Loretta Vandi - Ornament and European Modernism

This volume began to germinate in the snowy February of 2010, when, with a travel subvention from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, I organized and chaired a session, Ornament: Theoretical Perspectives, at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, at which I brought together five scholars, four from America and one from France. Three of them agreed to take part in the project of the essay collection, revising and greatly expanding the original versions as delivered to the conference. In addition, two scholars who had not participated in the conference but were invited to contribute to the volume answered with enthusiasm, offering with their essays original interpretations of the main topics of the book.

My principal debt as editor of this collection is owed to Christiane Hertel. As a result of her encouragement, patience, and endurance, the papers have now been turned into a book. I should also like to express my appreciation to all those who have contributed to this collection. They have provided me with many valuable suggestions about coverage, and they met their own deadlines with cheerfulness and complete absence of fuss. I also offer my thanks to Routledges anonymous readers for their detailed critiques of the book. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Isabella Vitti, Editor, Art History & Visual Studies, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, her assistant, Julia Michaelis, and Rebecca Dunn, Project Manager, codeMantra. They offered me a great deal of indispensable support and advice throughout the production of the essay volume.

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.

Loretta Vandi (PhD, Universit de Lausanne, 1998) is professor of art history at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino. She has held four Samuel H. Kress fellowships. Her publications include La trasformazione del motivo dellacanto dallantichit al XV secolo (2002), Il Manoscritto Oliveriano 1 (2004), and Four Essays (2007).

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the field of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research.

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Marilyn R. Brown

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Wendy N.E. Ikemoto

Expanding Nationalisms at Worlds Fairs
Identity, Diversity and Exchange, 18511915
Edited by David Raizman and Ethan Robey

William Hunter and his Eighteenth-Century Cultural Worlds
The Anatomist and the Fine Arts
Helen McCormack

The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art
Materials, Power and Manipulation
Edited by Grayna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz, Zuzanna Sarnecka

From Art Practice to Art History

Edited by Loretta Vandi

First published 2018
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The right of Loretta Vandi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN: 978-1-138-74340-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-16256-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

Ole W. Fischer (PhD, ETH Zurich, 2008) is an architect, theoretician, historian, and curator. Currently he serves as assistant professor for history and theory of architecture at the University of Utah. Previously he conducted research and taught at ETH Zurich, Harvard GSD, MIT, RISD, and TU Wien. He lectured and published internationally on contemporary questions of the history, theory, and criticism of architecture, amongst others in Archithese, Werk, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, MIT Thresholds, Archplus, AnArchitektur, Graz Architecture Magazine, Umeni/Art, Beyond, West 86th, Framework, and log. He contributed chapters to various books, such as The Humanities in Architectural Design (London, 2010) and The Handbook of Architectural Theory (London, 2012) and The Other Architect (Montral, 2015). He co-edited Precisions: Architecture between Sciences and the Arts (Berlin, 2008), the catalog Sehnsucht. The Book of Architectural Longings (Vienna, 2010), and the refereed critical architectural journal Dialectic (since 2012). He is the author of Nietzsches Schatten (Berlin, 2012).

Isabelle J. Frank (PhD, Harvard University, 1991) is visiting fellow at City University of Hong Kong. An art historian by training, she received her doctorate from Harvard University and her BA from Princeton University. She taught at Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts before moving into academic administration, becoming associate dean for academic affairs at The New School, and then dean at Fordham University School of Professional and Continuing Studies. She has published The Theory of the Decorative Arts. A Critical Anthology of European and American Writings (17501950) (New Haven, 2000), and Die Rhetorik des Ornaments (Munich, 2001), as well as articles on Italian Renaissance art and decorative art.

Christiane Hertel (PhD, Art History and German Literature, Eberhard Karls-University, TbingenDivision of Empirical Cultural Studies, 1985) is research professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in the arts of Northern Europe, from the Reformation to the early twentieth century, mainly in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. Her interest in visual and literary traditions has led her to focus on research projects involving their interplay. Her current book project is