Metamorphoses: the interiors and furniture of Dagobert Peche - designer

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Anne-Katrin Rossberg

One means he used to achieve suspense was to hang curtains, such as the ones of tulle that separated the dark corridor from the light-filled main room in his fashion show installation of 1915 (Fig. 2). The furniture in the main room is hardly noticeable because it is not really furniture. Instead, glass cases in black frames are set on pedestals concealed by white tulle skirts, giving the illusion that the cases are floating noiselessly over the floor. Silence was clearly important for Peche. The words "silent" and "quiet" appear frequently in his letters, as do "to creep" and "to dream." Curtains helped create silence and preserve the dream. As Peche wrote to a friend:

Slowly a dark curtain opens before us. We live in a dream, believing that all happiness resides behind it. Intoxicated, we await beauty until the curtain has opened far enough so that all images become clear. And already the most beautiful moment has passed. All we can do then is to relive our feelings and long for another curtain to open before us. (10)

When he wrote this letter Peche was seriously ill, but the message is still that of the creator of the fashion showroom in 1915. In Peche, fashion found a congenial masquerade artist who loved textiles. Instead of a simple showroom for up-to-the-minute ladies' clothes, Peche created the stage for the principal actor in fashion--Eros. His misen-scene with veils is of a subtlety that is a joy to see.

In his graphic work Peche allowed the human figure to mutate, preferably into a plant, in homage to Daphne, who had become his muse. Fleeing the lustful Apollo, Daphne asked the earth goddess Gaea (or her father Peneius, a river-god) to rescue her, and thus she was transformed into a laurel. Peche was clearly aware of the conflicting impulses of chastity and design in the myth, because they both find expression in his work His nudes are transformed into plants, and both sexes are objects of desire.

Furniture too mutates. In a linoleum cut of 1915 (Fig. 3) a canopied four-poster bed stands in a meadow, and shoots from a tree stump grow through its curtains. Here the metamorphosis is not a rescue as it was for Daphne, but a conquest. The forces of nature have parted the protective curtains, and innocence has been violated. Once more Peche is ambivalent. He presents nature as simultaneously consoling and destructive, or, as he expressed it in a fantasy as both joyful and horrible. He wrote:

Everything is slow, there is a feeling of horror, of joy, it creeps out of fur with growing leaves, on silent feet, and lets me find no peace. I think it is Daphne, always appearing and vanishing growing with joy and with pain in her eyes. (11)

Peche immortalized Daphne by making a small wooden statue of her for the Zurich branch of the Wiener Werkstatte, and she became the leitmotiv for the decoration of the shop's interior. At the firm's instigation Peche had been released from active duty in the armed forces in 1917 to become the director of the Swiss branch, and until 1919 he spent the most carefree time of his life there. The Garden of Eden he brought to flower in the salesroom on the Bahnhofstrasse must have been a direct expression of the respite he found in his Swiss paradise. (12)