Barbara Bessac's research focuses on the history of material culture, art, and design in relation to the performing arts since the nineteenth century. She is interested in the mechanisms of influence between theatrical set design and home decoration.
She has published several texts in journals and exhibition catalogues on the history of theatre scenery, fictional interiors and the construction of domesticity.
Her PhD thesis, titled Living décor. Performance and Decorative Arts from Theatrical Stages to Domestic Interiors (1851-1908), was defended in October 2022.
A complete record of her papers and scientific contributions is available on her online academic profile.
Silent Theaters: Dramatizing Furniture in the Fictional Interiors of Fin-de-Siècle Exhibitions, Stages, and the Commercial World, Nineteenth Century Theater and Film, 2024.
This article explores how the fictional interiors created for exhibitions and commercial spaces around 1900 stemmed from theatrical scenography practices. At a time when theatre was striving for a high degree of material realism, its techniques and craftspeople shaped new ways of staging everyday objects beyond the stage: in museums, department stores, and other public spaces. These environments harnessed the emotional and narrative power of domestic objects to create atmospheres, evoke memories, and generate stories.
This article shows how, in nineteenth-century Paris and London, women deemed "immoral" were represented on stage within opulent and object-laden settings. From Le Demi-monde to Les Demi-vierges, decorative excess —associated with Rococo, Aestheticism or Modern-style — became a sign of social transgression, excessive femininity, and otherness. These flamboyant interiors embodied both bourgeois fascination with and condemnation of decadent material environments.
The domestic sphere, a recurring theme in comedies of the second half of the nineteenth century, was brought to life on stage through the meticulous recreation of furnished and decorated interiors. Everyday objects, becoming part of the spectacle, became both receptacles of meaning and product placement opportunities for the retailers supplying the sets. These realistic sets influenced both the public's tastes and shaped their collective perceptions.
This text, written for an exhibition on the rediscovery of Byzantium between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examines the staging of the Byzantine world on the stages of Parisian and London theatres of the period. The reconstruction of this distant world provided set and costume designers with the opportunity to create sumptuous tableaux which, while striving for historical accuracy, were imbued with fantastical visions of a decadent, opulent, and excessive empire.
Published in the catalogue of an exhibition about the origins of Art Nouveau, this essay places the theatre at the heart of the movement's early development in Parisian decorative arts. From Alphonse Mucha's posters for Sarah Bernhardt and Victorien Sardou to the Art Nouveau sets of boulevard theatres, Art Nouveau lent its appealing graphic vocabulary to the stage, which, in return, contributed to its promotion.