Andrew Montana

Among the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty.

Researching Australia’s most iconic building and writing about its beleaguered history from the time Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 until it opened in 1973 might result in an indigestible plot for many of the building’s enthusiasts. Yet narrating the fraught circumstances behind the completion of the Sydney Opera House by Australian ...

Reading Andrew Montana’s new biography of Loudon Sainthill leaves one imagining how much the artist would have achieved without his lover, amanuensis, and entrepreneur, Harry Tatlock Miller. Lovers for some thirty-four years, they seem destined to achieve remarkable things together. Well into his project Montana realised that he could not tell Sainthill’s story without Miller’s, and so Fantasy Modern became a dual biography, a ‘portrait of a marriage’ of two gay men and of the work that bound them. It is also an encyclopedic trip through rapid aesthetic change, a social-family history of rare individuals, and urban culture shaped by art and design, not just coffee, magazines, and booze.

‘Vienna has little to offer its great while they are alive. But when they have departed, a funeral monument and a place in the museum is arranged for them.’ So wrote the critic Oskar Marus Fontana, with veiled anti-Semitism, in a Munich periodical when the Wiener Wersktätte (WW) closed in 1932. From 1903 this famous Viennese design firm created innovative and finely crafted decorative arts, and fitted out modern interiors in concert with the major aesthetic philosophy shared by Secessionist artists, architects, and designers who worked under its banner in Vienna – the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Swimming against tides of cultural, political, and economic change during the later 1920s, the WW was dissolved after its last ‘exhibition’ in 1932 – a large auction sale of more than seven thousand objects, many of which sold below their estimates.