Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed other than physically, in person. For many, these windows remain an indelible early metropolitan memory and perhaps the first experience of a work of visual art, something specifically conjured to arrest the attention, intrigue and entertain.
The performance artist Martina Morger likes to lick those delicious luxury Paris store windows
And now just in time for holiday season comes Fresh Window, the first major museum exhibition on this tradition, an exploration of ‘The Art of Display & Display of Art’. The show, which I have co-curated, presents a wide variety of artists who have used such windows in myriad ways but also elucidates how, in entirely practical terms, so many started their careers and literally survived by creating these commercial tableaux. For window display or ‘dressing’ has traditionally been one of the very few regular paying jobs specifically suited to a visual artist.
The exhibition takes place at Museum Tinguely in Basel, dedicated to Switzerland’s most famous postwar artist Jean Tinguely. My original inspiration as guest curator was discovering that he had actually trained as an apprentice window decorator, aged 16, and worked as such for more than a decade. He was still creating windows when he moved to Paris where his young artist neighbours, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, also supported themselves by creating windows for Christian Dior, before going on to be France’s most successful sculptor-designers. But what seems remarkable is that even today debutant artists still find themselves thus employed – a pleasing creative continuity.
One section of the show, entitled ‘Making (A Living)’, deals with the celebrated artists who began as window dressers, not least Jasper Johns, oldest in show at a stately 94, who as a young man had his own window-display business along with partner Robert Rauschenberg under the pseudonym ‘Matson Jones’.
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