Fifth Avenue Window Displays: American Design and Art in the 20th Century

*Originally written December 8, 2023

The department store has long defined the shopping experience—particularly in New York City—through its monumental windows that invite passersby to peer into a staged world of luxury and abundance. Now a holiday tradition, thousands flock each year to marvel at the elaborate displays crafted by window dressers at Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale’s. These windows function as both spectacle and advertisement: the careful arrangement of merchandise, props, lighting, and backgrounds can captivate a passerby within seconds, with the allure of purchase just steps beyond the glass. Department stores, in this sense, became emblematic of American consumer culture, feeding and shaping a national appetite for excess and abundance.

By the early twentieth century, the department store window evolved into a site of experimentation and, at times, contention, as artists and designers sought to balance commerce with creative expression. This essay examines how the adaptation of European modern design in the 1920s opened new possibilities for American designers, fostering the development of a distinctly American visual language that continues to underpin marketing and consumerism today. Key historical moments, including the founding of Le Bon Marché in Paris, the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, and the disruptions of World Wars I and II, provide context for the work of industrial designers such as Frederick Kiesler, Donald Deskey, Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes. The radical transformations of window dressing in the 1920s and 1930s also created opportunities for artists like Salvador Dalí, and later Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, to present early works in dialogue with the latest fashions.

Byron Company (New York, N.Y.). Street Scenes – Sixth Ave. Near 18th St., 1900. Museum of the City of New York

Byron Company (New York, N.Y.). Simpson Crawford Co., 1904. Museum of the City of New York.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the rapidly transforming urban landscape of Paris reshaped the centuries-old tradition of the market hall. Expanding cities, new modes of transportation, machine-driven mass production, and a flourishing middle class created the ideal conditions for the rise of the department store. Paris soon emerged as the global capital of this new retail form, with the opening of Le Bon Marché in 1852, widely considered the first modern department store. Offering an unprecedented range of merchandise accessible to all social classes, Le Bon Marché not only sold goods but also acted as a cultural mediator, translating the lifestyle of the elite for a broader public. This all-encompassing retail model would soon be exported to the United States, most notably in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. In Manhattan, A.T. Stewart, a former wholesaler, opened his “Marble Palace” devoted to retail trade in 1862, while Rowland H. Macy expanded his dry goods store on Sixth Avenue just a few years later, diversifying product lines and introducing new merchandising strategies.

By the early twentieth century, however, the United States had outpaced France in scale and reach. With its colossal growth and expanding urban centers, the country supported hundreds of department stores: by 1919, there were approximately one hundred large establishments and countless smaller ones. Department stores, particularly in the immigrant-rich United States, played a key role in promoting a higher standard of living. They encouraged consumers to purchase manufactured goods rather than make them at home, positioning themselves as arbiters of modern life. To entice potential shoppers, the show window became the most immediate means of drawing pedestrians from the street into the store.

Unlike the market hall, which allowed commerce to be freer and more intimate, as one could freely touch and handle goods, the enclosed retail environment required new methods to engage the senses. What once occurred naturally in open marketplaces now had to be carefully constructed through display and mediation. As Frederick Kiesler observed, “We live mainly by the eye. The eye observes, calculates, advises. It is quicker than the ear, more precise and impartial. The evolution of the show window is due to one fact: speed.” Effectively, the show window was to create demand by the proper display of desirable objects. By making its contents conspicuous, the show window succeeded in its purpose of promotion. The window display became its own artistic entity, held between production and consumption.

The growth of department stores institutionalized the art of window display. By the late 1890s, commercial art schools in Germany, France, and the United States were offering formal training in window decoration. by 1915, half of the world’s supply of plate glass was being used in America, a figure that would double within the following decade.

Shop windows were visually overstimulating up until the 1930s, often mimicking the tableaux vivants or tableaux réalistes found in museums, popular wax cabinets, dioramas, and panoramas of the late nineteenth century. Or the cluttered art gallery style, as galleries would fill objects and pictures from floor to ceiling, the shop owner similarly filled the window from top to bottom. This practice of excessive display reflected both the abundance of modern society and the standardized quality made possible by mass production.

Poster - Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, 1925, Color lithograph, Robert Bonfils

A shift in attitudes toward window display emerged during the 1920s, particularly after the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925. Although the United States declined to participate due to a misunderstanding of the exposition’s purpose, hundreds of American designers, artists, journalists, and department store buyers travelled to Paris to view it. The design ideas emerging from Europe sparked an aesthetic awakening in the United States, influencing both the interiors and exteriors of department stores.

This influence was evident when Lord & Taylor mounted its Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art in 1928. Curated by Dorothy Shaver, the exhibition featured furniture and objects by Pierre Chareau, Jean Dunand, François Jourdain, and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, displayed alongside artworks by André Derain, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice Utrillo. None of the furniture was available for purchase; rather, the exhibition sought to cultivate taste and align American retail with European modernism. The project also involved Paul Claudel, the French Ambassador to the United States. Art critic and gallerist Helen Appleton Read argued that the works expressed “a questioning of the validity of inherited traditions, merely because they are inherited, a discarding of the superfluous and a revaluation of life in terms of existing conditions.”

Macy’s, meanwhile, had introduced its Exposition of Art in Industry a year earlier, featuring furniture by Josef Hoffmann of Austria-Hungary, Bruno Paul of Germany, and Americans William Lescaze, Eugene Schoen, and Kem Weber. Both Macy’s and Lord & Taylor leveraged European modernist furniture and decorative arts to legitimize their roles as tastemakers of the American middle class within a rapidly expanding consumer society.

Naum Gabo, Constructed Head No.2, 1916.

Theo van Doesburg, Contra-Construction Project (Axonometric), 1923.

During World War I, Europe lost its dominance in most industries, except for the arts, while the United States gained leadership in nearly every field, except the arts. In the U.S., new ideas about commercial production, business, marketing, and consumer behaviour were emerging. Department stores played a key role in introducing modernism to the general public by integrating contemporary art and design into their commercial strategies. Beyond exhibitions, industrial designers were commissioned to create window displays that drew on numerous European movements, incorporating the aesthetics of Constructivism, Cubism, and Futurism. The appeal of these styles lies in their repetition of forms, reduction, abstraction, and reliance on geometric shapes.

In Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, Frederick Kiesler emphasized the elementarism of the De Stijl group, advocated by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. He argued that brevity was essential in visual communication: the shorter the selling argument, the more digestible it was to the viewer. Thus, window displays were to be arranged in straight lines or geometric shapes to capture the attention of passersby. Kiesler’s book also featured artists such as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, Naum Gabo, Mies van der Rohe, Kazimir Malevich, J. J. P. Oud, and Fernand Léger, contending that fine art was the foundation of all decoration. He identified the three pillars of fine art—painting, sculpture, and architecture—as essential to organizing and balancing colour, material, and form. Applied to window displays, modernist methodologies stripped away the political undertones of European avant-garde movements, such as Constructivism, transforming them into marketing tools and aesthetic strategies.

Modernism migrated to the United States shortly after the rise of ready-made fashion in the 1910s, which demanded a higher level of visual sophistication than the display of dry goods or housewares. Behind the glass façades of department stores, displays became asymmetrical and angular, and new materials, including aluminum, leather, and frosted glass, were introduced. Saks Fifth Avenue, for instance, began using streamlined mannequins with slit eyes, shrunken lips, and pointed chins and noses, first presented by the Siégel & Stockman company at the 1925 exposition.

Before delving into the designers of the 1920s, it is worth noting Raymond Loewy’s pioneering efforts in modernizing window display. Prior to American acceptance of Art Deco styles after 1925, Loewy, a French émigré, was hired as Macy’s display director in 1919. His windows featured a single mannequin in a black dress and fur, with only a few accessories arranged on the floor. Loewy recalled: “I left the window in semi-darkness… The only illumination came from three powerful spotlights focused on the figure. The result was a contrast of violent shadows. It was dramatic, simple, and potent. It sang.” Like his contemporaries, Loewy manipulated form and light, stripping away ornament to direct attention squarely on the products. Macy’s, however, deemed his displays too avant-garde. Before they could dismiss him, Loewy resigned. Though considered a commercial liability at the time, his work set a template for later designers.

Raymond Loewy drawing for Bonwit Teller. Advertising and selling. January 25. 1928.

Saks Fifth Avenue window displays, Frederick Kiesler, 1927/28.

Born in Vienna, Frederick Kiesler immigrated to New York in 1926 after developing groundbreaking modernist buildings, theatre sets, and exhibitions in Europe. Two years later, Saks Fifth Avenue commissioned him to design window displays. Kiesler’s signature arrangements often featured a single coat and gloves draped over a chair, or a lone hat displayed on a stand, all set against abstract, asymmetrical backgrounds. He argued that since buildings no longer relied on walls for structural support, but instead on steel columns, the proper material for walls was glass. At Saks, he eliminated the partitions dividing the fourteen windows, creating a seamless visual flow. This expansion of horizontal space, Kiesler explained, embodied the “conquering of distance” through rhythmic effect and continuity.

Architectural historian Mark Linder later described Kiesler as “an inadvertent precursor of the neo-avant-garde artists of the 1960s.” Moving fluidly across genres, materials, and display contexts, Kiesler became a translator of European modernism for North American audiences, his familiarity with the European cultural scene blending seamlessly with his cross-disciplinary approach.

Shop window design for Saks Fifth Avenue, Frederick Kiesler, 1927/28. Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

Drawing, Design for Advertising Brochure Cover, Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, 1927–28. Donald Deskey, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Men’s Wear Display designed by Donald Deskey; cork, copper and monel metal, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display by Frederick Kiesler (1930)

In 1927, designer Donald Deskey was commissioned by Adam Gimbel, then President of Saks Fifth Avenue, to create several window displays as well as advertising brochure covers as part of a rebranding project. One such brochure cover depicts an abstracted, Cubist-inspired representation of Saks’ windows. Deskey had recently returned to the United States after visiting the 1925 Paris Exposition, which profoundly influenced his design approach. His scheme emphasized geometric compositions and sleek, machined aesthetics. Gradually, outdated seasonal backdrops of seashores, snow, or autumn leaves gave way to bold zigzags and stark white pedestals arranged to evoke the Manhattan skyline. Through his work at Saks, Deskey solidified his reputation as a leader in modern art and design while simultaneously elevating the cultural status of the department store.

Franklin Simon Windows: Hat and Shoes designed by Norman Bel Geddes, 1929; Horizons by Norman Bel Geddes (1932)

Another industrial designer working in the department store realm was Norman Bel Geddes. Hired by Franklin Simon & Co. between 1927 and 1929, Bel Geddes reconceptualized the display window as an urban theatre, “a stage on which the merchandise is presented as the actors.” Drawing from his earlier career as a theatre designer of sets and costumes, he imported theatrical display techniques directly into the commercial sphere. Echoing Kiesler, Bel Geddes argued that a window failed if it did not arrest the passerby’s glance, focus attention on the merchandise, and persuade the onlooker to desire it. His displays employed sharp contrasts and harmonies of colour to accentuate products.

One of his most striking displays featured “quiet beige” walls, carpet, and ceiling, framing an aluminum bust at center stage. The bust wore a scarf in vermilion and chartreuse, with a matching handbag resting on a circular glass pedestal. Large triangular shapes composed the background, directing attention toward the “actor,” while hidden spotlights projected a dramatic blue shadow of the bust onto the backdrop. In another shoe display, six platforms were covered in shiny black satin, with only the top plane rendered in deep red. Against this red, reptile-skin shoes appeared especially vivid, while more subtle beige shoes stood out against the glossy black satin.

Bel Geddes stood at the forefront of a wave of stage designers migrating into window design. By the 1930s, the effects of the Great Depression had forced many unemployed theatre designers to seek work in this emerging commercial field.

Examining the work of these industrial designers reveals not only how modernism seeped into public consciousness but also how department stores deepened their ties to the fine arts community by the late 1920s. Collaborations between the Museum of Modern Art, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bonwit Teller during the 1930s demonstrate how department stores often introduced new art forms to the public more effectively than museums themselves.

Advertisement for Bonwit Teller windows, New York Herald Tribune, December 20, 1936.

She was a Surrealist Woman. She was like a Figure in a Dream, Salvador Dali Design for Window Display at Bonwit Teller, New York, NY, December 1936; Photographed by Worsinger Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

In 1935, Saks Fifth Avenue created a series of windows to coincide with MoMA’s Van Gogh exhibition, featuring reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings alongside matching, tonally toned garments. This decision reflects what Kiesler argued: “The department store acted as the interpreter for the populace of the new spirit in art. Here was the art gaining acceptance not through slow fostering of its theories and principles in academies and art schools, but simply by planting its creations down in the commercial marts.”

A year later, MoMA staged Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which the retailer Bonwit Teller promoted through a series of eight windows. Salvador Dalí was hired to design one of them, drawing heavily from his fine art practice. In his display, hundreds of teaspoons covered the floor; his Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket (Veston Aphrodisiaque) was featured, adorned with dozens of cocktail glasses, while red arms extended from the walls toward a mannequin whose “head” was a dense cluster of red roses. The mannequin’s distorted head echoed his 1936 painting Three Surrealist Women, while his Lobster Telephone, made that same year, rested on a nearby table. The New York World-Telegram reported that the display was “one more occasion when industry and art joined hands to make John Q. Public art-conscious – and also to sell merchandise.”

Other windows displayed a copy of the Surrealism exhibition catalogue and mannequins dressed in “mysterious black” garments punctuated with bursts of Surrealist colours—delphinium, canary, gold, white, red, pink, and violet—similar to Bel Geddes’ use of visual contrast. The scheme recalled Raymond Loewy’s earlier installation of “only a single mannequin in a black evening gown with fur and accessories scattered on the floor.”

Designs for Window Display at Bonwit Teller alongside Dali’s window, New York, NY, December 1936; Photographed by Worsinger Photo, Gelatin Silver Print; Museum of the City of New York, New York.

Yet Dalí, like Loewy, encountered censorship in the commercial realm. After the success of his 1935 window, he was invited back to Bonwit Teller in 1939. This time, however, public complaints deemed his designs too risqué. The store removed a “corpse-like” mannequin lying on a bed of coals, replaced another’s unsettling feather costume with a tailored suit, and scrubbed away the dirt, insects, and dried-blood tears Dalí had added as ornamentation. Outraged, Dalí stormed into one of the windows, overturning a fur-lined bathtub that crashed through the plate glass.

Despite this dramatic rupture, Dalí’s displays inspired later window artists such as Tom Lee, Candy Pratts Price, and Gene Moore, who adapted Surrealism for commercial purposes. Surrealism’s power to juxtapose the real and the unreal made it especially well-suited to advertising, where merchandise could be staged as the embodiment of consumer dreams. The eye, a recurring Surrealist motif, symbolized passage between reality and imagination; likewise, the department store window functioned as an aperture into a fantastical realm of excessive consumption. Surrealism’s adaptability made it particularly appealing to display designers, bridging the rigid elementarism of the 1920s with the disjointed aesthetics of Neo-Dadaism and Pop Art.

The expansion of avant-garde art into the public sphere was facilitated by both department stores and museums, which increasingly recognized the value of cross-promotion. Such collaborations reinforced each institution’s appeal to their overlapping audiences while simultaneously drawing in new ones.

Bonwit Teller Window Display, Featuring Women's Ensemble by Lanz and Artwork by Jasper Johns, January 29, 1957 Photographed by Virginia Roehl; The New School Archives

Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange Field, 1957, Encaustic on canvas; Museum Ludwig, Köln, Germany

Neo-Dadaism emerged in the 1950s as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns worked for prominent retailers such as Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, and Tiffany & Co. Defined by its revival of Dadaism, which had responded to the catastrophes of post–World War I through absurdism, Neo-Dadaism arose amid the anxieties of McCarthyism, the Lavender Scare, the Korean War, and the civil rights movement. Artists associated with Neo-Dada employed found objects and banal activities as tools of social and aesthetic critique. Performance art also entered the movement, with leading figures such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham expanding its reach. Within this context, department store windows themselves became performances, frozen in time for passersby to stop and contemplate.

The decade fostered a spirit of collaboration between artists behind the glass panel, as Rauschenberg and Johns began working under the commercial pseudonym Matson Jones. The name combined Rauschenberg’s mother’s maiden name, Matson, with “Jones,” a near homonym of Johns. Although not entirely secret, the pseudonym allowed the two to distinguish their studio practice from their commercial work. Both artists were included in Bonwit Teller’s “Young American Artists Window Exhibit” in January 1957. John’s Flag on Orange was featured alongside a mannequin, its slight tilt designed to highlight both art and fashion to passing shoppers. The flag motif would remain central to Johns’s career, as he used familiar images, “things the mind already knows," to challenge assumptions about what constitutes art. Nearby, Rauschenberg exhibited one of his Combines, placed with two mannequins posed as if contemplating the work. For Rauschenberg, found materials were as essential to storytelling as brushstrokes, each serving as a tool of expression.

Untitled, Matson Jones (Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns), c. 1955; Christie’s

Robert Rauschenberg holding a blueprint by Susan Weil and himself in their West Ninety-Fifth Street apartment, New York, 1951; Photo: Wallace Kirkland, University of Illinois at Chicago

Recently, four cyanotypes attributed to Matson Jones, labelled Jasper Johns Blue Ceiling, were uncovered, most likely produced for display at Bonwit Teller. The fourteen-foot-high panels depict an underwater scene with figures swimming among marine life, including fish, lobsters, urchins, and crabs. Mythological allusions also appear, with tridents emerging in two panels amid seaweed-like strands. The fixation on the body, a recurring theme in Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist works, is also evident here. Rauschenberg often created cyanotypes by placing human models and objects on sensitized paper, then exposing the uncovered areas to ultraviolet light. The result was a negative impression: the figures appeared white against rich blue tones where the paper absorbed the light. A Macy’s window display from 1955, which featured a large cyanotype behind a group of mannequins (though credited to no designer), corresponds with the years when Matson Jones was active in display design.

1955 Macy’s Window Display, Artnet News (August 2016)

Window Display at the I. Miller Shoe Store, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, 1955

Collaborations between artists continued as Rauschenberg and Johns later worked with Andy Warhol on displays for retailers such as I. Miller. Warhol, arguably one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century, began his career as a window dresser for Bonwit Teller. A defining element of his style was the incorporation of American popular cultural references: iconic figures, celebrities, and familiar symbols. By drawing on the collective consciousness of the American public, Warhol’s displays forged emotional connections between consumers and merchandise. They reflected social desires while celebrating the spirit of the times. Like his predecessors, Warhol democratized art by exhibiting his work along the streets of New York City. In 1961, he presented a series of five large-scale paintings at Bonwit Teller, including Superman and Before and After (1961), creating a bold, graphic representation of American popular culture’s fascination with fantasy and perfection.

Window Display for Bonwit Teller & Co. with artwork by Andy Warhol, 1961 Photographed by Nathan Gluck, Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles Gallery.

The window display is understood to be in a constant state of flux—a space of rejuvenation and creation. Throughout the early half of the twentieth century, the show window strengthened the relationship between art and fashion. Cross-promotion between museums and department stores—from Lord & Taylor and Macy’s exhibitions referencing the 1925 Paris Exposition, to MoMA’s collaborations with Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller—blurred the lines between the museum and the marketplace. By adopting modernist aesthetics emerging from Europe, the American visual vernacular as we know it today began to develop as its own independent form. As Frederick Kiesler stated in 1930, “The new American style of art is evolving out of the chaos of older styles of other lands.”

The window display, as Norman Bel Geddes described, is truly an urban theatre, presenting the evolution of art and design in the United States—from early modernism to Surrealism, Neo-Dadaism, and Pop Art. These displays were unique in that the department store setting drew audiences of everyday Americans, introducing art to casual browsers and shoppers more effectively than traditional museum exhibitions. As Jan Whitaker writes, “As symbols of progress, department stores have succeeded and survived for so long because they've always ridden the waves of industrial development and modern life.” Even today, department store windows and advertising materials remain widely popular and influential, showcasing merchandise through the abnormal and the unconventional.

Andy Warhol, Superman, 1961, Casein and wax crayon on canvas, Private Collection

Andy Warhol, Before and After I, 1962, Acrylic and graphite on linen, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York

Simon Doonan, Madonna, Barneys NY 1992

Simon Doonan, Warholiday, Barneys NY 2006

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