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