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In this essay, I would like to focus on some thoughts that I developed while I was writing a book for Reaktion Books in London, titled The Modern Interior. I wrote this book to address a number of questions that had arisen in my mind over the last decade or so while I was working on two other books -As Long as It's Pink: the Sexual Politics of Taste, published in 1995, which addressed the issue of the marginalization of feminine taste within modernism, and Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration, published a decade later, in which I explored the implementation of feminine taste in the interior from the perspective of the life and work of a single individual. 1 My assertion, in the latter text, was that de Wolfe's work was as modern as that of any of the modernists, even if it did not look as if it were. This led me to the conclusion that the word "modern," in the context of the interior, needs unpacking and that it is necessary to discuss it within the frame not only of "modernism" but also in that of the much broader concept of "modernity." This made it possible to address not only the familiar features of the modernist interior -the emphasis upon space, immateriality, the open plan, transparency, inside/outside ambiguity, etc. -which relied upon an architectural "take" on the interior, but also another range of ideas emanating from discussions about the concept of industrial modernity -the separate spheres, the growth of the mass media, the rise of individualism, feminine modernity, interiority, mass consumption, and so on -themes that enabled me to borrow from other disciplines, cultural studies and literary analysis among them. This double-leveled discussion, which did not prioritize either modernism or modernity, or see them as necessarily existing in a binary opposition to each other, permitted me to begin to think about the modern interior in a wholly new way. It provided me with a useful frame within which to lay out an exposition of the subject, which is what I set out to do in my recent book.

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This article provides an overview of the work that has addressed the subject of the "modern interior," showing how it has been discussed within a wide variety of contexts, including that of architectural and design modernism (which emphasized the concept of "space"); that of the social, cultural, and psychological links between interiors and their modern inhabitants (which focused on the idea of "place"); and that of the decorative arts (which prioritized the importance of "taste"). It offers a historiographical approach to the "modern interior" and seeks to demonstrate both the subject's fundamental multidisciplinarity and its inherent complexity. The article suggests that the study of the modern interior must embrace that complexity, recognizing and acknowledging the importance of both modernism and modernity, as well as that of the roles of "interiority" and "representation," both visual and literary.

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