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9781538173954

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"Tripp Evans's The Importance of Being Furnished offers a fresh, important perspective on the interest in the past at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to the female-oriented ""cult of domesticity"" of the mid-19th century, Evans explores the male-driven ""cult of curating"" that prized the individual expressiveness of personal taste in the bachelor house. Eschewing the Christian virtues of the nuclear family in which the home was retreat, he uses case studies to demonstrate how non-marriage freed some males to explore collecting and furnishing. This study provides the foundational history for the glorification of the bachelor pad in the 1960s, when the single professional man projected tasteful consumption and pleasurable entertainment through modern design and gadgets. --Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University"

""Decorating is autobiography,"" the artist and writer Gloria Vanderbilt once said. R. Tripp Evans's banquet of a book, The Importance of Being Furnished, magnifies her comment four-fold, forensically examining the lives and lairs--all of them now museums--of a quartet of tastemakers.... Gibson, Sleeper, Codman, and Pendleton's personal lives make The Importance ofBeing Furnished a rare read: a scholarly book that is also satisfyingly spicy. -- ""The Magazine Antiques"" Tripp Evans's The Importance of Being Furnished offers a fresh, important perspective on the interest in the past at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast to the female-oriented ""cult of domesticity"" of the mid-19th century, Evans explores the male-driven ""cult of curating"" that prized the individual expressiveness of personal taste in the bachelor house. Eschewing the Christian virtues of the nuclear family in which the home was retreat, he uses case studies to demonstrate how non-marriage freed some males to explore collecting and furnishing. This study provides the foundational history for the glorification of the bachelor pad in the 1960s, when the single professional man projected tasteful consumption and pleasurable entertainment through modern design and gadgets. --Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

Author Information

R. Tripp Evans is an award-winning historian of American art and design. He is a frequent public lecturer, professor of the history of art at Wheaton College, and serves as a collections consultant to historic house museums. In his more recent work, Evans has focused on the contributions gay men have made to the development of American style. His biography of the American painter Grant Wood considers the roles that Wood's sexuality and family life played in his art, and the complicated way his work--particularly, his iconic painting American Gothic (1930)--became a powerful vehicle for nationalist expression. Grant Wood: A Life won the National Award for Arts Writing.

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