Review of The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style (Cambridge University Press, 2003), by Debra Schafter

The earliest developments in modern art and architecture were deeply entwined within the complex of values and theories formulated in the nineteenth century. Yet many of the most prominent modernists of the early twentieth centuryarchitects as much as painterswere quick to dismiss the functional roles and even, perhaps, the psychological necessity of decoration and ornament. Although much of the work produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now can be seen to have explored various possibilities for the decorative and the ornamental that both engaged tradition and sought unique responses to the circumstances of the modern world, the devaluation of decoration and ornament by the avant-garde set modernism against these decadent and feminine categories. Until quite recently historical accounts have placed art from this period in an ambiguous zone, characterizing these works as either indicative of the last stage of a vestigial traditionalism or as a proto-modernist effort important only for its place in the inevitable drive toward the full liberation of Art by the end of World War I. In so characterizing the fin-de-sicle, the nuanced arguments its theorists and artists produced about the efficacy of decoration and ornament were trivialized and ignored. The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style is Debra Schafter's book on the theoretical foundations of modern art in which she attempts to redress the deficiency in the study of decoration and ornament. Schafter's aim in part is to erase the limitations of traditional constructions about the role of nineteenth-century theories of ornament and style (Schafter 6). Although interest in the theoretical and practical problems of decoration, ornament, and style has expanded recently, Schafter's book is a valuable but limited addition to the literature; among the other notable works that serve as anchors in this area of scholarship are E. H. Gombrich's The Sense of Order (1979), Oleg Grabar's The Mediation of Ornament (1992), and from the same year as Schafter's book (2003), James Trilling's Ornament: A Modern Perspective. Schafter's account illuminates the specific ideas of four key theorists: John Ruskin, Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper, and Alois Riegl. The ideas of these theorists and critics are considered for both their content and structure, emphasizing the ways in which the authors employed contemporary linguistic models to understand the development and purpose of ornament, especially ancient, non-canonical, and non-Western examples. The linguistic models appropriated by the theorists were thought to provide a rational, scientific basis for their discussions of ornament. Schafter considers each of the authors works as exemplifying one of four general categories in which ornament conveys meaning: Ruskins as emblematic, Jones as structural, Sempers as functional, and Riegls as perceptual. Schafter argues that for a select group of theorists and artists, so-called archaic or outsider ornament was thought to be in harmony with natural order and thus had given rise to the authentic styles of the past. The study

of this ornament legitimized new and innovative design practices in the late nineteenth century that were considered authentic products of the modern age (Schafter 179). Schafters book is divided in two parts. The first discusses the ideas of the four authors and establishes their theoretical constructions relative to linguistic analogies. Schafter provides the reader with detailed and nuanced accounts of the ways in which Ruskin, Jones, Semper, and Riegl negotiated routes to a clearer understanding of the history, function, and meaning of ornament. Part two offers a limited survey of artworks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which in some way instantiate or at least parallel the theoretical ideas discussed in the first part. Schafter focuses especially on Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffman, and Adolf Loos as exemplary artists interested in the new ideas about ornament. This division of the books focus into sections on theory and practice is not intended to suggest a divide between the writers and artists, but is rather the authors way to organize and give legibility to the diverse and complex ideas with which she deals. On the other hand, this format also reveals the books greatest shortcoming in leaving ambiguous the relationship of theory to practice. Nonetheless, Schafters book is valuable on several counts. She gives the mostly formalist approaches of the four authors a historical and cultural context; she provides a useful reading of key artistic writings as they relate to the neglected subject of ornament; she demonstrates the complimentary nature of theory and practice in late nineteenth century Vienna, especially; and she enriches our understanding of how archaic and marginalized precedents were used in developing new ornamental forms outside of typical academic practice. These forms were both abstract in the absolute sense and abstracted in the sense of moving away from naturalistic representations. The latter point is especially important because none of the four theorists or artists Schafter discusseswith the possible exception of Adolph Loos (whose work is discussed only as a development subsequent to her main period of interest)entirely eschewed the use of figurative ornament. While these aspects of the book are laudable, the precise relationship between the various theories of ornament and the practice of abstraction remains problematic, both as a historical problem in itself and in Schafters treatment of it. The problem is not entirely resolved by the end of the book. Most glaring is her consideration of John Ruskins writing, which is initially portrayed as equally central to the argument but is only occasionally invoked in the second part of the book, and much less so than the other three writers. Schafter establishes that Ruskins writing was marked by an intense interest in ornament broadly construed. In fact, Schafter identifies twelve types of ornament in Ruskins accounts, ranging from abstract lines to animals and man in hierarchical order. Eleven of the twelve types are figurative, and Schafter recognizes that Ruskin was adamant that "noble ornament must be imitative of natural form" (Schafter 19). Because Ruskin's writing is cited as the primary example of theorizing the emblematic function

of ornamentthat is, its iconographic or allegorical functions using figurative forms that imitate natural formsit would seem necessary to consider his contribution and impact more thoroughly and on par with the other writers. The neglect of Ruskin in the second part of the book is significant because Schafter implies that ornament as practiced by fin-de-sicle artists is more important for modernisms history the more abstract it is. Schafter recognizes the uneasiness of balancing ornaments simultaneous role in the nascent modernism and in the more traditional ideas of the nineteenth century. She is aware of the fact that some artists and architects gave emphasis to new ornamental precedents while adhering to some degree of academic traditionwhether this was achieved through a focus on faade design, on the role of precedent in new works, or on the adaptation of painting and sculpture for its architectural context (Anger; Morgan; Sankovitch; Leatherbarrow; and Tournikiotis). Schafter's understanding of these art historical issues, however, does not resolve the precise role of abstracted ornament in modern art, or of the ways in which artists achieved abstraction. Both issues are given less attention than one might wish for. Schafter suggests that overall there was a movement in time away from Ruskin's type of emblematic ornament toward Riegls type of perceptual ornament in a way that paralleled developments in science. This change in the critical attitude to ornament is construed as a shift in focus from the object to the process, or from imitation and representation to function and purpose. In Schafters view, the nineteenth-centurys typical focus on the object tended to produce illusionistic ornament that imitated natural forms in some way. Conversely, the later focus on process is seen to have produced greater awareness of the possibilities of abstract ornament to achieve new formal goals. Still, the specific reasons for the rejection of the emblematic function of ornament remain unclear in Schafters text. The brief discussion of Adolph Loos in the concluding chapter recognizes that he and similarly-minded artists forced a dichotomy between utility and pleasure, at least theoretically, that the other protagonists did not countenance. James Trillings contemporaneous book goes some way to resolving the Loos question by suggesting that Loos actually made structure and material part of an ornamental scheme, despite his verbal claims to the contrary, and that this incognito ornament became part of the modernist tradition (Trilling 131-136). Several further questions are raised by Schafters argument. First, is it possible that academic practice incorporated some of the changes in the value of exotic, archaic, and non-canonical ornament? Did abstract or abstracted ornament play a similar role here as it did for experimental artists? Second, does abstraction necessarily imply a greater role for analytic processes at the expense of descriptive or other processes? Schafter states, As ornament gradually distanced itself from representational values, both its function and the activity of the audience became

more analytic (Schafter 179). This may be theoretically plausible, but the audience of which she speaks was comprised of like-minded or sympathetic critics and artists, not the public used to emblematic ornament and traditional styles and the designers who provided them. Does the shift to an analytic mode really follow the shift to abstraction, as Schafter suggests, or might the analytic mode precede it and provide the intellectual groundwork necessary to understand abstract ornament? Or, perhaps, is cause and effect not so easy to distinguish? Third, is it possible to conceive of representation in abstract ornament? As Charles Harrison has written, the desire to find meaning in abstract art requires . . . the possibility of representation in the absence of resemblance; for if there can be no representation without resemblance, then the pictorial order of the abstract painting must be seen as merely accidental, and thus as insignificant meaninglessin human terms (Harrison 200). Schafter's book provides an introduction to these issues and offers a nuanced argument about the importance of nineteenth-century theories of ornament. The work opens up the field for further study of this important period of debate and innovation in the arts. Its greatest strength is that it reveals the centrality of ornament to the concerns of some of the experimental artists and influential critics of the turn of the century and thus invites other scholars to take more seriously the role of ornament in the design culture of this period. At the same, the book raises but leaves unresolved the vexing question of the precise relation of ornament to modernist theory and practice. Yet this uncertainty and hesitation may suggest that artists such as Wagner, Klimt, and Loos are not quite the modernists (or proto-modernists) that historians have made them to be; their interest in ornament (whether overt or veiled, abstracted or absolutely abstract) and the utility of history and tradition sets them distinctly apart from the mainstream of twentiethcentury modernism. In Schafters study, these figures emerge as enigmatic and contradictory, and thus they may be of greater interest to todays scholars than ever before.

Bibliography Anger, Jenny. Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900-1915. In Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, edited by Christopher Reed, 120-147. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Harrison, Charles, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Open University, 1993. Leatherbarrow, David. Interpretation and Abstraction in the Architecture of Adolf Loos. Journal of Architectural Education 40, no. 4 (Summer 1987), 2-9. Morgan, David. The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to

Kandinsky. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 3 (Summer 1992), 231-42. Sankovitch, Anne-Marie. Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of Architecture. Art Bulletin 80, no. 4 (December 1998), 687-717. Schafter, Debra. The Order of Ornament, the Structure of Style: Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Tournikiotis, Panayotis. Adolf Loos. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Trilling, James. Ornament: A Modern Perspective. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.