ABSTRACT
When we think of modern art and design, however, we do not think of domestic imagery or objects for the home, for in the arts the linkage of domesticity and modernism was overruled by another conceptual invention of the nineteenth century: the ‘avant-garde’. As this term derived from military strategy suggests, the avant-garde imagined itself away from home, fighting for glory on the battlefield of culture. Expressions of antipathy toward domesticity were not confined to painting, but characterize modernist architecture as well. The anti-domestic tenor of avant-garde architecture is nowhere more evident than in the career of modernism’s most influential architect, Le Corbusier. Ironically, given the anti-domestic attitudes of European modernists, when after the Second World War a new generation of American modernists sought to distinguish itself from its forefathers, what they condemned was the domesticity of modern European art.
