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’. Likewise Andy Warhol – represented here by a big wooden advertisement for Mistigri perfume – did much such work, mainly thanks to Gene Moore, the fabled New York art director who supervised displays at Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. Moore not only employed young artists to work the windows, but also offered them the rare chance to show their own art in these most prestigious Fifth Avenue locations, and as such exhibited key pieces by Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol before any gallery. One of the lesser known artists whose work has been recreated here is Sari Dienes, a protean Hungarian surrealist whose window displays for Moore have remarkably survived and are now seen again for the first time since 1955.
But of equal interest are those artists who may not have actually dressed any windows but whose oeuvre is inspired by their proportions and pleasures, whether Christo’s early store fronts or Peter Blake’s resonant sculpture-painting ‘The Toy Shop’ from 1962, or Duchamp’s ‘Fresh Widow’ that lent the show its title. Then there’s the performance artist Martina Morger, who likes to lick those delicious luxury Paris store windows. R.I.P. Germain, meanwhile, builds ghostly and clandestine false frontages.
A necessary sense of critique, rather than mere celebration of commerce, is provided by some. In ‘Role Exchange’ (1975), Marina Abramovic swaps places with a prostitute in her Amsterdam window, while Vlasta Delimar demonstrates in a shop vitrine demanding ‘The Right to an Orgasm at Over 60’ (2016). If vintage photographs of ancient stores by Atget, Berenice Abbott and London’s own Nigel Henderson picture a retail world we have long lost, our current shopping future is suggested in the final room; here an ever morphing Instagram projection displays contemporary shop windows by artists, anonymous and acclaimed, across the world, a shifting simulacra, a feed of fleeting dazzle.
Yet happily the older artisanal tradition also continues, for in the New Year as a continuation of the exhibition, a select group of local art students at the very beginning of their careers have been commissioned to do whatever they so wish in various Basel storefronts. Who knows – in 70 years’ time one of them may turn out to be as famous as Warhol.
Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art is at the Museum Tinguely until 11 May 2025.
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