a further note on the exhibition of ornament

A Further Note on the Exhibition of OrnamentAuthor(s): William M. Ivins, Jr.Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 14, No. 6 (Jun., 1919), pp. 140-142Published by: The Metropolitan Museum of ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3254013 .

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BULLETIN OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

been given by Albert E. Gallatin. It is one of those which were made for the illus- tration of La Morte d'Arthur. B. B.

A FURTHER NOTE ON THE EXHIBITION OF ORNAMENT

ONE of the most interesting aspects of the Exhibition of Ornament now being shown in the print galleries is the way in which the various styles of design seem in great part to come from the imaginative efforts of a comparatively restricted number of great designers and inventors of ornament. Today in all our newspapers we read of the great desire, the necessity, of bringing the ultimate consumer in- to more immediate touch with the producer; it is one of the burning econom- ic questions of the day, and every housewife is familiar with it. Many efforts are being made to solve the problem, and co- 6perative stores and farmers' and con- sumers' leagues are battling for it. The same situation is to be found in design -since there, for one

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contemporary designer who is in touch with the work of the real producers of the styles and motifs on which he depends, hundreds get their acquaintance with them only at second and third hand. And it is notice- able that those contemporary designers who produce the best work are those who have come into closest touch with the work of their greatest predecessors.

Without going back to Renaissance times and tracing the development of the pilaster from Mantegna and Zoan Andrea to the beginning of the nineteenth century, or delving into the results of the profusion of ideas that sprang from the teeming brain of Le Pautre, it will be interesting, perhaps, for a moment to look at the work of Pir- anesi and to consider the way in which the

middleman of design passed his work

I~ 1 ff t on to the ultimate consumer.

'i llT ! tIf we look at the

, , f t prints hung about

t%. -.~? v nK the most northerly of the three galleries in which the orna-

!/~ ̂ SJ ment prints are displayed, we shall notice that the west wall is supported by a series of large and overworked designs by Piranesi for mantels, over- mantels, tables, tab- ourets, sedan chairs, and various other objects that go to make up the furnish- ing of a room. Al- most without exception they are so rich and fanciful, and particularly so over-

',/,,,, ":,,.....X, laden with orna- II,tf^ . \,9,/ .ement, that they

could not be exe- cuted in wood or

'A PIRANESI stone, and must IERE D'ADORNARE therefore be re- OME, I769 garded as abstract.

Piranesi was the great original producer of a style that was to sweep Europe, but his work, like clotted cream or condensed milk, was only capable of use after being diluted to the consump- tion point.

A large part of this "richness" of his designs can be traced to one simple psychological fact which showed itself in two different ways simultaneously, each of

140




them contributing to the thickening of his plot. He was an over-enthusiastic person, who knew no moderation, who never took a middle ground, and who, overemphasizing everything from his title pages to the linear structure of his plates, never knew when to stop. He was in short an all-over kind of individual. And this came out in the fact that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so did he, being very natural and exuberant, ab- hor any va- A cant space- -

wherever he sawonehehad :

to put some- thing into it, with the result that he filled his plates so full of mate- rial that they became like overgrown apple trees, full of fruit but very diffi- cult to climb, and quite use- less from a profitable point of view until well pruned.

In addition to this, his exuberancec created an- other diffi- BY ROB]

culty for the FROM THE WORKS A

unskilled he ROBERT AND JAMES, overstated his own too great complication. It was perhaps merely a question of rendering, but his overemphasis deterred those who were accustomed only to watered milk. If he had a flower and leaf design on a flat surface, let us say, instead of treating it in delicate line with little shading, so that it would appear in keeping with the object it decorated, he bit his etching vigorously,

ER

AN

AD

made every line strong, heavy, and black, and had the flowers and leaves cast shad- ows of such size and density, that so far from appearing like a flat or nearly flat design, they stood out boldly in the full round, away from the surface they were intended to be a part of. His combination of too much and too strong made it necessary that he should be diluted before using.

He rapidly found middle-

2 ; 1 ; ;; :00t0: :0 :: :0 Cmen to water

his product 'i +'1'~ , ^^ so that the

'?c ~A ^craftsmen and

j|[ ' could use it;

in England Robert and

'S4 -f , wJames Adam, Pergolesi, Richardson,

r: .'"' .....* ' Sheraton, and -1 ', Hepplewhite,

Z||r^| S. :, M , the two latter :

j i of whom took SIS; j?i / * 0f;X?much of Pi-

ranesi at second and

served this ! ARCHITEfunction of the

middleman for the classic revival. Com-

:L t :,~; pare, for in-

colored, hot emphasis of the Piranesi plates with the still rich but much simpler and quite cold Adam engravings for the Adam plates without exception were made from buildings and objects which had actually been constructed, and were not pure exer- cises of decorative imagination, as were those of the great Italian.

Then with the Adam ceiling, for instance,

141

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which is shown in one of the prints in the exhibition, compare the still greater simpli- fication, the complete absence of shading and relief in the Pergolesi patterns for ceil- ings displayed in one of the floor cases in the same room. And finally, shown in the same case as the Pergolesis, is a plate of a ceiling by the Englishman Richardson, as it happens, tinted with water color, but not- withstanding that fact, still simpler and less robust, and certainly with less emphasis. Richardson was what the builders and plasterers actually used-it was so thin that they could digest and understand it as compared with the other richer things; in their time they undoubtedly referred to them as nice, workmanlike drawings.

This process of dilution, which always follows the copying of a copyist, is bound to continue so long as the designer, who makes the actual pattern used by the workman, goes to secondary and tertiary sources for his inspiration, and it should be remembered that the "actual objects themselves" to which so many contemporary designers confine themselves in their study of the design of past epochs, certainly in so far as made during the last

two hundred years, are never better than secondary, and rarely better than tertiary sources. It is doubtless much easier to look at old furniture, or to look at photo- graphs of it-which are one step further removed from the source-than to go back to the designs of the great creators, or to the middlemen who come nearest to them, for most of the hard thinking necessary to transform the master's more or less "abstract" design into terms of wood, metal, or plaster, is thus done for one, but in the long run might it not be better worth while to return as closely as possible to the prim- ary sources and in the light of one's own ability and the particular problem in hand work out the solution anew? Certainly it would seem to promise greater scope for originality, and even better results so far as practice goes.

The Exhibition of Ornament now on view contains a number of examples showing this degradation due to thinking with other people's predigested thought, and it also contains a great deal of the unadul- terated pure gold of ornament. Especially it points the way to the location and utilization of the real thing.

W. M. I., JR.

BY ROBERT ADAM

FROM THE WORKS AND ARCHITECTURE OF ROBERT AND

JAMES ADAM, LONDON, I773-9

142



a further note on the exhibition of ornament

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