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In Düsseldorf, in 1928, Rosenthal exhibited Wohnzimmer für ein berufstätiges Ehepaar (Living Room for a Working Couple) for a building exposition of interiors - a rival to the 1925 Parisian Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs from which German artists had been excluded because of their involvement in the First World War. For the show, Rosenthal presented a setting for a working couple – extremely progressive in 1928 – which was a sort of manifesto for the modern as an explicit critique of a similar stuffy, formal setting for the French aristocracy - such as at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France (1907-12). He took the same built-in and freestanding furniture out of the old-fashioned, Rococo-revival, backwardslooking aristocratic setting – and modernized it – simplifying it, democratizing it, removing its heavy and anachronistic gilded ornament – and re-presenting it as something clean, egalitarian, progressive, inclusive, available – and modern.