Concluding our series for Women's History Month, Professor Louise Campbell will consider the role of the publicity in subverting expected associations between women and interior design and décor in the 1930s.
Writing about artists flourished following the expansion of the illustrated press in the 20th century. Artists who combined home and workplace were a favourite subject for newspaper and magazine articles and interviews. With the advent of the gossip column in 1926, a new spotlight was trained on the domestic environment. How did this affect the women artists who came to the fore during the interwar years? This talk suggests that during the 1930s women made an adroit use of publicity in order to negotiate their place in the art world and to subvert the identification of interior design and décor as the domain of the feminine and the frivolous.
Louise Campbell is Professor Emerita of History of Art at Warwick University. She has published widely on modernism and architecture, on Basil Spence and his practice, and on the artist’s studio in Britain and France. Her publications include: Coventry Cathedral: art and architecture in postwar Britain (OUP, 1996); Twentieth century architecture and its histories (SAHGB, 2000); Basil Spence Buildings and Projects (with Miles Glendinning and Jane Thomas) (RIBA, 2012); and Studio Lives: architect, art and artist in twentieth-century Britain (Lund Humphries, 2019). She is a member of Coventry Cathedral’s FAC and a trustee of the Hosking Houses Trust which awards residential bursaries to women artists and writers. She is currently working on an exhibition about post-war art, architecture and design in the Midlands, Modern Mercia, which opens at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum in May 2021
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