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Selected press reviews and online coverage from 2009/2010 are highlighted here.
The Geffrye Museum's 1965 Living Room - permanent display
Geffrye Museum 24 November 2009 - 3 January 2010
Geffrye Museum 13 October 2009 - 7 February 2010
Photographs by Mark Cowper at the Geffrye Museum 7 April - 31 August 2009
'Structurally they are identical, but each of these high-rise apartments has been adapted to make it home. Photographer Mark Cowper catches them in the moment.'
'"I was curious to see what other people had done with their flats," says photographer Mark Cowper, who has lived on and off in Ethelburga Tower in Battersea, south London, for 20 years. "It's fascinating how much self-expression can go into one small space. And everyone likes to peek into someone else's world, don't they?"
'Cowper doorstepped his neighbours over the course of a year, asking if he could photograph their living rooms right there and then, just as he found them. "I was surprised how many people let me in," he says. Some were in the middle of the ironing, others were on the phone, many were watching TV. "People wanted to tidy up first, but I wanted to capture that moment, how they were using the room, how the furniture was arranged," Cowper says.
'His impromptu visits took place from summer 2007 to 2008. "I practised in my own flat first, getting the camera in the right position so that I could be quick."
'The apartments are identical in construction: two-bed, split-level maisonettes, each 5m x 3m of living space with a glass-panelled door leading on to a small balcony. The pictures are intriguing because "the same neutral space has been interpreted in so many ways", says Alex Corney, curator at the Geffrye Museum, east London, which is staging an exhibition of Cowper's photographs. One resident has turned their flat into a mock Victorian parlour, with floral carpet and heavy furniture. Another has created an all-white, Japanese-style den. Some have even knocked down the wall between the living room and the kitchen. A common factor is the abundance of gadgetry: remote controls, DVD players and the ubiquitous flickering flatscreen.'
Geffrye Museum 14 October 2008 - 22 February 2009
'The Victorians believed an Englishman's home was his castle, but while men had a stranglehold on the world outside, did they also get to choose the chintz? Stuart Jeffries finds out.'
'Some say men know little, and care less, about domestic interiors. Fools! Consider this from a literary fellow whose aesthetic sense of domestic beauty was so highly attuned that he once said: "I find it harder and harder to live up to my blue china."
'Oscar Wilde's library was a carefully choreographed space with a low divan, ottomans, lanterns and hangings, and it was here, according to his biographer, Richard Ellman, that Wilde smoked, conducted tête-à-têtes and did most of his writing. But it wasn't the only room that he had stage designer William Godwin fit out to his theatrical specifications. On the third floor of his four-storey house was the study, painted gold and vermilion.
'You may well now be asking yourself (I know I am) the following: even though Wilde was a big bloke, did he really need both a library and a study? If he did most of his writing in his library, couldn't he have given over his study to his wife, Constance? And was his rather modern interest in home furnishings representative of his fellow males at the time?
'A new exhibition at the Geffrye Museum in east London is to explore the balance between men and women when it comes to choosing soft furnishings, from the repressive patriarchal atmosphere of the Victorian era, to today. Who ruled the roost domestically? Were men in charge at home, just as much as they ensured their stranglehold on the world outside? Or was the home one of the few places where women ran the show?
'"Wilde's an extreme example," says Christine Lalumia, deputy director of the Geffrye Museum. "He takes it further than most, but the fact that he was gay is irrelevant. For most of the period we're considering, men had the financial power, women didn't have the vote, and the notion that an Englishman's home was his castle had enormous power. Yet there is this misconception that men were absent while their wives made the choices about furnishings."
'The exhibition is partly aimed at exploding the myth that men - the straight ones, at least - would sooner stick rusty knitting needles in their eyes than spend Saturday afternoon examining curtain fabrics with their life partners. When, for instance, WS Gilbert spent one 19th-century afternoon with his wife at Liberty, checking out a Japanese display, it was the catalyst for his and Sullivan's operetta The Mikado. "Husbands and wives made decorating decisions collaboratively," say the exhibition's curators.
'However, the sexist rhetoric of leading Victorian writers suggested otherwise. The home was the wife's domain. The poet Coventry Patmore said he preferred to keep his angelic wife "in the house", while critic John Ruskin wrote that "home was a feeling that followed the true wife wherever she went". Stereotypical Victorian gents preferred to be "in the club" rather than chilling in the home, where they risked being symbolically castrated. If the home was, as 17th-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke claimed, an Englishman's castle, then it was one in which he was an absentee landlord or irritating guest.
'If you think I'm joking about the symbolic castration thing, reflect on this: Charles Eastlake, keeper of the National Gallery from 1878-1898, reportedly said, "I can go off and buy masterpieces, but at home I can't win the battle of the mantelpieces." Yet Eastlake was the author of Hints On Household Taste In Furniture, Upholstery And Other Details, one of which, ironically enough, was that the mantelpiece in one's library should be a place for the display of important male artefacts. Eastlake recommended that it should be divided into panels, and that "a little museum may thus be formed". In his own home, though, he could not even divide the mantelpiece into one panel marked "His" and another "Hers". Maybe Eastlake needed to have a long, boring conversation with his wife about their relationship.
'In this socio-aesthetic maelstrom, Wilde was pivotal in challenging women's presumed domestic dominance (a dominance, you will have noticed, posited by men, often very bearded ones). "Not surprisingly, the married Victorian woman was to Oscar Wilde a signifier of middle-class banality, and he had little time for the domestic ideology that surrounded her," writes Professor Allison Pease in Reading Wilde/Querying Spaces. "Thus he introduced a new notion of the home in his 'House Beautiful' campaign that focused more on the aesthetically pleasing form of the house than its occupants. By taking the angel out of the house and making it beautiful, he threatened to empty the home of its moral core."
'But there is another strand to the story: when men got involved (commandingly), whole rooms changed their gender. Men ruled libraries, studies, smoking rooms and, most of all, dining rooms: it was in the last that the paterfamilias sat at the head of the table, surrounded by putatively masculine mahogany and heavy draperies, thereby hoping to resist the symbolic castration.
'Domestic gender politics have changed dramatically. "In the Edwardian period, houses became smaller," Lalumia says. As a result, even if today's fathers are perhaps bigger than their forebears, they are less likely to command dining rooms. The time of such gendered spaces for even the middle classes (with whose tastes the Geffrye show is exclusively concerned) is over.
'This is the new deal: women rarely get rooms of their own and men, faced with a new kind of symbolic castration, get the hump. Having got the hump, men (as they so often do, the pathetic sulks) have talked with their feet. "In the 20th century, men lost the den or study or library, and moved out to the garage or shed," Lalumia says. Which is why, no doubt, there has been such a literary flourishing of shed-bound male writers (think George Bernard Shaw or Philip Pullman). One can't help but think that Wilde would sooner have done himself in than write in a shed, especially one of those self-assembly Homebase jobbies. No matter: the shed has become the male (with) drawing room.
'Sheds notwithstanding, nowadays we think of domestic space as gender neutral. But some domestic stereotypes remain. "Women today, as they have in the past, tend to take more of an interest in the soft furnishings, while men may take a lead on 'electronic stuff'," the Geffrye's experts claim. Maybe in your house. In mine, it's my partner who deals with the electronic stuff, despite the undeniable fact of her being a woman, while I ruche the curtains and plump the cushions in a gender-transgressive way, nonetheless secure in my masculinity. At least, that's my story.'
• Choosing The Chintz: Men, Women And Furnishing The Home From 1850 To The Present, is at the Geffrye Museum, London from October 14-February 22.
'Anyone who has laboured through a weekend trip to Ikea will be under no illusion that women are the sole decision-makers behind household acquisitions. But though the ranks of couples debating the merits of one sofa over the next might suggest otherwise, the idea still pervades that it is women who rule the roost when it comes to furnishing the marital home. An ambitious exhibition at the Geffrye Museum aims to examine this notion as it traces the history of sexual politics and home decorations from the Victorian era to today. 'The exhibition starts with an interactive passageway leading into the main body of exhibits. Scene-setting sepia and black-and-white images of Victorian living rooms and studies are flashed on to large screens alongside spoken excerpts from diaries of the era. A middle-class gentlewoman’s observation that husband Edgar is ‘terribly fidgety about his carpets’ instantly raises a smile.'Amid enlarged images of Victorian couples shopping, taken from newspapers of the time, are sensitively placed paintings to emphasise how Victorians and Edwardians, particularly men, used their homes and possessions to inform the world of their place within it. An oil portrait (pictured below) of Henry Thomas Lambert by George Townsend Cole shows the shipping merchant solemnly depicted in his quintessentially fussy Victorian living room surrounded by a wealth of household accoutrements (carpets topped with rugs, curtains and pelmets, marble-topped sideboards and a surfeit of gilt). In ‘A Bloomsbury Family’ painted in 1907 by Sir William Orpen, William Nicholson, an artist, is placed at the heart of Edwardian domestic life, seated at a stately dining- room table surrounded by his children with his wife a mere shadowy figure in the background.'However, the greatest revelation of the exhibition is not so much that Victorian men were concerned with the appearance of their homes but that it was a collaborative venture enjoyed by both husband and wife. This harmonious domesticity is illustrated by the intriguing exhibit of a diary with alternating entries by a husband and wife in which they detail their pursuits in maintaining the household, all illustrated with pictorial vignettes. A fiftieth wedding anniversary album created by a husband for his wife in 1908, which recounts all the home improvements and decorating they did together, offers another fascinating insight into this side of Edwardian life. 'The star attraction for kids is likely to be Mrs Bryant’s 1860s dolls’ house, a model of her own home with authentic decoration and furniture. Decked out with miniature hand-made pieces, it’s entertaining in itself, but also serves to show how different rooms within the Victorian house were seen as either male or female arenas. Accordingly, the Lilliputian drawing room is wallpapered in delicate grey and white feminine wallpaper, while the study is a visual feast of rich crimson and thickly patterned carpets.'The theme of male versus female spaces is continued elsewhere. A furniture catalogue advertises a rather theatrically attired smoking room bedizened in hookahs, cushions and fretwork tables, like a Turkish palace. Other gentlemanly pursuits included curating home museums. John Hawkshaw’s bijou collection of South American and African shells gathered on his travels would have been displayed in his library or study. 'Though the bulk of exhibits concentrate on Victoriana, small but creative displays lead the exhibition into the modern era, and explain how women became the primary target for furniture sales with reference to information about changes in the law that allowed women to own property after marriage for the first time. The exhibition finale focuses on the twenty-first century, which has seen an equilibrium between the sexes at least in part restored: men are as involved as women in home decor, albeit with specific areas of interest. 'Interactive screens show slides of three living rooms and the audience is invited to guess whether the owners are male or female. Elsewhere, three couples explain their choices for home decor, but the last word must go to a couple in their seventies: the husband avers that he has nothing to do with ‘those soft furnishings’, though claims proudly that all the technological stuff is down to him'.
