Curtains have interestingly ambivalent associations. Once used to enclose a bed (the earliest use in the English language), to keep out draughts and to assert privacy, they have gradually accrued equally public, even monumental associations.
Petra Blaisse’s sites of production include the private and the public. She has worked on many private houses, but also in theatres, museums, libraries and other kinds of public auditoria. Curtains have been a key feature of her work since 1987. Curtains can be, and increasingly are, used to signal status at the same time as they suggest its absence. They can glamourise even as they suggest a kind of modest functionality. They can protect and shield objects of high worth or vulnerability, and yet are themselves inherently impermanent.
The manoeuvrability of the curtain makes it very suitable for a world concerned not only with performativity, but also with ambivalence. This kind of reticence may usefully seem to decline self-importance. It may also be read as feminine. Curtains denote time; they are opened at the beginning and drawn (or dropped) at the close; they mark the length of the day, or of the act. This temporal quality is matched by their purportedly transitional nature, but we need only think of a fire curtain, a safety curtain or a curtain wall, to correct any superficial links with lightness.
The theatrical associations of the curtain were deployed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich in a natural way, using the notion of the stage set (backdrop and stage) to arrange their characters (the furniture substituting the future inhabitants). Our reliance on black-and-white photographs, staged for posterity, only increases the sense of theatre we see in their projects (such as the German pavilion and the Tugendhat House). Mobile objects are stilled and set in position.
Mies and Reich met the silk manufacturer Hermann Lange in early 1927, and later that year made a Velvet and Silk Café in order to represent the Verein deutscher Seidenwebereien (the Krefeld-based Silk Manufacturers’Association, of which Lange was Chairman) at Die Mode der Dame show in Berlin. It used hanging drapery at different heights (2 to 6 metres) to differentiate areas within the vast spaces of the trade fair. Its novelty lay principally in the curved spaces and their ambiguous functions. The product on show thus became the backdrop, self-effacing yet all-encompassing. Huge swathes (ca. 850 square metres) of fabric hung in mid-air: there was absolutely no need for economy, quite the opposite. Viewed from above, the ground plan clearly resembled an abstract composition (like contemporary painting or the sculpture of Kobro) and its mix of curved and rectilinear angles echoed the shapes of the tubular steel furniture which it housed.
Two years later, Mies and Reich were again commissioned by the Association to represent them, this time at the International Exhibition in Barcelona. The following year they completed the Krefeld houses for Lange[1] and his business associate Esters, in which their experience with textile promotion (Reich would also work independently on the Kunstseide Verkaufsbüro or Rayon sales office in Berlin) allowed them to develop the use of fabric “walls” set against large “panels” of daylight. This was another version of Mies’s all-important transitional zone between indoors and out.
Famous as the interiors designed by Mies and Reich are, they are not unique. Contemporary projects by members of the Wiener Werkstätte, such as E. A. Plischke, and also by the Luckhardt brothers, show both the ways in which photography helped to condense a set of receding chiaroscuro planes, and how cinema must have helped develop that look. Here, curtains both frame the scene and provide its backdrop.
Mies and Reich might be characterised by their placement of “domestic” fittings in public spaces: enlarging the scale, obviously, but also unsettling the reading of a space by making it private and public at the same time. Petra Blaisse, by contrast, has been more consistently public in her use of the curtain. Even when a curtain project has deliberately tackled troublingly monumental space, as inthe Haus der Kunst, it has retained the public scale and function.
The age of temporary exhibitions and trade fairs, which might be seen to have commenced in 1851, has familiarised us with a panoply of similar solutions to the division of space and the promulgation of information. Fictive interiors were created to convey diverse national environments; more overtly commercial spaces were designed to showcase new materials and techniques.
The ingenuity of exhibition-making may be seen to have reached an apogee with the national andinternational propaganda displays developed by totalitarian regimes in the inter-war period. Miesand Reich were of this generation, which included brilliant designers such as Rodchenko in the Soviet Union and Persico in Italy. Convincing solutions included the communication of subliminal messages within a distinctive environment which overcame its merely temporary status. Petra Blaisse’s designs for exhibitions are within this line – primarily informative – rather than in the creation of permanent solutions for the presentation of art.
The Italian designers who came of age in the era of Fascist-sponsored exhibitions moved beyond the temporary showcasing of information to create long-lasting museum interiors. Scarpa, Albini, BBPR, Gardella and their contemporaries were those who both benefited from and created the post-war museum renaissance in Italy, and by inference, more widely. They used “temporary” solutions – which included curtains, panels, easels and other kinds of innovative non-wall based supports first essayed in temporary venues – to assert new kinds of art galleries. Their singling out of objects and pictures, displayed at mid-range, at an indeterminate depth, has come to characterise a new museum language of seeing. Whereas this grammar is one of accentuation and rhythm, that of Blaisse is more uniform, more all-encompassing. Hers is not so much an environment for art, as an environment for being and absorbing. Less about object-based appraisal, and more properly about immersion.
Female architects play an interesting role in post-war exhibition design. Ostensibly working alongside their male partners, a closer reading of their archives shows that they often played the lead role. Lilly Reich has been steadily rehabilitated since the 1980s, allowing her earlier contribution to emerge from under Mies’s American shadow. From the early 1950s, Franco Albini carried out all his museum projects with Franca Helg, and Alison Smithson, it appears, was the more active partner in the Smithsons’ exhibition designs. Their innovative approach to the museum space – like that of the Eames – might be characterised as domestic, or it might be characterised as private. In any case, they bring a wider vocabulary of material and treatment into the public space, allowing the visitor to think of it as a place which can be inhabited.
While curtains have featured in exhibition design since at least the 1930s, it is only more recently that artists have taken them up as a way of inserting a simple architectural presence into their own exhibitions. Felix Gonzalez- Torres, Goshka Macuga, Charlotte Moth, Ulla von Brandenburg and Celine Condorelli are among those artists who have put curtains into their shows in recent years. This is often more than just an homage to Lilly Reich. Curtains fill space very effectively without claiming too much. They can add opulence (with gold, silver, pink, as well as black and white, being favourite colours, and not just for Blaisse) without real expense. They are theatrical, cinematic and sculptural. They can act as the support for paintings or words: El Anatsui uses curtain-like drops for his fabric pieces; in Certain, Bethan Huws used the curtain as if it were a whiteboard. Curtains can also involve others in an easily managed communal project, and Blaisse has talked of this aspect as important.
At worst (which isn’t bad) curtains are inoffensive. At best they are transformative. Curtains are relatively cheap, they can be seen as temporary and they deal with problems left over or unforeseen: lack of colour, texture or security; surplus of light, sound, draughts. Blaisse has capitalised on some of these perceived problems and her early (ca. 1990–1998) contributions to OMA’s villas (Paris, Bordeaux, Holten) use the wind, the weather and the time to give unexpected dynamism to the architecture. Set in nature, it is as if the curtains here are the almost uncanny force which animates the villa. Far from being quiescent, curtains like these give movement and mutability to the stillness of architecture.
In this respect we might see Blaisse, consciously or not, as responding to a suggestion set up by Anni Albers when she wrote “The Pliable Plane; Textile in Architecture,” published in 1957.[2] Tracing the historic journey made by textiles from the exterior to the interior, and thus from a mobile to a static state, she proposed that in this new habitat curtains can take on more aesthetic functions, while we, when “we revert to nomadism [. . .] are open to textile behaviour”.
Extracted from Art Applied by Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse (MACK, 2024). Available to order at: https://mackbooks.eu/products/art-applied-br-inside-outside-petra-blaisse
Reproduced by permission of Penelope Curtis and MACK.
The image of the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa is published with the kind permission of the Fondazione Franco Albini.
The LocHal image is published with the kind permission of Peter Tijhuis.
[1] Christiane Lange, the great granddaughter of Hermann Lange, published her study of the Lange commissions to coincide with an exhibition in the Lange House in Krefeld in 2007. It coincided with my own exhibition, Figuring Space: Sculpture / Furniture from Mies to Moore at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Her book has added to my own research in this area.
[2] Anni Albers, “The Pliable Plane; Textile in Architecture,” Perspecta, vol. 4 (1957), p. 39. Thanks to Eliana Sousa Santos for mentioning this essay in conversation.