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| Anonymous artist working in Russia Interior on the estate of Countess Yulia Samoilova ca. 1835-45 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Anonymous artist working in Russia Interior on the estate of Countess Yulia Samoilova ca. 1835-45 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"Under the reign of Louis Philippe, the private individual makes his entry into history. For the private individual, places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. The former come to constitute the interior. Its complement is the office. (For its part, the office is distinguished clearly from the shop counter, which, with its globes, wall maps, and railings, looks like a relic of the baroque forms that preceded the rooms in today's residences.) The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of grafting onto his business interests a clear perception of his social function. In the arrangement of his private surroundings, he suppresses both of these concerns. From this derive the phantasmagorias of the interior – which, for the private individual, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a box in the theater of the world."
"The interior is the asylum where art takes refuge. The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the idealization of objects. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he can bestow on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful."
– from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, originally composed between 1927 and 1939, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
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| Anonymous artist working in Russia Interior on the estate of Countess Yulia Samoilova ca. 1835-45 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Anonymous artist working in Russia Interior on the estate of Countess Yulia Samoilova ca. 1835-45 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |