). Ulrike Müller and Marjan Sterckx focus on private collectors' spaces in Belgium, while Moran deals with visual and literary material, including Fernand Khnopff's and James Ensor's artworks and the writings of Maurice Maeterlinck and Georges Rodenbach, to name but a few. Moran considers the relationship between internal and external spaces (p. 80) and addresses issues regarding 'in-betweenness' (p. 81), discussing the characteristics of Belgian art and literature with depth and flair. Anne Green's chapter focuses on a vast corpus of French texts, including novels and writings by Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Maxime Du Camp, while Nathalie Aubert focuses on texts by Georges Rodenbach and Marcel Proust. Dominique Bauer provides an outstanding examination of spatial images of the domestic interior, analysing Jules Romains's Cromedeyre-le-Vieiland providing a thought-provoking investigation of notions such as unanimism (pp. 122–25). The second part of the book, entitled 'Gender and Domestic Space', consists of three chapters considering the representations of domestic interiors from a gender-related perspective. For instance, Sinéad Furlong-Clancy studies the domestic space as depicted by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Attention is paid in this part of the volume to the bourgeois dimension of the material studied. Caroline Ardrey explores the notion of bricolage, considering three journals as diverse as La Ménagère, La Mode illustréeand Stéphane Mallarmé's La Dernière Mode. Through the prism of Claude Lévi-Strauss's discussion of the notion of bricolage, Ardrey aims to study how the feminine press employed and relied on this activity, which was thought to be the preserve of masculine spheres. Aina Marti analyses the relation between bourgeois homes and sexualities in Colette's Claudineseries, showing how sexuality allows us to investigate domesticity through the description of characters' living spaces, such as Rézi's room (pp. 193–96) or Renaud's apartment (pp. 196–200). Finally, the third part, entitled 'Aesthetics and the Domestic Interior', reviews some aspects of art and architecture, following comparative and specific angles. Aniel Guxholli compares Art Nouveau and Belgian Symbolism, while Jill Owen relies on Balzac and Impressionism to interrogate the notion of ekphrasis. Maria Golovteeva deals more specifically with the interior of Villa Khnopff in Brussels, which survives only in photographs, studying the impact that Symbolism and Symbolist theories had on the domestic space. Finally, Anna Jozefacka studies the values of private space...