A rare and surreal suite of photographs and glass negatives documenting the objects shown at the “Exposition of Bad Taste,” a 1914 satirical display of by-gone decorative sensibilities. It was given the humorous subtitle, the “Casket of Domestic Fine Arts, Comprising Articles of Home Adornment Chosen for Their Elegant and Genteel Quality,” and it was held at Ruby Ross Wood’s short-lived Modernist Gallery in New York City.

From the objects on display to the sentiment behind it, the exhibition was replete with a Duchampian impishness. According to a lengthy New York Times review, it offered viewers a chance to behold (and ridicule), “marble-topped furniture, seaweed, wax flowers, and other treasures under glass; samplers, homemade paintings, ornate chinaware of every description, and countless articles such as were considered extremely genteel in the old days.” Also on display was a set of coffee cups for the whole family, labeled in gilt letters “Grandpa” “Father” Wife” and” Uncle.”” Everywhere hung carefully worked mottos of the type of ‘God Bless Our Home,’ ‘No Cross No Crown,’ etc.”

Most of the visitors were of the opinion that the exhibits were “screamingly funny” but other, older patrons were apoplectic that such cherished objects of the home were the subject of abject skewering. The Exposition of Bad Taste culminated with prizes awarded to the show’s “worst horrors.” One of top contenders was a daguerreotype from Brooklyn, but it was taken out of the competition on account of the profound family associations connected with it.

The Times review concludes by writing that those aged-attendees “who were shocked by this mockery of the sampler that sister Letitia worked with her own hands or the horsehair sofa on which Uncle Hiram breathed his last” vented their spleen on the perpetrators of the exhibition. And, like an old soothsayer in a Greek tragedy, they warned the smirking youngsters that “in the days that were to come the work of the Modernists would itself be made the subject of a similar ‘Casket of the Domestic Arts.’’

The Exhibition of Bad Taste was organized by Ruby Ross Wood, one of the 20th-century’s eminent arbiters of the opposite. Wood, a New York City interior designer and journalist, was once dubbed by her protege, Billy Badwin as, “Quite simply the finest decorator who ever lived.” Under the name Ruby Ross Goodnow, she wrote fiction, poetry, and articles about interior design for “The Delineator,” a popular women's magazine. She was also the ghostwriter for Elsie de Wolfe's decorating manual “The House in Good Taste” and other publications. After a stint at Wanamakers, she opened her own design firm in the 1920s and found long-term success.

The Modernist Gallery, however, did not share the same fate. Its offerings of Weiner Wertkstätte and the like were simply too cutting edge for “Grandpa” or “Wife,” and Wood closed its doors later that year.