INTERIORS
September 1954
Olga Gueft [Editor]
Olga Gueft [Editor]: INTERIORS. New York: Whitney Publications, Volume 112, no. 2, September 1954. Original edition. Slim quarto. Perfect bound and sewn printed illustrated wrappers. 160 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Cover by Andy Warhol. Front wrappers lightly worn and soiled with a diagonal creasing to upper corner, but a very good copy. Preserved in Publishers mailing envelope.
“Our cover: Andy Warhol announces this special issue on Music in Interiors with a loudspeaker, symbol and final instrument of sound reproducing systems—final except for the interior in which the sound is modified and heard.”
9 x 12 magazine with 160 pages color and black and white examples of the best modern American interior and industrial design, circa 1954— -- offering a magnificent snapshot of the blossoming post-WWII modern movement. A very desirable, vintage publication in terms of form and content: high quality printing and clean, functional design and typography and excellent photographic reproduction make this a spectacular addition to a midcentury design collection. Highly recommended.
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- Interiors Cover Artists: short illustrated bios of Salvador Lodico, Genichiro Inokuma, Bruno Munari, and Andy Warhol. “Andy Warhol, our most omnipresent non-staff cover artist, did some drawings for our Music in Interiors study in this issue, as well as the thematic cover. He also supplied some new biographical facts: he will have a show in October at the Loft Gallery, he has published two picture books — Love is a Pink Cake and A is an alphabet — and after a thorough housecleaning, he has newly acquired ten cats named Sam.”
- For your information: Giant and Photographic Houses of Cards by Charles Eames,“. . . his application of the art of design to toys is fast putting Charles Eames in the class somewhere between Roy Rogers and Santa Claus.”
- Full-page two color ad for the new Eames Compact Sofa from the Herman Miller Furniture Company.
- Music in Interiors: sixteen page feature with two Warhol illustrations and 88 black and white photographs.
- Paul Laszlo Interior: two pages photographed by Julius Shulman.
- The Clash of Symbols: 8. Interiors Explores traditional ornament (Silent Music Instruments): four pages and eight black and white photographs.
- Furniture Review: twelve pages and 69 black and white photographs of work by Jens Risom, George Tanier, Herman Miller Furniture Company, George Neslon, Charles Eames, Erwin-Lambeth, Harvey Probber, Mcguire Company, M. Singer & Sons, Bertha Schaeffer, Statton Furniture, Murray Furniture, Ficks Reed Company, Richards Morgenthau, Glenn Of California, Selig, Sherrill, and others.
- Our Eternal Romance with Sleep: Ati and Charles Forberg design a traveling display for the Englander Company.
- Design in Domestics
- Lightolier’s Pragmatic Dramatics: Alvin Lustig designs a lighting showroom, three pages and 11 black and white photographs.
- Merchandise Cues: fabrics, wallpapers, furniture, lamps, tableware, accessories, floor coverings, etc.
Includes advertising (many full-page and/or color) from the following manufacturers and companies: Akari Lamps by Isamu Noguchi at Bonniers, Century Lighting, Directional Modern Showrooms, Dunbar Furniture Corp., Hanson, Heifetz, Lightolier, Harvey Probber, Raymor, Ben Rose, John Stuart, and many others.
“Andy Warhol couldn’t think of anything much to say except that he has eight cats named Sam, when asked for a character portrait, despite the facts, most of them gleaned elsewhere, that: he studied painting and design at Carnegie Tech in home-town Pittsburgh; came to New York in 1949; found Vogue, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, very pleased with such blotting-paper drawings . . . and won an Art Director’s Club medal for a drawing he did for the Columbia Broadcasting System.” — Interiors Cover Artists, July 1953
From the Andy Warhol Foundation: “More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.
“A skilled (analog) social networker, Warhol parlayed his fame, one connection at a time, to the status of a globally recognized brand. Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his traveling audio tape recorder and beloved Minox 35EL camera. Predating the hyper-personal outlets now provided online, Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and broadcast it through his work, to a wide and receptive audience.
“The youngest child of three, Andy was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in the working-class neighborhood of Oakland, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stricken at an early age with a rare neurological disorder, the young Andy Warhol found solace and escape in the form of popular celebrity magazines and DC comic books, imagery he would return to years later. Predating the multiple silver wigs and deadpan demeanor of later years, Andy experimented with inventing personae during his college years. He signed greeting cards “André”, and ultimately dropped the “a” from his last name, shortly after moving to New York and following his graduation with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949.
“Work came quickly to Warhol in New York, a city he made his home and studio for the rest of his life. Within a year of arriving, Warhol garnered top assignments as a commercial artist for a variety of clients including Columbia Records, Glamour magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and others. He also designed fetching window displays for Bonwit Teller and I. Miller department stores. After establishing himself as an acclaimed graphic artist, Warhol turned to painting and drawing in the 1950s, and in 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, with Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. As he matured, his paintings incorporated photo-based techniques he developed as a commercial illustrator. The Museum of Modern Art (among others) took notice, and in 1956 the institution included his work in his first group show.
“The turbulent 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol’s life. It is this period, extending into the early 1970s, which saw the production of many of Warhol’s most iconic works. Building on the emerging movement of Pop Art, wherein artists used everyday consumer objects as subjects, Warhol started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background. When asked about the impulse to paint Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it”. The humble soup cans would soon take their place among the Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs, Disasters, and Coca Cola Bottles as essential, exemplary works of contemporary art.“
George Nelson famously served as Editorial contributor to Interiors, where he used the magazine as his bully pulpit for bringing modernism to middle-class America. Interiors was a hard-core interior design publication, as shown by their publishing credo: "Published for the Interior Designers Group which includes: interior designers, architects who do interior work, industrial designers who specialize in interior furnishings, the interior decorating departments of retail stores, and all concerned with the creation and production of interiors-- both residential and commercial." [interiors_2019]