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Pattern and Decoration: preference for purity still linger. The colonnade (1979; pp.142–43) drew upon 28. Geometry Ornament as Promise show’s subtitle and its seventy-three Egyptian architecture (its palm trees in flowers, by Miriam Schapiro. Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig artworks cock a clever snook at this and crispness share an aesthetic with 1978. Acrylic on Foundation (MUMOK), Vienna aesthetic puritanism. In such a scheme, David Hockney’s Los Angeles work), canvas, textile while in 1974 Robert Kushner went to applications, 23rd February–8th September Loos’s eschatological warning becomes collage, 180.4 the teleological ‘promise’ of a brighter, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Viewed by 364.3 cm. by david anfam less proscriptive future. More, so to from a contemporary geopolitical (Ludwig Forum für Internationale speak, should be more. standpoint and given the Jewish Kunst Aachen; Most histories of post-war art No single style distinguished ethnicity of several P&D members, exh. MUMOK, overlook the Pattern and Decoration P&D. Rather, pluralism and their outlooks appear laudably open- Vienna). movement,1 usually abbreviated to unpredictability reigned.2 On one minded. Yet not everyone then or soon ‘P&D’, which was championed by the hand, the viewer encounters small, thereafter was in favour. flamboyant New York gallerist Holly almost twee pieces such as Valerie Foremost among the naysayers Solomon in the 1970s. MUMOK’s Jaudon’s pastels, with their delicate was Hal Foster. In a 1982 article titled current survey makes an excellent and arcing tracery, and Brad Davis’s perky ‘The problem of pluralism’ Foster took timely case for P&D’s rehabilitation. little dogs. On the other hand, Joyce a Greenbergian slant, criticising 1970s The impressive selection of works, Kozloff’s wallpapers and tiles cover art as ‘promiscuous’. This censorious all lent by the museum’s benefactors, big vertical and horizontal expanses, response strikes at the heart of the prolific collectors Peter and emulating architectural surfaces P&D’s aims. It was inclusive, impure, Irene Ludwig, fills two large gallery (pp.102–03). The show’s shrewd design subversive and counter-cultural. In this levels. Within the dour, minimalist echoes this quality with freestanding sense, its short-lived sensibility – the museum designed by Ortner & enclosures punctured by Islamic-type movement per se lasted only a decade Ortner, it makes a spectacular display window openings (Fig.29). Indeed, (1975–85) although a majority of its of colour, countless configurations allusions to Islam recur throughout members are still active – represented and excess. Such a juxtaposition is P&D. The catalogue reprints three a riposte to Minimalist orthodoxy. apt since Minimalism – understood key historic texts – respectively Despite Clement Greenberg’s quirky as a specific American phenomenon by the critic Amy Goldin, Jaudon aversion to Minimalism, paradoxically from the 1960s onwards – bears upon and Kozloff and the curator Harald some of his views overlapped with P&D’s rationale, as does the Viennese Szeemann.3 In the first, Goldin its tenets. This reciprocity included setting of the current show. In 1908 associates pattern with Islamic artisans a penchant for formal rigour, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos whose intentional ‘mistakes’ signified reductiveness, planarity, machismo published his polemic Ornament and a religious renunciation of perfection, and more. As the P&D exponent Crime; over a century later, the ghosts believed to belong ‘only to God’ (p.42). Kim MacConnel recalled in 1997: of this perennial chromophobia and Indeed, Ned Smyth’s Philadelphia ‘To me, carrying a message or content

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through a decorative vehicle was To order it opposed unruliness; to fabrics familiar from Zakanitch’s 29. Installation absolutely antithetical to the notion the spartan grid it added capricious grandparents’ New Jersey home) with view of Pattern and Decoration of Minimalism [. . .] I was using a flourishes; the stern industrial ethos some strange new mythology, perhaps at MUMOK, decorative vehicle while trying to carry underlying Minimalism, Earthworks akin to Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Vienna, 23rd content through the imagery – which February–8th and the like segued to artisanal traits Roses of Heliogabalus (1888; private September I view as being non-decorative. And or appropriation (tiles, weaving, collection). Elsewhere, Schapiro 2019, showing therein lies the irony’ (p.17). Irony had neo-Chinoiserie); Kozloff and Miriam transforms Frank Stella’s Protractor An Interior Decorated, by no place in the high modernist temple. Schapiro countered machismo with a series into a shimmering, gauzy fan Joyce Kozloff. Greenberg began his critical commitment to feminism; and Thomas (pp.136–37; Fig.28). An especially campaign as early as 1939, when he Lanigan-Schmidt helped pioneer gay fascinating discovery are the intricate argued for a lofty separation between rights. Artificiality, glittering and fields by the relatively little-known the notions of avant-garde and kitsch: brash, answered such mantras as ‘truth Frank Faulkner (Fig.30). Seemingly ‘folk art is not Athene, and it’s Athene to materials’ and flatness. woven, cartographic and rendered whom we want’.4 Some thirty years Susan Sontag’s disquisition in subtle browns with an aged aura, later P&D countered the critic by on ‘Camp’ (1964) is pertinent: these images defy categorisation (and incorporating references not just to ‘Indeed, the essence of Camp is its also evince an uncanny resemblance folk art, but also Indian miniatures, love of the unnatural: of artifice to certain compositions by Ellen early Christian icons, diverse textiles, and exaggeration’.5 Nothing better Gallagher). Throughout, MUMOK’s floral designs, Art Deco and much else describes Kushner’s gaudy, drag display emphasises the sheer richness both ‘high’ and ‘low’. Thus these artists queen-like Rivals (1978; p.111), nor of P&D’s esprit de corps, an imaginative undercut Modernism’s plainsong, as it Robert Zakanitch’s monumental and material generosity that starts to were, with a dodecaphony of expressive pale pink field of rose blossoms, Tea make Minimalism’s bricks-and-steel voices. In a sense P&D resembled party (1979; pp.150–51). Replacing slabs feel a bit sterile. the freewheeling, flower-power spirit the promised relaxation of Matisse’s With a comparable scope, the of the sixties redivivus, launched metaphoric armchair, this postmodern catalogue is set to be a standard text anew into the conflicted seventies. fantasia mixes memory (the floral on the subject. Holger Otten traces

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30. Atlantis II, Matisse’s ideological fortunes in the After Modernism’s lingering demise, Cut and Paste: 400 Years by Frank Faulkner. United States with exhaustive (and P&D’s creative bag of tricks remains of Collage Acrylic on canvas, 182.5 by 183.5 cm. sometimes exhausting) scrutiny; more topical than ever, a veritable Scottish National Gallery of Modern (Austrian Ludwig five of the artists in the show offer magic carpet flying into the present. Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh Foundation; exh. valuable reminiscences in reply to a MUMOK, Vienna). 29th June–27th October questionnaire; among the historic 1 A notable exception is D. Wheeler: Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present, texts is Jaudon and Kozloff’s revelatory New York 1991. by susannah thompson ‘Art hysterical notions of progress 2 For the various sources of the P&D movement, its development and early and culture’ (1977–78), which art reception, see J. Sorkin: ‘Patterns and Eileen Agar, whose Surrealist work The historians could do well to revisit. If pictures: strategies of appropriation, 1975– lotus eater (1939; cat. no.101) is displayed 85, Burlington Contemporary 1 (2019), doi. the book has a fault, it is a hesitancy org./10.31452/bcj1.patterns.sorkin. alongside over 180 other collages as to further contextualise its theme by 3 Catalogue: Pattern and Decoration. Edited part of this exhibition, described by Manuela Ammer and Esther Boehle. 176 discussing other Post-Minimalists of pp. incl. 105 col. + b. & w. ills. (Ludwig Forum the medium as ‘a form of inspired otherwise disparate makeup, such für Internationale Kunst Aachen, Aachen, and correction, a displacement of the banal Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, with as Lynda Benglis, Larry Poons and Walther König, Cologne, 2019), £29. ISBN by the fertile imagination of chance or Charles Simonds, who have continued 978–3–902947–59–8. coincidence’.1 While Agar’s definition 4 C. Greenberg: The Collected Essays to create remarkable, innovative and Criticism, Volume I: Perceptions and seems apt for the majority of works work into the present. Crucially, the Judgments, 1939–1944, Chicago 1986, p.19. included in this expansive show, the 5 S. Sontag: A Susan Sontag Reader, New entire project offers a timely reminder York 1982, p.105. resounding success of the exhibition of a much larger issue. Namely, 6 At opposite ends of the interpretative – the first ever historical survey of the spectrum relating to decoration and how pattern and decoration – far pattern, see, for example, G. Hersey: The form – lies in its refusal to impose strict from being superficial, pejorative or Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, conditions on what does or does not Cambridge MA 1988; and E. Gombrich: The 2 frivolous – have deep, often strange Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology constitute collage. Works are included and always abiding existential roots.6 of Decorative Art, London 1984. that both enhance and complicate the viewer’s understanding of the history of the form, too often regarded as beginning with Picasso’s Still life with chair caning (1912; Musée Picasso, Paris). Numerous examples here contradict such established lineages, including a poignant memento to the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 (no.36), for which the anonymous artist used paper tickets from passengers alongside photographs of the driver, fireman and two guards, all of whom lost their lives in the disaster. A moving reminder of lives lost, the work also adds a fascinating footnote to long-held art-historical assertions that a 1919–20 collage by Kurt Schwitters was the first collage to have incorporated travel tickets as a material. Elsewhere, New Zealand ferns (1895; no.35), one of twenty-eight pages of a hortus siccus by the Northumberland-born emigré Mary Frances Hindmarsh, is pioneering in its use of material: long before Juan Gris’s mirror in The washstand (1912; private collection), Hindmarsh used a mirror to represent water in a landscape composed of fern fronds. As an illuminating catalogue essay by Freya Gowrley notes, examples of collage that predate Picasso and Braque are often ‘dismissed as faintly related curios of a resolutely un-modern age’, thus reinforcing ‘entrenched hierarchies within art history: differences between “high” and “low” art forms; divisions

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