In the womb the human embryo passes through a whole course of development that corresponds to the development of the animal kingdom. And when a human being is born, their sensory impressions1 are like those of a newborn puppy. Their childhood passes through all the transformations that correspond to the history of humankind. At two they see like the natives of Papua2, at four like members of the Germanic tribes3, at six like Socrates, at eight like Voltaire. At eight they become aware of violet, the colour the eighteenth century discovered. Because before that the violet was blue, and the purple, snail red4; even today physicists point to colours in the spectrum of sunlight that already have names, but only the people of the future will know them... .
The child is amoral. In our eyes so is the Papuan native. The Papuan native kills their enemies and devours them. They are not a criminal. But if a modern person kills someone and devours them, they are a criminal and degenerate. The Papuan native tattoos their skin, their boat, its rudder, in short whatever is at hand. There are prisons in which 80 per cent of the prisoners are tattooed. Those who are tattooed and are not in prison are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats.
The urge to ornament the face and whatever is at hand is the very origin of the visual arts. It is the babbling of painting. All art, of course, is erotic5.
The person of our time who, following their innermost urges, smears the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. What is natural in the Papuan native and the child is degenerate in the modern person. I have made this discovery and shared it with the world: the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from the object of use. I believed that by saying this I would bring joy to the world, but the world has not thanked me much. People were saddened and hung their heads. What troubled them was the realization that they could no longer produce new ornaments. What every Black person could do, and what all peoples and ages before us had been able to accomplish, we, the people of the nineteenth century, alone are incapable of? The things humankind made without ornament in earlier millennia were rejected with indifference and consigned to oblivion. We have no workbench from that time, but every piece of junk that displays even the smallest ornament was collected and cleaned up, and magnificent palaces were built to house it.
And we walked sadly from one showcase to another, ashamed of our impotence. Every age has had its style, and only our age is to be denied one. And by style they meant ornament. And I answered: do not weep. Behold, this is what makes the greatness of our age, that it cannot produce a new ornament. We have overcome ornament, we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. Behold, the time is at hand. Fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will shine like white walls! Like the kingdom of God6, the holy city, the capital of heaven! Then fulfilment will have come.
But there are black elves7 who will have none of this. Humankind goes on wheezing8 in the slavery of ornament. People had come so far that ornament no longer aroused any feeling in them, so far that a tattooed face did not heighten aesthetic feeling, as it does for the Papuan native, but lowered it. So far that they could take pleasure in a plain cigarette case, but refused to buy an ornamented case at the same price. They felt happy in their clothes, and were glad that they did not have to go about in velvet trousers with gold braid like a fairground monkey. And I said: behold, Goethe’s death chamber is more magnificent than any Renaissance splendour, and a plain piece of furniture more beautiful than any carved and inlaid museum piece. Goethe’s language is more beautiful than all the ornaments of the Nuremberg Baroque poets.
The black elves heard all this with distaste, and the state, whose task it is to halt the development of its people, took up the question of the development and acceptance of ornament and made it its own. Woe to the state whose revolution is led by the legal advisers of the courts; in a short time a sideboard was seen in the Museum of Art and Craft named “The Rich Catch of Fish”9, and shortly afterwards a cupboard called “The Enchanted Princess”, and other similar names referring to the ornament with which this wretched furniture had been covered. The Austrian state understood its task in the same way: to make sure that footwraps10 did not vanish from the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It forces every cultured twenty-year-old to march for three years in footwraps instead of machine-made shoes. Because at bottom every state proceeds on the assumption that a wretched common people is easier to govern than a cultured one.
Well, the Austrian state has recognized the calamitous situation of ornament, and subsidizes it. But I consider this a step backwards. I cannot accept the objection that ornament increases the cultured person’s joy in life. I cannot accept the objection hidden in these words: but what if the ornament is beautiful! Ornament does not increase my joy in life, nor that of any other cultured person. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choose a piece that is plain, and not a piece depicting a heart or a babe11 in swaddling12, or a knight covered in ornament from head to toe. A person from the fifteenth century would not understand me. But all modern people do. The advocate of ornament believes that my urge for simplicity amounts to self-mortification. No, my dear professor of the School of Arts and Crafts, I do not mortify myself. I think it tastes better that way.
The terrible damage and devastation that the revival of ornament causes to aesthetic development cannot simply be ignored. Because no one, not even the power of the state, can halt the evolution of humankind! It can only be delayed. We can wait. But, by economic standards, it is a crime that human labour, money and material are wasted. Time cannot repair this damage.
The pace of cultural development suffers from the stragglers. I may be living in 1912, but my neighbour is living around 1900, and that person over there in 1880. It is regrettable for a state if the culture of its people stretches over too long a span of time. The peasant of a Tyrolean13 village lives in the twelfth century. During the jubilee procession we discovered with horror that in Austria we still have tribes that belong to the fourth century. Happy the land that is no longer inhabited by these stragglers and marauders! Happy America! Here, even in the cities, we have people who are not modern, who are stragglers of the eighteenth century, who are horrified by paintings with violet shadows because they cannot yet see violet, who prefer a pleasant taste that the cook has worked on for days on end, and who like a cigarette case with Renaissance ornament better than a plain one. And what is the situation in the villages? Clothes and household goods all belong to earlier centuries. The peasant is not a Christian; they are still a pagan.
These stragglers slow down the cultural progress of nations and of humankind. By economic standards, when two people live side by side, with the same needs, the same demands on life and the same income, but with different cultures, we can witness this process: the person of the twentieth century grows richer and richer, and the person of the eighteenth century poorer and poorer. My view is that both live according to their inclinations. The person of the twentieth century can meet their needs with less capital, and can therefore save. The vegetables they like are simply boiled in water and then a little butter is added. The other person likes them only when honey and nuts are added and someone else has spent hours cooking them. Ornamented plates are more expensive, but the other person likes their food only on white earthenware. One saves, the other runs into debt. This holds for a whole nation as well. Woe to the nation that lags behind in cultural development. The English grow rich, and we poorer.
Even greater is the damage that ornament does to the producing nation. Because ornament is no longer a natural product of our culture, and thus represents neither backwardness nor a sign of decline, its maker is paid a low wage. The situation in the workshops of sculptors and wood turners, and the criminally low wages paid to weavers and lacemakers14, are clear to everyone. The maker of ornament must work twenty hours to reach the income of a modern manual worker who works only eight hours a day. As a rule, ornament makes objects more expensive, although sometimes by chance an ornamented object, with the same cost of materials, which has clearly taken three times the working time, is offered at half the price of a plain object. The absence of ornament leads to shorter working hours and an increase in price. The Chinese carver works sixteen hours, the American worker eight. If I pay as much for a plain vessel as for an ornamented one, the difference in working time belongs to the worker. And if there were no ornament at all – a situation that will come about in the next millennium – a person would need to work only four hours and not eight, because at present half the time is spent on ornament.
Ornament means wasted labour and wasted health. It has always been so. But today it also means wasted material, and the two together mean wasted capital.
Since ornament is no longer organically linked with our culture, ornament is no longer the expression of our culture. The ornament that is made today has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with humankind, nothing to do with the world order. It has no capacity to develop. What has become of the ornament of Otto Eckmann15 (1865-1902), German painter and designer, the floral16 school, Jugendstil17, what has become of the ornament of Van de Velde18 (1633-1707), Dutch painter of seascapes? The artist was the height of humanity and always full of power and health. But the modern ornamentalist is a straggler or a pathological phenomenon. They themselves disown their products after three years. Cultured people find them unbearable at once, and others become aware of their unbearableness only after a few years. Where are Eckmann’s works now? Where will the works of Olbrich19 (1867-1908), Austrian architect, end up within ten years? Modern ornament has no parents and no offspring, it has no past and no future. It is welcomed with joy by uncultured people, for whom the greatness of our age is a book with seven seals, and shortly after its appearance it is discredited.
Humankind is healthy; only a few are sick. But those few tyrannize the worker, a worker so healthy that they cannot invent ornament. They force them to make ornaments that they have invented, in a great variety of materials.
The change of ornament leads to a premature devaluation of the product of labour. The worker’s time and the material used are wasted capital. I have explained this as follows: let the form of an object last as long as possible, that is, remain bearable to us for as long as the object lasts. Let me try to explain it this way: a suit changes its form more often than a valuable fur. A lady’s ball gown, made for only one night, changes its form faster than a desk. But woe if we had to change the desk as quickly as a dress because the old forms had become unbearable; then a person would lose the money spent on the desk.
The ornamentalists know this well, and the Austrian ornamentalists try to make the best of this shortcoming. They say: “A customer who has a piece of furniture that they find unbearable after only ten years, and must therefore buy new furniture every ten years, is better than one who buys a new object only when the old one has become unusable through use. Industry needs it. Millions of people remain employed through the change.” This seems to be the secret of the Austrian economy; at the outbreak of a fire we often hear the words: “Thank God, people have work to do again.” Set fire to a house, set fire to an empire, and everything is awash in money and plenty. Make furniture that one can burn within three years, metal fittings that must be melted down after four years, because one cannot recover a tenth of the cost of labour and materials, and we grow richer and richer.
The resulting loss does not affect only the consumer; above all it affects the producer. Today ornament on things that, thanks to development, have escaped ornament means wasted human labour and violated material. If all objects lasted as long aesthetically as they do physically, the consumer would pay a price for them that would allow the worker to earn more money and work fewer hours. For an object I am sure I can use and exploit fully, I am willing to pay four times the price of another object I could have bought. I gladly pay forty crowns20 for my boots, although in another shop I was shown boots worth 10 crowns. But in those trades that have withered under the tyranny of the ornamentalists, good or bad work is not valued. Labour suffers because no one takes the trouble to pay its true value.
And there is no problem, because these ornamented things are apparently bearable only in the shabbiest execution. When I hear that only worthless junk is being burned, I get over a fire more easily. The presence of bric-a-brac in artists’ houses does not trouble me, because I know it is put up one day and thrown out the next. Throwing gold coins rather than pebbles, lighting a cigar with a banknote, dissolving and drinking pearls are at odds with the aesthetic.
Ornamented things truly appear at odds with the aesthetic when they are executed in the best materials and with the greatest care, and require long hours of work. We must accept responsibility for demanding quality work. The furniture of the Apollo candle factory warehouse in Vienna, made of softwood, brightly painted, and built fourteen years ago, does not seem as unbearable as the contemporary works of Professor Hoffmann. And how will Professor Hoffmann’s works look in another fourteen years? But that café which opened at the same time as the business will seem unbearable once the softwood work comes apart.
The modern person, who regards ornament entirely as a sign of the artistic excess of past times, at once recognizes the tortured, painfully exhausted and morbid side of modern ornament. Today a person who lives on our cultural level cannot possibly produce any ornament. This cannot be said of individuals and nations that have not yet reached our stage.
I preach to the aristocrat; I mean someone who is at the top of the hierarchy of humankind and yet has a deep understanding of the urgency and necessity of what has not yet come. The kaffir21 who, to a particular rhythm, works textile ornaments that become visible only when they are taken apart, the Persian who weaves a carpet, the Slovak peasant woman who makes lace, the old lady who makes remarkable things by unravelling strings of glass beads and silk – the aristocrat understands all of these well. The aristocrat lets them carry on; they know that these are their sacred hours. The revolutionary goes their way and says, all this is nonsense. Just as they pull the little old woman away from the wayside cross22 and say, “There is no God”, while the atheist among the aristocracy raises their hat in respect when passing a church.
My shoes are covered all over with tacks and holes, work the shoemaker did and was not paid for. I go to the shoemaker and say, you ask thirty crowns for a pair of shoes. I will give you forty crowns. By doing this I have raised that person to the height of the spiritual, for which they thank me with work and materials whose quality far exceeds my extra payment. They are happy. Happiness rarely finds its way into their house. Here is a person who understands them. Who values their work and has no doubt about their honesty. In their mind the finished shoes already stand before them. They already know where to find the best leather, they know which worker can be trusted with the shoes, and the shoes will have serrations and holes, as many as an elegant shoe has room for. Now I say: I have only one condition, the shoe must be quite plain. Now I have thrown them down from the height of the spiritual to the position of a Tatar. They have less work, but I have taken all the joy from them.
I preach to the aristocrat. I can bear the tattoo on my body if it gives other people pleasure. They are my joy. I can bear the ornaments of the Black person, of the Persian, of the Slovak peasant woman, the ornaments of my shoemaker, because they have no other way of reaching the heights of their existence. We have art, which has left ornament behind. When the toil and labour of the day are at an end, we go to Beethoven or to Tristan23. My shoemaker cannot do that. I must not take their religion from them, because I have nothing to put in its place. But whoever goes to the Ninth24 and then sits down to draw patterns is either a forger or a degenerate.
The absence of ornament has raised the other arts to unimagined heights. Beethoven’s symphonies could never have been written by someone who had to walk about in silk, velvet and lace. Whoever goes about today in a velvet waistcoat is not an artist but a clown, or a house painter. We have become better and more refined. The people of the herd had to distinguish themselves with different masks; the modern person does not need clothing as a mask. Their individuality is so strong that it is no longer expressed through clothing; the absence of ornament is a sign of intellectual strength. The modern person uses the ornaments of past and foreign cultures as they see fit, and at whim. Their creativity is concentrated on other things.
Footnotes:
1- impression
2- papuan: natives of the island of New Guinea in Indonesia. Tr.
3- teuton
4- snail-red
5- erotic
6- Zion
7- elves
8- wheezing
9- The rich catch of fish
10- footwraps
11- babe
12- swaddling
13- Tyrolean
14- lacemaker
15- Otto Eckmann
16- floral
17- jugendstil
18- Van de Velde
19- Joseph Maria Olbrich
20- crown
21- kaffir
22- wayside cross
23- Tristan
24- Ninth