Women Modernists and the Decorative: An Introduction

Decoration is disguise … trash is always abundantly decorated; the luxury object is well-made, neat and clean, pure and healthy, and its bareness reveals the quality of its manufacture.

In a 1925 essay on The Decorative Art of Today, Le Corbusier sets out a typically forthright argument against the decorative in art (Le Corbusier 1987). Decoration, he suggests, is deceitful, a trick deployed by inferior makers to hide the poor quality of their products. From his perspective, this was much more than simply a matter of aesthetics; rather, morality and the health of society were at stake. The Decorative Art of Today asserts a number of familiar tropes that defined the modernist period, when the feminine became aligned with mass media, mass produced consumer objects, and the decorative and applied arts. Modernism's clean lines and masculine, mechanical aesthetic was seen as the antidote to these decadent, disorderly elements that continued to pollute modern culture. Indeed, Le Corbusier's essay echoes many points made more than ten years earlier in Adolf Loos's ‘Ornament and Crime’ ([1913] 1998). In this essay, Loos confronts the popularity of decorative art and ornamentation with alarm, viewing it as a serious threat to the health, wealth, and progress of a nation: ‘the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use’, he argues, and ‘lack of ornamentation is a sign of intellectual strength’ (175). Conversely, a love of ornamentation is, in Loos’ theory, a mark of uncultured, ‘primitive’ groups, such as children, savages, degenerates, criminals and women (175). Le Corbusier's The Decorative Art of Today is more measured in its approach, but both men share a markedly elitist tone, arguing that ‘cultured’ (or, for Loos, ‘cultivated’) people shun the decorative. For both, women also stand at the nexus between decadence and the decorative. ‘Shop girls’ are the key market for cheap, badly made objects, Le Corbusier suggests with obvious contempt.

The shift in attitudes toward the decorative and applied arts in the modernist period was clearly gendered. In ‘Forgotten Ties: the Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900–1915′, Jenny Anger (1996) explores the gender politics at work in these debates, tracking the change in fortunes of decorative art as it becomes inextricably linked to the feminine in the early twentieth century. Anger uses the case of Karl Scheffler as an example, a critic and one-time champion of ‘the decorative as an aesthetic significant to modernism’ (132) who enacted a ‘complete turn against decoration and ornament by 1908′ (137). As Le Corbusier's essay suggests, the role of commerce and shopping was an obvious factor, but Anger also highlights the role played by anxieties surrounding the increasing number of women entering arts schools.¹ Anger quotes Scheffler's warning to fathers that they should ban their daughter from studying arts and crafts, lest they become ‘joyless, manly, embittered girls’ who can never match the talent of their male peers. This argument would surface again during the founding of the supposedly democratic Bauhaus school in 1919, where women students were largely relegated to the weaving workshop. Even so, the women of the weaving workshop created work that was productive, innovative and financially viable. Indeed, schools like Bauhaus also illustrated how women's increasing access to the arts (as well as broader socio-political freedoms) went hand in hand with an attempt to downgrade so-called ‘feminine arts’ and elevate ‘masculine’ high art.² Many of the most innovative avant-garde women artists and writers of the early twentieth century studied applied arts, and drew on their training (on both a practical and theoretical level) in their careers. Sophie Taeuber-Arp developed her understanding of colour and form studying textile design in Munich and at the Schweizerischer Werkbund; the influence of Mina Loy's time in Munich during the height of Jugendstil can be traced in her later fashion and lampshade design work; similarly, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven was also a part of Munich's Jugendstil cultural circles, which would inform her performance and assemblage art.

A number of contemporary critical studies have begun to unpick the uneasy relationship between modernism and the decorative and applied arts, as well as the attendant issues of gender, race and sexuality that are often mapped onto the high art versus applied arts binary. Texts such as Jasmine Rault's Eileen Grey and the Design of Sapphic Modernity (2011), Anne Anlin Cheng's Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (2010), Jane Stevenson's Baroque Between the Wars: Alternative Style in the Arts 1918–1939 (2018), and Rebecca Van Diver's Designing a New Tradition: Lois Mailou Jones and the Aesthetic of Blackness (2020) explore alternative modes of modernism that encompass what Stevenson refers to as ‘antonyms’ of traditional masculine modernist concepts: ‘frivolous, prodigal, feminine, queer, decorative, and equivocal’ (2018: 2). In Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (2019), Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo explore the ‘collision of media and new integrated modes of expression’ (2019: 3) that was inherent to the art practice of the Stettheimer sisters (encompassing painting, poetry and prose, cooking, interior design, and salon hosting). Their study asks how we ‘investigate … such an integration, which, by nature, eludes typical categorization and analysis’ (2019: 5) and, significantly, is coded feminine, decorative and camp. In answer, Gammel and Zelazo ‘reclaim a space for female artists’ (2019: 3) in experimental modernism by examining the dissident intersections between multimodal forms of making, and between modernism and the decorative. New Directions in Multimodal Modernism offers an alternative framework for situating the work of female modernists who have been neglected ‘in part because of the multimodality of their practice’ (2019: 5) a framework which this special issue welcomes and seeks to build on. This special issue adds to this growing conversation by expanding on the range of approaches to marginalized female modernists and their intermedia art practice. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives on women writers and artists working at the intersections between modernism and the decorative, this collection seeks to create a vibrant conversation that establishes a fresh approach to modernist art's others (the domestic, the decorative, craft and the feminine). In this issue, the ‘decorative’ frames many different modes of working: informing literary works by Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes and visual art by Georgia O’Keeffe, Hannah Ryggen and Betye Saar.

The articles in this special issue show that the decorative has always been present in modernism as an alternative mode of making and way of reimagining life in the modern age. The influence may be in the development of technical forms and styles, as in Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (2005), where David Brett traces the influence of textile patterns, carpets, and wallpaper on Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Seurat and Paul Gauguin, noting that ‘modern painting largely grew out of the nineteenth-century discourse of decoration, both in its formal means and its theory of meaning’ (210). The influence of the decorative may also work through larger expressions of domestic modernist production, for example in the Omega Workshop, founded by Roger Fry in collaboration with Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and (briefly) Wyndham Lewis. The Omega Workshop produced home furnishings and dresses in simple forms and bright, bold, abstract patterns: merging the visual language of Cubism with domestic design. Offering a very different modernist vision to that of Le Corbusier, the studio espoused a ‘strongly anti-industrial aesthetic’ and took an artisanal approach to design in the vein of William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement (Reed 1996: 112). The Omega Workshop's experimental approach to interior design and decoration attracted criticism from later art historians (it was branded ‘homely and insipid’ after a 1985 exhibition, quoted in Reed 1996: 49) and even by those within its own milieu. When Lewis left the group he derided Omega as a ‘party of strayed and dissenting Aesthetes’ (clearly alluding to its association with Bloomsbury's queer networks): without his ‘modern talent’ and ‘rough and masculine work’, he claims, their efforts were reduced to the ‘level of a pleasant tea party’ (quoted in Reed 1996: 4). Lewis's comments gesture towards the unstable and arbitrary boundaries that existed within modernism, which usually delineated between high art and decorative art based on gender, sexuality, and race. Without the hypermasculine, self-aggrandizing presence of Lewis, the Omega Workshop falls into the ‘feminine, queer, decorative and equivocal’ (2) category that Stevenson identifies as an alternative mode of modernism. The decorative, therefore, functioned as a coded form, an integral – if disavowed – part of modernism's history.

Alexandra Peat considers the proximity of Virginia Woolf to decorative culture through the Omega Workshop, and her work with the Hogarth Press. However, as Peat argues, Woolf was largely ambivalent – if not sceptical – towards craft practices. This article examines the myriad ways that craft, as a concept, operates in Woolf's work from a 1937 radio broadcast on ‘Craftsmanship’ to the recurrent theme of writing as ‘craft’ that pervades her work. Peat centres Woolf as a literary modernist to explore the craft (and anti-craft) of writing, where to be too crafted risks words becoming merely decorative, only ‘fit for a glass case in a museum’ (Woolf 1993: 137). Where Woolf might have been sceptical of the metaphor of craft, Lottie Whalen's essay offers tapestries by Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) as one of the most striking bodies of politically charged textile art of the twentieth century. In Ryggen's work, decorative art's ambivalent associations hold subversive power, and pictorial weaving is transformed into a mirror held up to the chaos and violence of the modern age. Whalen's article explores both the challenge these tapestries offer to growing European fascism as well as their radically sustainable materials. Modernism has often been more associated with speed of trains, planes, motor cars and the newly electrified world or, as Alexandra Harris points out, ‘the wasteland, and not the herbaceous border’ (2015: 52). In contrast, Ryggen's work offers a decelerated, decorative modernism, where the renewal and reconstruction embodied by these tapestries presciently calls upon us to embrace slow process, handmade materials and the anti-capitalist potential of making.

One artist who rejected a connection to any type of ‘expressionism’ was Georgia O’Keeffe, who even went so far to emphatically note: ‘I never think about expressing anything’ (Buhler Lynes, 1989: 249). The way in which design principles governed O’Keeffe's modernist aesthetics are explored in this issue by Sarah Garland, who argues that O’Keeffe's work is indebted to a formalist vision of Buddhist, Taoist and transcendentalist traditions. By offering readings of O’Keeffe's work outside of the psychoanalytic, Garland refocuses our attention on the aesthetic importance of painting. She deftly reframes O’Keeffe's connections to decadence, nature and innocence by way of revisiting the artist's own statements on their craft. Being part of the art market necessitated a type of self-fashioning that O’Keeffe largely rebelled against in order, as Garland puts it, ‘to control her reception’ in the wake of Freudian-inspired myths of femininity.

Returning to Gammel and Zelazo's concept of multimodal modernism, Alex Goody's article outlines the way in which animal materials used in twentieth-century fashion influenced writers Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy. By tracing the motif of animal decoration in women's fashion across the diverse styles that Barnes and Loy worked in (including journalism, drama, poetry and, in Loy's case, hat design), Goody reveals the extent to which these varying approaches intersected and informed one another: for example, Loy's decorative horse hair hat design gestures towards the way that, in her poetry, she unpicks ‘the uncertain divisions between human and non-human world’. By attending to the decorative surfaces and sensuous materials at play in Barnes's and Loy's work, Goody shows how each ‘imagine animal-human connections that deconstruct an exploitative anthropocentric economy and a patriarchal cultural elitism’. Goody's article gestures towards the ways that women modernists were able to turn Le Corbusier's sneer that ‘decoration is disguise’ against his masculine aesthetic; in Barnes's and Loy's work, the decorative surface disguises provocative critiques of modernism's gendered cultural hierarchies.

The longevity and personal resonance of the everyday and decorative objects accumulated over a lifetime is further highlighted in Jade French's essay on Betye Saar, an artist who has reevaluated the worth of objects accumulated through ageing. Saar uses modernist techniques of assemblage but she also, as Lubiana Himid suggests, ‘chose to return to these images just at a time, at the close of the century, when this kind of work was deemed redundant in art circles in Europe’ (2016: 22). As an older, contemporary artist, Saar nods to modernist legacies to ultimately subvert them. Saar's ‘family shrines’ turn personal, decorative items into assemblages to imbue new meaning in old objects across the ages. French's essay offers ageing as another space in which Saar's work can be read as engaging with spaces of belated temporality, using decorative materials, assemblage methodologies and acts of retrospection that are filled with cyclical returns and thematic echoes.

The writers and artists featured in this special issue offer a glimpse into the ways in which decorative modernism troubles disciplinary boundaries and cultural hierarchies through its multi-modality. As these papers demonstrate, the decorative has always been an integral, if disavowed, part of modernism; taking a fresh approach to the intersections between the two offers a way of reframing the uneasy relationship between modernism and the decorative, as well as the gendered assumptions that underpin this relationship. Decorative works recycle and – potentially – regenerate modernism by unpicking its spatial and temporal boundaries, uncovering the questions of agency embedded within the movement; however, they also question the limits of our received cultural frameworks, pushing us to search for alternative forms, genealogies, and terminology in order to stay faithful to the works’ radical politics.

Notes

1 In Germany, Anger also notes that this turn against women in art happened against a backdrop of increasing gender equality in key areas: 1908 marked ‘women's first legal membership in German political parties and significant gender-equalizing education reforms’ (138).

2 For a reframed position on gender in Bauhaus, see Otto and Rössler 2019.