Debra Schafter’s book contributes to a small but growing literature committed to identifying intersections of, rather than differences between, ornament and modernism. The stakes of this endeavor should not be underestimated. One needs only to remember Adolf Loos’s proclamation that “the evolution of humanity would cause ornament to disappear from functional objects,” in his polemic from 1908, aptly titled “Ornament and Crime,” to grasp the significance of this turnaround in aesthetic categorization and judgment. Hal Foster, who plays on Loos’s title for his own recent book, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), summarizes the traditional understanding of Loos’s position: “This anti-decorative dictate is a modernist mantra if ever there was one…” (14). Given the hallowed status of this position, then, Schafter’s study could be revolutionary, for she suggests that ornament was not, after all, the anathema of modernism, but, rather, its structural and theoretical basis. She even reclaims Loos for her argument. If Schafter is right, and the evidence is mounting that she is, then the modernist mantra was wrong. But how so? Have historians mixed things up? Did modernists not really say, believe, or practice it? Or did they do all those things but not understand that ornament was, contrary to their expectations, at the foundation of modernism? Schafter’s answer is not as definitive as it could be, but she reviews towers of documentation that will enable those interested in the problem to consider it for themselves.

In chapter 1, the introduction, Schafter clearly outlines her approach. Citing another tenet of modernism, she writes, “Contrary to the concept that modern art and design developed from an ahistorical search for purer form and more personal modes of expression, this study proposes that it was precisely within a more discriminating tradition and a keener observation of style (eventually, from lesser-known cultures) that theorists devised new concepts regarding how art functions and obtains meaning” (1–2). She identifies “archaism,” which includes primitivism, “as one of the key factors that contributed to the advent of modern expression…. More important, [this project] also recognizes that archaisms took a very specific form—that of ornament—in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art…. In the ornamental compositions associated with ancient art and vernacular objects, central European architects and artists discovered rational designs for articulating form and structure, residual evidence of artistic and architectural development, and visually complex patterns that suggested new perceptual possibilities for both the constructed façade and the painted surface” (2). Simply put, modern form and expression, purportedly “ahistorical” and “pure,” were conceptualized through analysis of historical and situated ornament.

In the following chapters, Schafter reveals the complexity of the series with which she completed her last sentence quoted above. This series provides three of the four approaches to ornament that the author explores, namely, structure, function, and perceptual response and possibility. (The fourth approach—actually the first in her presentation—is reflection.) Very neatly, Schafter matches leading theorists of ornament with these approaches and with semiotic descriptors, thus: 1) John Ruskin, reflection, emblem; 2) Owen Jones, structure, sign; 3) Gottfried Semper, function, symbol; and 4) Alois Riegl, perceptual possibility, signifier. Chapter 1 introduces these triads; chapter 2 analyzes the second term of each in relation to a theoretical model; chapter 3 assesses the third term of each triad in terms of contemporary linguistics to determine the meaning(s) that ornament was thought to convey. Schafter surmises that Ruskin, for example, drew from a model of reflection whereby “architecture, like the material world, was to operate as an emblematic structure denoting a higher spiritual ground” (20). Ornament was defined very broadly for him; it could be representational or abstract (as long as it appeared organic, thereby mirroring life, God’s creation). For the other three theorists, abstract properties of ornament were more prominent. Schafter provides an occasional direct, and helpful, comparison between them, as in the following: “Identical characteristics, such as flat planes of color and repeated or symmetrically composed ornamental elements with clearly defined outlines, signified for all three [Jones, Semper, Riegl] the flatness and solidity of the plane. For Jones, these elements denoted the two-dimensional plane because they reproduced the surface structure of natural plant forms; for Semper, they symbolized the surface plane because they made reference to technical ideas associated with the primitive textile enclosure [i.e., original function]. But for Riegl they indicated the flatness of the plane, as they characterized the ‘uninterrupted tactile coherence’ of the surface…. Riegl removed the concept of structural symbolism from the exclusive domain of materials and objects and attached it to the perception of the beholder” (58).

The structure of Schafter’s book can be unwieldy, as the reader must return to each theorist and/or theory in each chapter, but the repetition strengthens the argument as a whole, much like an intricate pattern with repeats. Readers of Michel Foucault may also recognize the modes of thought as paralleling those he identified in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). Schafter acknowledges this debt but differentiates her models from his by pointing out his historical agenda: “Foucault defined parallel strategies by which humankind ordered information…at four stages in history, beginning in the Middle Ages and extending into the modern era” (5). It is intriguing to consider that modes of thought from previous eras were available simultaneously in the nineteenth century (are they today as well?), but Schafter does not inquire as to why or how Ruskin, for example, could choose a medieval way of thinking in the 1840s. Schafter does, however, make the important point that “the construction of theoretical accounts as much as their content figured prominently in the development of modern ideas and modes of perception that emerged in central Europe” (6, her emphasis). Somewhat surprisingly, however, having noted that the choice and elaboration of a theoretical model produce certain results, Schafter does not reflect—other than to call her approach “structuralist,” which begs the question—on how her method affects her material.

Chapter 4 rehearses the four theoretical and semiotic possibilities again, this time from the perspective not of the theories but, rather, of artworks and buildings that lend themselves, quite convincingly, to description and analysis within these modes. This may be the most satisfying chapter, as one finally sees how theories of ornament developed by Ruskin, Jones, Semper, and Riegl suggested new artistic forms, often in unexpected ways. Schafter restricts her geography to central Europe, but she does follow the Austrian Josef Hoffmann to Brussels to examine the Palais Stoclet (1905–11), which appears here as a Gesamtkunstwerk of all of ornament’s signifying possibilities. Another rich example is Otto Wagner’s so-called Majolikahaus in Vienna (1898–99), a building that Schafter finds particularly Semperian, and her reading is illuminating not only for appreciating this monument but also for helping the reader to understand modernism more broadly. In short, Semper wanted ornament to be a symbol of (original) function. Schafter writes: “The majolica surface complies with Semper’s recognition that the Egyptians transformed the primitive textile enclosure into glazed terra-cotta, alabaster claddings, and polished and incised granite facings” (118). That is the work’s “archaism.” In addition: “In order for the ‘enclosure’ symbol…to perform effectively, it must convey the concept of planarity. In Wagner’s apartment building, the idea of the flat plane is connoted by way of organic elements that assume conventional form and comply with precise laws of arrangement (symmetry, proportion, balance, and repetition)” (118).

The Semperian reading may be surprising, because one hardly expects that flowing vines decorating a façade could be construed as essential to the building’s function, but one recognizes here that this expectation follows from the old, Loosian principle that ornament is superfluous. We know now that an older interpretation of ornament—Semper’s—considered ornament to be essential for communicating function: the wall is a flat, enclosing device, so it must be shown to be flat, as the conventionalized, flat, rhythmic tendrils of the Majolikahaus do. Both Loos and Semper insisted on honesty and truth; the difference lies in how that truth was to be conveyed. Semper, and other nineteenth-century theorists, believed that ornament is a language that signifies honestly and purely. Loos is traditionally understood to have believed that art and architecture should simply be; they do not need to tell us what they are. Historians have believed that the purist modernist mantra follows from Loos’s view alone. Schafter returns to Loos, among others, in her concluding chapter 5; here she shares her greatest insight: “Loos’s position was obviously more wishful than factual. What he was in fact sensing…was that the spatial and structural plans of architecture and works of applied art had gradually begun to absorb the principles worked out in ornamental theory and practice” (186). Her reading of his competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Building of 1922 is most incisive. Loos’s eleven-story tower was itself to take the shape of a giant Doric column. The building itself “became pure symbol referring back to the roots of classical architecture” (189). In sum, “[m]aterials used naturally, truthfully, and void of decorative embellishment [i.e., following the modernist mantra] simply fulfilled the role previously played by ornament in new ways” (189).

Ornament structured modernism. This is such a revolutionary idea that Schafter herself shies away from it at times. She makes claims only for central European art, though her brief analysis of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (71–72), for example, suggests French strands for other authors to follow, and her claim that art nouveau and Jugendstil were less ordered than Viennese production is debatable (117, 121). Lamentably, some sentences such as the following appear: “Although in apparent conflict with the central precepts of ‘high modernism’ that privileged material, technical, and expressive honesty, the contributions of fin-de-siècle art and architecture in central Europe are perhaps better appreciated from our own postmodern perspective” (180). Making the more cautious claim that perhaps only we postmoderns can appreciate these works, Schafter seems to rejoin the old-time Loosians who read ornament as very much in conflict with modernism. But in this book, indeed, in that very sentence, the reader discovers that this was only an “apparent conflict.” Hopefully this book will encourage others to investigate the historical effects of the incessantly repeated mantra whose hallowed status Schafter, with exhaustive research and guarded daring, questions here.