Ornament and European Modernism

From Art Practice to Art History

Loretta Vandi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351668583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.

1 Owen Jones’s Theory of Ornament

Isabelle J. Frank

Owen Jones wrote his bestseller The Grammar of Ornament in 1856, on the heels of the Great Exhibition, a turning point in the history of design, architecture, and art theory. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was the most industrially advanced of the European countries and was the first to see the negative effects of mechanical production on its exports.¹ Given the financial importance of this market for Britain (as well as the increasing competition among European nations), decorative arts became a focus of national concern;² the government’s first step was to sponsor the establishment of a School of Design in 1837, intended to train workmen in industrial design.³ Henry Cole, who later founded the South Kensington Museum, became director in 1849 and the unofficial leader of the British reform movement for industry. To garner even more support for British design, Cole and Prince Albert planned the Great Exhibition of 1851, which brought together an unprecedented display of Western and non-Western art.⁴

At the same time, such well-known writers and architects as W.N. Pugin, John Ruskin, Owen Jones, and Gottfried Semper were worried by the aesthetic degradation of ornament industrially produced by machines in a variety of historical styles and materials.⁵ Although they disagreed about the future of industrial art—some for and some against—they all felt that current mechanical production had broken the natural bonds between materials, objects, and ornament and, as a result, designers and practitioners had lost their ability to create ornament suited to the object, the material, and the contemporary period. They too called for reforms in the education and production of ornament within the decorative arts on artistic grounds.

This happy convergence of aesthetic and economic concerns allowed Cole to use government and royal support to gather around him architects, designers, historians, and critics eager to help improve the production of decorative arts in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Joining the group of writers mentioned above were also such practitioners and theorists as William Dyce, Richard Redgrave, and M. D. Wyatt, all of whom Cole involved in the new design school, his new Journal of Design and Manufacturers, and later in the South Kensington Museum.

It is within this context that Cole recruited Jones as a well-known designer and architect to help with the interior decoration of the Crystal Palace (the seat of the exhibition), and later to design the suite of Fine Arts Courts (historical halls) for its permanent installation at Sydenham in 1854. The Great Exhibition confirmed the need for radical improvement within British manufacturing: Reviewers and organizers alike were dismayed by the mixed showing of British decorative art products and awed by the unexpected beauty of non-European, especially Indian and Islamic, artifacts.⁶ The Exhibition triggered new debates about how to improve British decorative arts, especially focusing on new educational projects for craftsmen and designers.

Jones wrote his Grammar of Ornament for a public well aware of the flaws in British decorative arts, design, and production. Jones’s solution was to put forth, for future practitioners, simple principles of design drawn from nature and past styles with colored illustrative examples, hoping thereby to instigate the creation of a new style of ornament. His intent as we shall see, was to offer examples of best practices of design drawn from the past, shown in beautiful representations, and analyzed for their successful principles of design. As such, Jones wished to create a book whose words and images were of equal importance that would work together in a careful equilibrium towards his stated goal.

However, the result, as we shall see, was quite different from Jones’s intent. One could say that Jones’s handling of the written text, on the one hand, and the pictorial representation, on the other, made each successful on its own terms but conspired to set them at odds. For one, Jones undermines what should have been a natural linkage between the historical chapters and the colored plates. While the written descriptions of each style do refer to the plates, these are grouped together at the end of the text, physically isolated from the explanatory texts; at the same time Jones also includes black-and-white illustrations within the text, which effectively lessen the reader’s need to turn to the plates. The independence of the plates from the text is such that over the ensuing decades, Jones’s vivid illustrations have become the best-known and most successful part of the book, reprinted without any text at all.

Second, Jones’s analyses, principles, and illustrations tend to present ornament as a two-dimensional linear motif, devoid of materiality and function. For instance, Jones often depicts ornament first on a three-dimensional object and then focuses on the details of a motif itself, extracting it from its material and contextual origins; the motif then appears either in black-or-white or in the colored plates as a flat, linear element (cf. Figure 1.2, Owen Jones, ‘Head of Canoe, New Guinea,’ Ornament of Savage Tribes, The Grammar of Ornament, detail from p. 16, which is in the text, and Figure 1.4, Owen Jones, ‘Ornaments from Articles belonging to various Savage Tribes, exhibited in the United Service and British Museum,’ Ornament of Savage Tribes, Color Plate II, The Grammar of Ornament, where the carved reliefs are partially shown—and this plate is unusual for the three-dimensionality of the ornament). This is an understandable approach since objects with decoration exist in a bewildering variety of materials, shapes, and sizes (from tassels and cane handles to wall murals and architectural friezes).⁷ By extracting a detail from a floor mosaic, a textile, or an architectural entablature, Jones can show the reader how the motif is shared across different incarnations and different historical styles in a simple, distilled ornament outline. However, as a result, the ornamental motif now seems able to exist on its own, surviving through different stylistic permutations, without the need for framing historical explanation.

For readers, Jones’s principles and commentaries seem to evoke a ‘pure’ ornament, as if decoration could exist outside of a specific medium, detached from an actual ornament-carrier (to use Karsten Harries’s term).⁸ Jones’s celebration of ornament as an aesthetic element, common to all the decorative arts, results in a concept of ornament severed from the objects and materials it inhabits. Yet once one conjures up an abstract, disembodied idea of ornament, then one can also question its relevance to the structure and object it supposedly decorates. If detachable and isolated, ornament assumes more and more the aspect of an external appendage added on to a given form and structure; a few decades later, such approaches to ornament could unconsciously inform modernist critics’ condemnation of ornament.

Introduction to The Grammar

Owen Jones joined Cole’s group as an established architect-cum-designer, unusual among his contemporaries for his interest in non-European architecture. Having spent several years traveling throughout Europe, Africa, and the Near East, Jones had become an ardent admirer of Moorish decoration, and of the newly discovered ‘original’ coloring of ancient art.⁹ Returning to England after his journeys, Jones published Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (1836–1845) from drawings he and a colleague had done on-site.¹⁰ To do justice to the coloring of the Alhambra, Jones perfected a new method of printing called chromolithography.¹¹ His subsequent publications from the 1840s [Designs for Mosaic and Tessellated Pavements by Owen Jones (London, 1842) and Encaustic Tiles (London, 1843)], displayed his admiration for Moorish-colored designs, presenting them as models for British productions.¹²

Commissioned to design the new courts for the re-erected Crystal Palace at Sydenham, Jones used the vast space as a laboratory for the development and application of his color theory, based on his earlier study of the Alhambra. Working with M. Digby Wyatt on the arrangements of the exhibitions, Jones was able to devise a color scheme of primary colors that matched the different artistic regions displayed in the building. His decoration was well received, although his Greek section, modeled on archaeological theories of colored Greek temples, drew some criticism.¹³ Jones was then invited to lecture on color and ornament for the Royal Society of Arts, later published as “An Attempt to Define the Principles Which Should Regulate the Employment of Colour in the Decorative Arts.”¹⁴ Jones’s involvement with the School of Design, his visible interest in color principles, and the support of Cole all inspired him to write The Grammar of Ornament.¹⁵

At the time of its publication The Grammar of Ornament offered the most encyclopedic coverage not only of ornament but of art in general. As the title indicates, the volume wished to set forth the language of ornament in all of its cultural and historical instantiations; as Schafter points out in her essay, the analogy was a current one for the decorative arts, used by Jones as well as his contemporaries.¹⁶ Jones addressed the eclectic confusion of Victorian ornament by seeking out the most perfect designs of the past, analyzing their elements, and assembling these into overarching laws to guide future practice. The resulting volume combined a set of principles with an innovative history of ornament, and a full 2,050 illustrations printed with his new system of chromolithography. It was Jones’s hope that the reader, inspired by the vocabulary and the guiding principles at his disposal, would fashion designs embodying the ideals of The Grammar. Over time, a new style would then arise, seamlessly applying the principles to the various materials, functions, and forms existing within the decorative arts.

At a more practical level, Jones was also advocating for a specific approach to ornament design, namely stylization (which he called conventional). For Jones and the reformist group around Cole, stylization of nature was a defining feature of decorative arts, one to be embraced and favorably compared to the mimetic naturalism of the fine arts. Good ornament, as exemplified throughout The Grammar, fashioned nature into regularized, geometric forms. What Jones did not explain, however, was that stylized, flat patterns also benefited industrial production, since they were much easier to reproduce than three-dimensional designs. Thus The Grammar offered a compilation of perfect ‘forms,’ and of principles derived from these forms, while also advocating for abstract rather than naturalistic types of representation.

In his wish to classify ornamental excellence in its diverse cultural manifestations, Jones was very much a man of his time, following current ideas concerning botany, evolution, and color theory.¹⁷ The written sections describe the defining features of each ‘style,’ explain their historical provenance, and connect different specimens to Jones’s principles of design. At the same time, these chapters are peppered with insightful comments about the development of artistic form, human creativity, and beauty in ornament, which, albeit un-systematically presented, do lay out a groundwork for later writers. Jones’s heterodox positions in fact went beyond later categorizations; historians still wonder to what extent Jones was committed to historically infused ornamentation (given his own designs), as opposed to more abstract and original designs that, like Modernist ones, adapted their forms to suit the intended function.¹⁸ Was he a proto-modernist? Was he a throwback to stylistic revivals? Or was he neither, aiming for something else?

In the preface to The Grammar, Jones clearly presents the intended aim of his book:

In the following chapters I have endeavoured to establish these main facts—First, that whenever any style o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Black and White Illustrations
• List of Color Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors’ Biographies
• Introduction
• 1 Owen Jones’s Theory of Ornament
• 2 Function, Fiction, Flux, and Silence: Ornamental Theory, Science, and the Modern Search for Aesthetic Volition
• 3 August Schmarsow’s Theory of Ornament
• 4 The Veil of Truth? Van de Velde, Muthesius, and the Battle over Ornament in Modern Architecture
• 5 Ornament, Image, and Tension in Ernst Gombrich’s Theory of Perception
• Bibliography
• Index of People
• Index of Places
• Index of Subjects