PRESERVATION OF WALLPAPERS AS PARTS OF INTERIORS

Historic types of wallpaper and decorative schemes of interiors
1.4. WALLPAPER AT THE BEGINNING
OF THE 20TH CENTURY
By the late nineteenth century wallpaper had become a standard
element of interior design in Europe and the United States
of America. White walls were considered barbaric and papering
walls was incorporated into building contracts. 127 By the 1920s
wall decoration became one of the main concerns of interior
architects and was frequently discussed in specialized literature.
This marked the beginning of wallpaper stagnation. The end of
the 1930s is symbolically marked by the sentence Der moderne
Mensch hat weisse Wände, written by the Austrian architect Josef
Frank in 1927. In addition, representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit
movement in Germany were opposed to ornamental
decoration and promoted painted, monochromatic walls.
In the functionalist discourse, generally wallpapers were
considered a romantic relic of the bourgeois lifestyle, while
painted surfaces were seen as a genuine way of presenting a
wall as an architectural structure. In the 1930s wallpaper was
considered to be a surrogate and was seen as pretentious. 128
127
Saunders, Wallpaper in Interior Decoration, 15.
128
Thümmler, Die Geschichte der Tapete, 185.
76