The Department Store Poison - Le Grand Magasin Empoisonneur (1922)
[a possible reaction to the essay 'Le Grand Magasin educateur' by French psychologist Edouard Toulouse]
The large department store bears an enormous share of responsibility for the general debasement of taste in France.
It is the department store, with its moderate prices and its delivery facilities, that has virtually imposed on the middle-class home and even on the country cottage the stupid color reproduction, the idiotic sideboard, the phony antique brass lamp and all the other hideous furnishings of the modern apartment.
It has promoted the universal deterioration of taste by bringing about the extinction of those isolated centers of individual initiative, the small stores.
Whereas in the cities of certain great foreign countries - in Vienna, for example - each interior bears an unmistakable personal stamp, the total standardization of decorative poverty drives the visitor away from the French home.
People are stupid, people are blind. They do not know that one does not furnish simply to furnish, that furniture is designed to serve a useful function, and that it can deviate from strict functionalism only when it has unquestionable artistic and aesthetic interest. The most unpretentious painted white cupboard, which simply shelters those objects most necessary to daily life, is a thousand times more beautiful than some mass-produced Bon Marche pedestal table that vaguely refers to styles of which only the caricature remains.
For in offering such merchandise Mr. Boucicaut [founder of first modern dept. store in France, Le Bon Marche = The Good Deal] is interested only in filling his cash registers with as much money as possible. It makes no difference to him if by his fault such a tide of ugliness has spread over the world that modern man may be said to be steeped in ugliness from the hour of his birth to the hour of his death.
Martine, Mare, and Francis Jourdain may vie with one another in ingenuity and create furnishings whose harmony is a true enchantment to the eye and almost to the ear, but they will reach only the moneyed aristocracy, who pay dearly for the privilege of living in beautiful surroundings.
Boucicaut, because of the size of the business, will remain the great invader of the home and the poisoner of the aesthetic well-being of the public.
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