Flash forward to the 20th century, age of irony. Popmeister Roy Lichtenstein first became intrigued by interiors in the 1960s. In the 1990s, he launched into a series of people-free rooms that spoofed the perfection of the kind of houses that made it into the glossy shelter magazines in the '80s. Lichtenstein's rooms are intentionally bland and banal, as sanitized as laboratories. Every pillow is plumped.
Sectional sofas surround low glass coffee tables Windexed into spotlessness.
Walls cede to sliding glass doors. In one work, a blue sling chair confronts a depiction of a blue sling chair. There are some delighful spatial jokes here, and parodies of high modernist style. Lichtenstein's interiors are about as inviting as Philip Johnson's glass house. Thurber's rooms are messy, tacky, abandoned - and beautiful in a wild sort of way.