Minimalism: Ornament as Crime

Wool Print by Sonia DeLaunay

1977

The trend advocating minimal ornament such as circles and squares was pushed even further by architects advocating Minimalism as a philosophy as well as a design principle.

In 1908 Adolf Loos published a diatribe called Ornament and Crime.

Loos's tombstone. 

His dates (missing due to the idea that they are unnecessary ornament, I guess) are

1870-1933

He despised any decorative detail and likened ornament to disease and degeneration, among other negative images, as well as "unmodernism," which caused "enormous damage and devastation ...in aesthetic development."

You can read Loos's essay here at the George Washington University Website

http://www.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf

Loos's ideas influenced Germany's Bauhaus School theories on architecture and design, trends that became known as International Style. When Hitler came to power in 1933 many Bauhaus faculty and former Loos students fled to the U.S. Several became influential teachers at American schools, creating a generation of designers who agreed with Loos (although the rhetoric was toned down.) 

Bauhaus glass box

Bauhaus minimalism was not the first imported wave of modernism, but because we imported the designers themselves, their principles strongly affected our architecture and interiors. 

Miller House by Richard Neutra, a pupil of Loos, 

Palm Springs.

Within 20 years of their arrival the ideal building was an unadorned box....

Furnished with chairs of pared-down line

upholstered in fabrics of the most minimal design.

Chair by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen

1941

Textured cloth was acceptable ornament.

You can still buy a Saarinen Womb Chair

in any of dozens of minimal textured fabrics.

No prints.

This contemporary grass cloth is probably too busy.

Pattern designers would be out of business if everyone listened to Loos..

But people love pattern---so prints were designed as a response to the

trend for texture.

Fake textures

These are feedsack prints,

terribly up-to-date

in the era of International Style.

Here's a textured seersucker with added printed texture.

But don't tell Adolf Loos. He would come unglued.

Although he MIGHT approve of quilting as texture.

Very modern. Very International Style.

"New York" quilt from Haptic Lab.

http://www.hapticlab.com/

Quilting from Canoe Ridge Creations

http://www.canoeridgecreations.com/2013/05/lately-snapshots.html

The quilted wholecloth quilt, as in this example

from Crate & Barrel, may be the essence of minimalism.

See another post about Loos here:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/09/modernism-and-ornament.html

Modern Print Monday: Josef Hoffmann

Cranefly by Josef Hoffmann

1910

Vienna

A exemplary minimalistic floral

suggesting a bloom with circles and triangles and no color at all.

Josef Hoffmann

(1870-1956)

Hoffmann was an architect and designer whose influence on early 20th-century modernism was significant. Hoffmann co-founded the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstätte) with Koloman Moser in 1903. Both designed fabric among their many arts and crafts. Their print styles diverged with Moser's print design more organic and detailed and Hoffmann's more geometric and minimal.

A scrap of Cranefly is in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums. Click here and then do a search for Hoffmann to see a few more prints.

http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/223688

The Neue Gallery New York specializes in Austrian arts. This summer the museum has a show about Hoffman's partner. Koloman Moser: Designing Modern Vienna 1897-1907 will be up until September 2, 2013. The exhibit travels next to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from September 29, 2013 to January 12, 2014.

https://www.neuegalerie.org/content/koloman-moser-designing-modern-vienna-1897-1907

Minimalism in Floral Abstractions

The traditional abstraction indicating a floral.

Minimalism in the 1940s

The flower can be abstracted further

and we still read it as a flower

In this quilt from the 1930s or '40s

the flower is abstracted and minimalized to two squares.

It seems to be a variation of this Hollyhock Wreath

from Coats & Clark in the 1940s.

Two circles---you know it's a flower and not a donut.

Here's an older simple floral---although we might see it as a fruit,

a pomegranate or love apple.

It's probably late 19th-century.

Even more abstract, but again is it a fruit or a flower?

The fancy border is a minor clue to mid-19th century.

We see a lot more of these abstracted florals in vintage prints than we do in vintage quilts.

"Riva" Fabric design by Josef Hoffmann

for the Wiener Werkstatte.

Hoffman's floral with 3 circles is an early modern print from about 1910

I went through my box of 1930s, 40's and 50's prints and found quite a few inspired by that print, pictured in Angela Volkers's book Textiles of the Wiener Werkstatte.

Hoffman's print was done a good twenty years before

this flower became a standard ditsy print.

Design evolved from avant-garde to run-of-the-mill

when feedsacks began following modernist principles.

Modern Print Monday: Raoul Dufy

Fleurs (Flowers)

By Raoul Dufy

1918

France

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) is best known as a painter affiliated with groups known as the Fauves and the Cubists, but he also was a professional fabric designer working with Paul Poiret. 

 La Perse coat

This velvet coat designed by Paul Poiret gives you an idea of the print's scale. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns La Perse (The Persian) coat. See it here in color:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2005.199

Detail of a Dufy painting done about the same time as the textile design.

The Park of St. Cloud

Many of Dufy's prints translate the boldness of monochromatic woodcuts to fabric. A Dufy quote:

"Paintings have spilled from their frames and stained our dress and our walls."

See a post about Dufy at The Blue Lantern blog:
http://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/2012/10/roses-sauvages-raoul-dufy-invents-art.html

Minimalism in a Maximal Culture

Early 20th century quilt

Late 19th-century parlor

One of the contradictions in quilt history is that women who decorated their homes and children to visual excess also made quilts that are exemplars of minimalism.

(Do notice the hooked rug on the floor in the photo. It's has an Oddfellows theme with the heart in hand and the letters FLT---but I digress.) 

Block

Quilt from about 1910

Quilt from ?

Quilt from about 1890

Of course, there are plenty of surviving examples of late Victorian romantic clutter. 

But how two such different styles coexisted is an interesting puzzle.

Above and Below about 1900

Here we have a style mixture, a good example of the paradox---

The center of wools: an excellent example of functionality.

The print border: an excellent example of ornament for its own sake.

Modern Print Monday: Vernon MacFarlane

Audrey Hepburn at El Morocco in 1951

Fake zebra stripes seem so obvious we can imagine Adam & Eve leaving the Garden of Eden clad in velveteen animal prints, but there had to be a designer who was the first to say: "Faux Zebra! There's an idea!"

Some credit Elsie de Wolfe in the 1920s and others Vernon MacFarlane, the interior designer who did all the New York nightclubs before and after Prohibition's repeal in 1933.

See the inside of this El Morocco matchbook at the New York Historical Society here:

http://www.nyhistory.org/node/61704

MacFarlane certainly made faux zebra synonymous with exotic sophistication. His banquettes at El Morocco were upholstered in stripes printed in the obviously fake color scheme of navy blue on white. The story is that the speakeasy was decorated with a minimal hand for reasons of budget and the sloppiness of the clientele. A desert oasis in Northern Africa was chosen as the theme.

Clark Gable and Slim Keith 

Celebrities photographed in the booths were instantly identifiable as El Morocco patrons. MacFarlane added fake palm trees and a desert sky of twinkling lights, two other illusions that became classics.

The palm trees seem to have been white.

The leaves were originally of cellophane.

Biographical details about MacFarlane are slim---he wasn't. He was either an Australian or a New Zealander---it all looked the same from New York. His interiors in the 1930s defined celebrity.

Merle Oberon (left) and friends

under a fake palm tree