Note 431 — CHAPTER 20 PETER BEHRENS AND OTHER GERMAN ARCHITECTS

The triangular bay-window lighting the stairs is still somewhat Expressionist, but the interior treatment is in general more related to geometrical abstract art. The decoration approaches what came to be known as ‘Jazz-Modern’ when it became vulgarized in the next ten years or so in England. The contrast of the interiors that Behrens designed with the fine examples of Mackintosh’s furniture, brought from a house that he had remodelled earlier for the Bassett-Lowkes, appears rather shocking a generation later. What must have been considered a bit démodé in 1925 now represents to posterity—at least in the field of furniture design—the main line of advance in the early twentieth century; what then seemed in England to be ‘the last word’ has dated badly.