In 1936, Salvador Dalí made a window display for Bonwit Teller department store and he wasn’t the only Surrealist to make a storefront appearance; in 1945, Marcel Duchamp arranged copies of a book by André Breton in the windows of the Gotham Book Mart. For Jean Tinguely in Basel and Andy Warhol in New York, however, window-dressing was an actual profession before they could make a real living from their art. The relationship between art and the shop window became rather less literal towards the end of the 20th century: see Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of desolate shopping streets in the suburban United States, Christo’s store-front sculptures – and Tinguely’s own crockery-smashing machine in Bern. An exhibition about the subject at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, named after window-based work by Duchamp of 1920, makes a practical move beyond the white cube with works by former art and design students appearing in stores across the city (4 December – 11 May 2025).
Find out more from the Museum Tinguely’s website.
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Reproduction of Andy Warhol’s window display for department store Bonwit Teller in New York promoting Jacques Griffe perfume ‘Mistigri’ (1955; reproduced 2021). Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Photo: © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2024 ProLitteris, Zürich
Purple Store Front (1964), Christo. Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. Photo: Wolfgang Volz; © 2024 ProLitteris, Zürich
Prada Marfa (2012), Elmgreen & Dragset. Photo: © 2024 ProLitteris, Zürich
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