contained the proper items. I her eyes, there was a connection between the inner and outer life. A beautiful environment would make people better and happier. Beauty also was something every human being had a right to enjoy, according to Ellen Key. This resulted in an influential pedagogical movement directed at the working class. Inspired by William Morris and the British Arts &Crafts movement, Key connected beauty with simplicity, harmony, honesty and a relationship between the object and its use. Key despised dark and overbearing interior decoration with its aping expensive materials, overstuffed furniture, heavy drapes, fringe, tassels and useless decorative objects. All of this could be found in the new middle class homes and the working class also wanted such design when they could afford it. Key’s thoughts were continued in the magazine Vackrare vardagsvara, where the idea of the social function of art was developed. Industry ought to use artists as designers. In order for the working class to procure beautiful and af-
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fordable, rational machine production had to be used. At the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, the ideas of modernism were launched on all fronts. Functional model dwellings were shown in the interior design exhibit. Many people, however, did have difficulty accepting the geometric language of form and the exhibit was debated long afterwards. One year after the exhibit, the magazine Acceptera appeared. This magazine was a forum for functionalism and design in the same spirit as Skönhet för alla and Vackrare vardagsvara. The propaganda became part of the ideology of the Swedish People’s Home and the new welfare state, which was built up in Sweden during the middle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the propaganda was not successful in the beginning. The Swedes loved their coffee cups with curlicues, their heavy stuffed furniture and their birch board pictures. The campaign for how a beautiful home should appear was most intensive in the thirties, but was still continuing long into the sixties.