Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
But what function, or functions, belong to the mural? One is what Greenberg
identified as the danger run by abstraction: decoration of a surface, that is, a
function subordinate to the structural and visual work performed by a wall (or
ceiling). 15 This was certainly not a function Pollock wished to fulfill: although he
was interested in working with architects, he said to his friend, the architect
Peter Blake, “You architects think of my work as being a kind of wallpaper,
potentially decorative.” 16 What Pollock had in mind was more along the lines of
Mies van der Rohe’s idea of “an ideal museum in which the paintings would be
large walls, free-standing, and with sculpture” 17 —a vision anticipated in part,
perhaps, by Mural. With painting-walls made to measure, such a museum would
be not a repository of the art of the past—even of the modernist past, as in the
Museum of Modern Art—but a demonstration of the significance of the contemporary
avant-garde.
Decoration
Modernist painters and architects had long shared the condemnation of decoration.
In the 1912 text Du “Cubisme,” in which Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger
explained Cubism as a style, they insist that decoration is “the antithesis of the
picture,” as it is “essentially dependent, necessarily incomplete” while the easel
painting “bears its pretext, the reason for its existence, within it.” Portable from
context to context, it is, as a meaningful object, autonomous in relation to all of
them. “It does not harmonize with this or that environment; it harmonizes with
things in general, with the universe.” 18 The supposedly neutral white cube of the
gallery space or the modern house is therefore its ideal home: the undecorated
building is the counterpart of the autonomous art object on display within it.
Twelve years after Adolf Loos’s 1908 denunciation of architectural ornament
as “crime,” Le Corbusier and Ozenfant criticized Mondrian’s abstractions,
15 Curiously enough, it was as decorations that Burgoyne Diller, director of the mural division of
the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Artists Project in New York between 1935 and
1941, was able to procure abstract mural commissions in a number of public buildings. As he
later explained, “they didn’t have to be called art—abstract or anything. So the name was a
dangerous thing. I found in other places that we introduced abstract work just simply by calling
it . . . ‘the decoration’” (quoted in Barbara Haskell, Burgoyne Diller (New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 1990), p. 64).
16 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 94.
17 Ibid., p. 104.
18 Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1968), pp. 201–10. David Cottington notes the “apparent contradiction
between what those artists said in their manifesto and their loan of paintings to the Maison
Cubiste’s salon bourgeois,” exhibited in Paris in 1912—an indicator of the complexity of the story
of decoration and modernism (“The Maison Cubiste and the meaning of modernism in pre-
1914 France,” in Eve Blau and Nancy Troy (eds), Architecture and Cubism (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997), p. 28).
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