Art Deco Hybridity, Interior Design, and Sexuality between the Wars Two Double Acts: Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher/Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wyld

Abstract

Tracing the emergence of female interior decorators around the turn of the twentieth century, Peter McNeil notes that the issue of the designer’s sexuality has been suppressed in most of the design literature, perhaps because during the interwar years so many leading figures in the field were women who pursued same-sex relationships. To demonstrate his point, McNeil draws our attention to the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, the florist Constance Spry, the painter and frame-maker Gluck, the furniture historian and advisor Margaret Jourdain, the designer and architect Eileen Gray, and the designing couple Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wyld. 1 Starting from McNeil’s observations, this chapter considers the practice of two such designing couples: Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, who specialized in hand-block printed textiles and worked in London before moving their studio to rural Gloucestershire, and Eyre de Lanux and Wyld, who produced furniture and rugs first in Paris and later in Cannes. Both couples were active during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when they combined their work (sometimes with that of other artists) to produce remarkably innovative interior decoration schemes. This chapter investigates their sources of inspiration, technical practices, and esthetic tenets as well as their desire to redesign everyday life for the modern woman. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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