Jean Tinguely’s early profession as a window dresser is the inspiration behind a brand new exhibition on the Tinguely Museum in Basel this month. The Swiss sculptor’s common designs for Basel store home windows, together with these of Kost Sport, Wohnbedarf, Jehle Mode, Ramstein, Tanner and Modes Emmy, have been documented by the photographer Peter Moeschlin within the Forties and past, however the curator Tabea Panizzi says that Tinguely was removed from distinctive.
“There have been many artists in New York within the Nineteen Fifties who labored for the division retailer Bonwit Teller, a lot of whom turned very well-known later, like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Susan Weil, Sari Dienes and, after all, Andy Warhol,” Panizzi says.
Youngsters taking a look at Jean Tinguely’s Rotozaza III sculpture in a store window in Bern in 1969 © Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern, Museum Tinguely, Photograph: Fredo Meyer-Henn
Gene Moore, the artwork director at Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co, was eager to utilize gifted younger artists in want of revenue, and he typically granted them appreciable inventive latitude. Although typically reluctant to be related to the business world—Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg operated below the moniker “Matson Jones”—many artists revealed their creative identities of their designs. As in his sculptures, Tinguely used wire for his window dressings; Jasper Johns included his first flag portray, Flag on Orange Area, in a 1957 design; and Rauschenberg additionally capitalised on his entry to Bonwit Teller’s home windows, utilizing his mix portray Assortment (1954-55) in a show. Salvador Dalí was so enraged by an alteration to his design at Bonwit Teller, that he pushed a tub via the window.
Usually, window dressings have been ephemeral, and on 5th Avenue within the Nineteen Fifties it was commonplace for shows to be modified as soon as every week. Usually all that continues to be of those inventive endeavours are images, which can function closely within the exhibition, together with examples of objects used within the shows, together with works by the Hungarian American artist Sari Dienes, and a recreation of a show by Andy Warhol.
The exhibition owes its title to Marcel Duchamp’s Contemporary Widow (1920), a pun on “French home windows” as a kind of door, and on the technology of girls whose husbands have been killed within the First World Warfare.
Prada Marfa (2012) by Elmgreen & Dragset © 2024 ProLitteris; Zürich Creditline: Elmgreen & Dragset
The present’s second half will have a look at store home windows as a motif that recurred in artwork via the twentieth century and past: in images by Eugène Atget and Nigel Henderson in Paris and London; Marina Abramović’s 1976 efficiency Position Change, through which she swapped locations with an Amsterdam intercourse employee on show in a brothel window; and recreations of store fronts corresponding to Elmgreen & Dragset’s Prada Marfa (2005) on a desolate freeway in Texas.
In her 2020 efficiency Lèche Vitrines (window licking), Martine Morger acted out her title in a critique of shopper tradition (“window licking” is how the French describe window buying), whereas in 1969, Tinguely’s machine Rotozaza No. 3 smashed plates within the window of the Bern division retailer Loeb. With the shift to on-line buying, window dressing issues much less, however in Basel a revival is deliberate, with empty store home windows as a consequence of be remodeled by artwork college students between January and March 2025.
• Contemporary Window: the Artwork of Show and Show of Artwork, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 4 December-11 Might 2025
