Biedermeier to Bauhaus

"Given access to private houses - cottages, palaces, town houses, artist's studios, and rural retreats throughout Germany and Austria - many of which have never been photographed before, author Sigrid Sangl presents gilded wood-paneled parlors and richly colored seventeenth-century textiles; exuberant Baroque stucco work; eighteenth-century Rococo fantasies from castles and summer palaces; the intense reds and bright blues of the Classical revival; Biedermeier living rooms with elegant ebonized tables and chairs; romantic neo-Gothic tracery; the ornamental curves of Jugendstil - the German counterpart of Art Nouveau - and the pure functionalism of the Bauhaus. Spanning the Baltic to the Alps and Dusseldorf to Dresden, these astonishingly varied and authentic interiors are seen as different strands of a complex but characteristic decorative heritage.".