Ornament and European Modernism: From Art Practice to Art History

摘要

Ornament is not merely decoration. Historians of European ornament have taken their subject seriously: in the Arts and Crafts movement as an expression of socialism eager to assail the boundaries between 'higher' and 'lower' in works of both art and craft and the people who made them; and in the history of early abstract art as a source for theories or a stepping stone for practices associated with the high arts. But the attempt made by Vandi and the other writers in this volume to integrate theories of ornament into the history of European Modernism is more profound. They treat orna-ment not in its role as an inspiration for or a foil to the fine arts but as the heart of modernism itself. An edited volume as cohesive as this is rare; although each chapter emphasizes a different thread and allows the discourse to widen as it pursues its chronological course, the book follows an unbroken historical discourse of figures who knew and responded to one another's works. Although the writing styles and some concerns of its authors diverge widely, an anthology that could have been loosely organized around the term 'ornament' becomes a vigorous argument about the importance to modernism of discourse about ornament.