The Arcades Project - Operi

alded. Naturally, one can say that the bourgeois comfort of the dining room has
survived longest in small cafes and other such places; but perhaps one can also
say that the space of the cafe, within which every square meter and every hour
are paid for more punctually than in apartment houses, evolved out of the latter.
The apartment from which a cafe was made is a picture puzzle < Vexierbild> with
the caption: Where is the capital hiding? [G 1,2]
Grandville's works are the siby lline books of publiciN. Everything that, with him,
has its preliminary form as joke, or satire, attains its tme unfolding as advertisement.
[G 1,3]
Handbill of a Parisian textiles dealer from the 18308: ··Ladies and Gentlemen: I I
ask you to cast an indulgent eye on the following observations; my desire to contrihute
to your eternal salvation impels me to address you. Allow me to direct your
attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures, as well as to the extremely moderate
prices which I have been the first to introduce into the field of hosiery, cotton
goods, and related products. No. 13, Rue Pave-Saint-Sauveur." Eduard Kroloff,
Schildenmgen aus Paris (Hamburg, 1839), vol. 2, pp. 50-51. [Gl,4]
Superposition and advertising: ""In the Palais-Royal, not long ago, between the
columns on the upper story, I happened to see a life-sized oil painting representing,
in very lively colors, a French generalin full-dress uniform. I take out my
spectacles to examine more closely the historical subject of the picture, and my
general is sitting in an armchair holding out a bare foot: the podiatrist, kneeling
before him, excises the corns." J. F. Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe aus Paris (Hamburg,
1805), vol. 1, p. 178. [Gl,5]
In 1861, the first lithographic poster suddenly appeared on walls here and there
around London. It showed the back of a woman in white who was thickly
wrapped in a shawl and who, in all haste, had just reached the top of a flight of
stairs, where, her head half turned ,md a finger upon her lips, she is ever so
slightly opening a heavy door, through which one glimpses the starry sky. In this
way Wilkie Collins advertised his latest book, one of the greatest detective novels
ever written: The Woman in White. See Tahneyr, La Cilif du sang (Paris, 1901),
pp. 263-264. [Gl,6]
It is significant that Jugendstil failed in interior design, and soon afterward in
architecture too, whereas in the street, with the poster, it often found very suc­
cessful solutions. This is fully confirmed in Behne's discerning critique: "By no
means was Jugendstil ridiculous in its original intentions. It was looking for
renewal because it clearly recognized the peculiar contradictions arising between
imitation Renaissance art and new methods of production deternlined by the
machine. But it gradually became ridiculous because it believed that it could
resolve the enormous objective tensions fonnally, on paper, in the studio." 0 In­
terior 0 Adolf Behne, Neues Wahnen-Neues Bauen (Leipzig, 1927), p. 15. Of