Biedermeier to Bauhaus

"Biedermeier to Bauhaus will delight anyone interested in interior design. Tracing the evolution of these and other eclectic European styles from their roots in the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, it reveals a creative decorative tradition that has been admired and imitated the world over." "Given access to private houses - cottages, palaces, town houses, artist's studios, and rural retreats throughout Germany and Austria - many of which have never been photographed before, author Sigrid Sangl presents gilded wood-paneled parlors and richly colored seventeenth-century textiles; exuberant Baroque stucco work; eighteenth-century Rococo fantasies from castles and summer palaces; the intense reds and bright blues of the Classical revival; Biedermeier living rooms with elegant ebonized tables and chairs; romantic neo-Gothic tracery; the ornamental curves of Jugendstil - the German counterpart of Art Nouveau - and the pure functionalism of the Bauhaus. Spanning the Baltic to the Alps and Dusseldorf to Dresden, these astonishingly varied and authentic interiors are seen as different strands of a complex but characteristic decorative heritage." "With an informative, accessible text and specially commissioned photographs by photographers Barbara and Rene Stoeltie, Biedermeier to Bauhaus is an unparalleled source book for contemporary interiors."--Jacket.

The influence of the Renaissance: the roots of German style in the sixteenth century -- Baroque grandeur and rococo fantasies: nature as a model for interiors in the eighteenth century -- Neo-classicism and the Biedermeier style: the impact of classical antiquity and the taste of the new bourgeoisie in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- Historicism: the search for a 'true' German style in the nineteenth century -- Jugendstil, the Werkstätten and the Bauhaus: the quest for a consciously modern style for the new twentieth century -- The rural tradition: sentiment and reality through the centuries.