Decorative Arts

The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes most of the arts making objects for the interiors of buildings, and interior design, but not usually architecture. Ceramic art, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, fashion, various forms of the textile arts and glassware are major groupings.

Decorative Arts

Applied arts largely overlaps with decorative arts, and the modern making of applied art is usually called design. The decorative arts are often categorized in distinction to the "fine arts", namely painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale sculpture, which generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate the intellect.

The distinction between the decorative and fine arts essentially arose from the post-Renaissance art of the West, where the distinction is for the most part meaningful. This distinction is much less meaningful when considering the art of other cultures and periods, where the most valued works, or even all works, include those in decorative media. For example, Islamic art in many periods and places consists entirely of the decorative arts, often using geometric and plant forms, as does the art of many traditional cultures.

The distinction between decorative and fine arts is not very useful for appreciating Chinese art, and neither is it for understanding early Medieval art in Europe. In that period in Europe, fine arts such as manuscript illumination and monumental sculpture existed, but the most prestigious works tended to be in goldsmith work, in cast metals such as bronze, or in other techniques such as ivory carving. Large-scale wall-paintings were much less regarded, crudely executed, and rarely mentioned in contemporary sources. They were probably seen as an inferior substitute for mosaic, which for the period must be considered a fine art, though in recent centuries mosaics have tended to be considered decorative. A similar fate has befallen tapestry, which late medieval and Renaissance royalty regarded as the most magnificent artform, and was certainly the most expensive. The term "ars sacra" ("sacred arts") is sometimes used for medieval Christian art executed in metal, ivory, textiles, and other more valuable materials but not for rarer secular works from that period.

The view of decoration as a 'lesser art' was formally challenged in the 1970s by writers and art historians like Amy Goldin[1] and Anne Swartz.[2] The argument for a singular narrative in art had lost traction by the close of the 20th century through post-modernist irony and increasing curatorial interest in street art and in ethnic decorative traditions. The Pattern and Decoration movement in New York galleries in the 1980s, though short-lived, opened the way to a more inclusive evaluation of the value of art objects.[3]

Modern understanding of the art of many cultures tends to be distorted by the modern privileging of fine visual arts media over others, as well as the very different survival rates of works in different media. Works in metal, above all in precious metals, are liable to be "recycled" as soon as they fall from fashion, and were often used by owners as repositories of wealth, to be melted down when extra money was needed. Illuminated manuscripts have a much higher survival rate, especially in the hands of the church, as there was little value in the materials and they were easy to store.

The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance, that placed little value on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity. Most European art during the Middle Ages had been produced under a very different set of values, where both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued. In China both approaches had co-existed for many centuries: ink wash painting, mostly of landscapes, was to a large extent produced by and for the scholar-bureaucrats or "literati", and was intended as an expression of the artist's imagination above all, while other major fields of art, including the very important Chinese ceramics produced in effectively industrial conditions, were produced according to a completely different set of artistic values.

The lower status given to works of decorative art in contrast to fine art narrowed with the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement. This aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was born in England and inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris. The movement represented the beginning of a greater appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. The appeal of the Arts and Crafts movement to a new generation led the English architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo to organize the Century Guild for craftsmen in 1882, championing the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement.[4]

The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement led to the decorative arts being given a greater appreciation and status in society and this was soon reflected by changes in the law. Until the enactment of the Copyright Act 1911 only works of fine art had been protected from unauthorised copying. The 1911 Act extended the definition of an "artistic work" to include works of "artistic craftsmanship".[5][6]

One way to achieve a customized look and feel to common objects is to change their external appearance by applying decorative techniques, as in decoupage, art cars, truck art in South Asia and IKEA hacking.

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

The Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts has evolved significantly since it was established in 1907, during the Museum presidency of J. Pierpont Morgan, as a repository of decorative art undifferentiated as to time or geography. The department's present scope was established in 1935, and in 1978 it assumed its current title.

Among the department's best-known masterpieces in marble are Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Bacchanal and Houdon's portrait of his infant daughter, Sabine. From the nineteenth century there is an extensive collection of sculptures by Rodin and Degas. Displays of furniture and smaller objects provide a lavish and comprehensive survey of styles in the decorative arts, documenting the achievements of master craftsmen across Europe in this era.

Major areas of the collection include Italian and French sculpture in marble, bronze, and terracotta; French and English furniture and silver; Italian bronzes, goldsmithwork, maiolica, and glass; French and German porcelain; and a comprehensive collection of European textiles, including Flemish and French tapestries. Architectural settings and period rooms range from a sixteenth-century patio from the castle of Vélez Blanco, Spain; to the Wrightsman Galleries, which display splendid examples of French furniture and several salons from grand eighteenth-century French houses; to the early Renaissance studiolo, or small, private study, from the palace of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, in Gubbio, Italy. Also on view are eighteenth-century decorative arts objects of Central Europe, as well as examples of English furniture and decorative arts and period rooms dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Large Italian and French sculptures originally intended for the outdoors and dating from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century are on view, and a series of galleries offers visitors an overview of the progression of artistic styles from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. Tapestries, decorative arts, and furniture from various countries are presented in telling juxtapositions, starting with the flourishing of the late Baroque style around 1700 and finishing with the spreading of the arts of the French Empire about 1800.

Nineteenth-century sculpture and decorative arts, regardless of country of origin, are displayed together. Spanning the period from the Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1815 to the flowering of Art Nouveau at the turn of the century, many of these works were acquired in an effort to enlarge the spectrum of the department's holdings and illustrate the multiplicity of styles that characterized nineteenth-century Europe.

The Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture collects and creates electronic resources for study and research of the decorative arts, with a particular focus on Early America. Included are electronic texts and journals, image databases, and information on organizations, museums and research facilities. Made possible by the Chipstone Foundation, the site was created and is maintained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.

VMFA houses one of the most significant public collections of decorative arts in the French Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, spanning the years 1895 through 1935. Highlights include lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany, American and British Arts and Crafts objects by major architects and designers, and a distinguished group of Art Deco objects made in Paris. 041b061a72