Ornaments: Relicts of the past?
From time immemorial ornaments have been part of human life, arts and crafts
being characterized by different ornamental styles.
Ornamental prints as an individual genre dates back to a more recent time: Graphic prints of ornamental patterns have served architects, sculptors and artisans as models since the 15th century. In the 19th century the continuous citation of ornaments finally culminates all over Europe in so-called pattern collections, when students of arts-and-crafts copied ideal type ornaments as a canon of true mastership. Also the architects of the Vienna Ringstraße buildings availed themselves of different historic styles. Whether neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, or neo-Baroque: both
aristocracy and bourgeoisie set a monument to their canon of values, indulging in excessive ornamentation; just consider the stuccoed fronts with all their pilasters, consoles, fruit wraths, abutment friezes, etc.
Finally, the question of benefits and drawbacks of ornamentation led to an aesthetic crisis in the aftermath of Historism: on the threshold to Modernism the matter of the primacy of form or function is wildly debated.
Inspired by the functionalist Chicago School à la Louis Henry Sullivan and Otto Wagner’s “Nutzstil”, intentional-rationalistic modernizer and purist Adolf Loos, friend of linguistic purist Karl Kraus, claims that all ornamentation is “crime” and declares the lack of ornament as the contemporary style. According to Loos the “Potemkinian City” of Vienna hides its commercial reality behind the illusiveness of historically stylized façades; he claims this stylization, the combination of art and objects of utility/architecture to be an ill, and anyway any newly designed
ornamentation would be a waste of capital, labor, health, and material. And yet, Loos’ rigorous criticism of ornamentation allows a right of existence for the naturally evolved ornament that interdigitates with a specific culture.
The ornament: anthropologic constant or relict of the past? Particularly in post-Modern times this issue appears to be modern again.
For all those who are looking for a factual overview, the present publication comes in the nick of time as it refers to an EU project undertaken by the MAK together with the Kunstbibliothek Berlin and the UPM Prague: The total stock of ornamental etchings of the above mentioned art institutions will go online for free, thus
being a benefit to both the public and the scientific research while at the same time creating a substantial prerequisite for a new interpretation of the historic interrelations in the study of ornaments.
Peter Noever
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