Ornament: A Modern Perspective

By James Trilling

Ornament - "the art we add to art," as James Trilling defines it - makes people happy; it stands for everything that makes life worth living. But ornament was effectively banned from our world almost a century ago, with modernism's doctrine that ornament was a betrayal of the beauty of function. Devotion to modernism stripped away our historical awareness of ornament and broke the tradition of craft that once kept ornament alive. Now that modernism is itself receding into history, ornament is again acceptable, but moving forward seems to mean reinventing the wheel. "Not since the artists and connoisseurs of fifteenth-century Italy set out to rediscover classical antiquity has a culture been so completely on its own in relation to the past," Trilling writes. This engaging, generously illustrated book - part visual guide, part cultural history - is a wide-ranging consideration of the cultural and symbolic significance of ornament, its rejection by modernism, and its subsequent reinvention. Trilling explains how ornament works, why it has to be explained, and why it matters. His discussion of ornament -- in textiles, ceramics, metalwork, architecture, manuscripts and books -- is enhanced by insights drawn from religion, science, ancient and modern literature, political history, and moral philosophy. The result is a resoundingly original, highly readable contribution to art history and, more broadly, to cultural and social history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0295981482
• ISBN13: 9780295981482
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.1" x 10.5"

Customer Reviews

Ornament: oh yeah.

Modernism never managed to kill off ornament completely, but it did cause massive trauma to the historical vocabularies of architecture. Trilling, like many, likes historical ornament, and has written this here book to talk about why ornament has for the most part gone the way of the dodo. I read the intro, skimmed the first half, and read the second half. He focuses on analyzing the various theories and writers, along with exploring some of the pyschological reasons modernism jettisoned ornament. All in all, I found it interesting and pretty good, but thats probably because I am interested in this very specific topic. This book is probably for architectural historians and students only, though anyone interested in the history of design might find it interesting.