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3 books match the query 'Decoration and ornament'
Design in the Age of Darwin
From William Morris to Frank Lloyd WrightStephen F Eisenman
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Charles Darwin’s monumental The Origin of Species, published in 1859, forever changed the landscape of natural science. The scientific world of the time had already established the principle of the “intelligent design” of a Creator; the art world had spent centuries devoting itself to the celebration of such a Designer’s creation. But the language of the book, and its implications, were stunning, and the ripples Darwin made when he rocked the boat spread outward: if he could question the Designer, what effect might there be on the art world, and on mortal designers’ renderings of Creation.
Published in partnership with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art to accompany its exhibit, this catalog of essays and more than fifty color exhibition plates invokes these two senses of “intelligent design”—one from the debates between science and theology and the other from the world of art, particularly architecture and the decorative arts. The extensive exhibition includes furniture, metalware, glassware, textiles, and designs on loan from public and private collections in the United States and England. Among the artwork included are items from William Morris, C. R. Ashbee, Christopher Dresser, C. F. A. Voysey, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan. Through these pieces and the accompanying examinations, the book explores how popular conceptions of the theory of evolution were used or rejected by British and American artists in the years that followed Darwin’s publication.
East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Isabelle Tillerot
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art.
This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.
Inside Abstraction
Interpreting Inka Visual CultureCarolyn Dean
University of Texas Press, 2025
2026 PROSE Award for Art History And Criticism, Association of American Publishers
Illuminating the abstract art of the Inka, what it conveys about Inka values, and its relationship to those who view it.
Inka visual culture is unusual in its tendency toward abstraction. Public stonework, vessels used at state feasts, garments worn by the imperial elite—these objects announcing status and power are adorned with geometric designs that refuse figuration. After searching in vain for hidden referents, many scholars have largely given up the search for meaning.
Inside Abstraction develops a novel interpretation. Eminent art historian Carolyn Dean proposes that Inka geometries are neither ornamental nor coded depictions of other objects. Rather, Dean shows that in the Andean world, the designs were functionally self-aware, possessing perspectives of their own, quite literally looking back at and addressing viewers directly. Further, Dean contends that these agent-abstractions were teachers, conveying particular messages concerning social hierarchy: the relations among geometries and colors instructed viewers as to their own proper social relations. Inka designs thereby served imperial aims by wordlessly communicating the state’s values and demands for submission. Extensively illustrated and rigorously argued, Inside Abstraction is a dramatic step forward in our understanding of Inka art and political order.