Window of opportunity: the artists who worked in retail display

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 widespread 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 Nineteen 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 grew to become very well-known later, like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Susan Weil, Sari Dienes and, after all, Andy Warhol,” Panizzi says.

Gene Moore, the artwork director at Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co, was eager to utilize proficient younger artists in want of earnings, and he usually granted them appreciable inventive latitude. Although usually reluctant to be related to the business world—Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg operated below the moniker “Matson Jones”—many artists revealed their inventive 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 Subject, 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 by means of the window.

Normally, window dressings have been ephemeral, and on fifth Avenue within the Nineteen Fifties it was common for shows to be modified as soon as every week. Usually all that is still 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 era of girls whose husbands have been killed within the First World Conflict.

The present’s second half will have a look at store home windows as a motif that recurred in artwork by means of the twentieth century and past: in images by Eugène Atget and Nigel Henderson in Paris and London; Marina Abramović’s 1976 efficiency Function Change, during which she swapped locations with an Amsterdam intercourse employee on show in a brothel window; and recreations of store fronts reminiscent of 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 client 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 resulting from be reworked 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