Maisons d'artistes: sympathetic frame and wandering aesthetic

Abstract

Originally a 'highly aestheticised bachelor atelier for the exhibiting of art and the seduction of visitors', the maison d'artiste was adapted by artists in the early twentieth century to provide a flexible living and working space that also functioned as sympathetic frame for their practice. Maisons d'artistes were created from the late nineteenth century by James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, Eileen Gray, Romaine Brooks, Sonia Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, Florine Stettheimer, and Dora Gordine. In post World War II America, a notable one was created for Robert Motherwell. Maisons d'artistes continue to be created and decorated by artists in the twenty-first century. In each case these combined living and working spaces were written up and circulated through various interior and architectural journals both at the time of their creation and since, helping transpose, but often homogenising this incorrigible space. Using Bourdieu's term disposition this paper envisions how the maison d'artiste has travelled. It will demonstrate through historical and contemporary examples how the artist's studio has been used as a means for the reinforcement of marginal artistic practices (feminine, queer) and also how as a form, it has 'travelled' both geographically and beyond the boundaries of medium and discipline. Transposable and durable, the maison d'artist is revived, decade after decade, as a sympathetic structure for producing, sheltering and ultimately framing the work, and it stands in perverse, ambivalent, and even antagonistic relationship to white-walled modernism.