The Unadorned Life is Not Worth Living
Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889–1914
Edited by Katherine M. Kuenzli, translated by Elizabeth Tucker
Getty Publications, 2022
Imagine a time when questions of painting, architecture, clothing design, and wallpaper were considered crucial to the reform of society as a whole, when joy in labor and the aesthetic education of workers and artisans was deemed as important as wages, when one of the prime arguments for Socialism was that it might free people from drudgery so that they all could be artists and live in a more beautifully designed world. Such utopian ideas were in the air from the 1850s to the 1920s in a rapidly industrializing England and on the continent while wildly different thinkers — Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Morris, Gottfried Semper — all attempted to understand Modernity’s challenges and possibilities. The disparate disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, perception science, history, and art theory collaborated to reevaluate traditional beliefs and to trace genealogies not only of morals, but of ornament and design. This heady atmosphere is richly evoked in Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889–1914. Van de Velde was a Belgian painter, designer, architect, pedagogical and manufacturing reformer — a self-styled priest of modern ornament — whose selected essays have just been published in a handsome volume edited and introduced by Katherine M. Kuenzli and translated from the French and German by Elizabeth Tucker. Many theorists and artists who had a stake in the dreams and the debates of the times haunt this collection and, while reading van de Velde’s vivid prose — which ranges from imagistic symbolist poetics to logical polemic — one feels as if one were listening in with a time-machine ear trumpet to conversations and controversies that have nearly been lost between the cracks of history.
Edvard Munch, Henry van de Velde, 1906. Lithograph.
Van de Velde was a member of the Belgian Neo-Impressionist group of painters called Les XX; he was a designer, a self-taught architect, and the founder in 1901 of what some consider the first modern art museum, the Folkwang, which displayed painting by modern European masters alongside crafts and artifacts of medieval and modern-day European peasants, ancient Greek art, and contemporary works from Oceania and Africa. Appointed to design displays for the Congolese pavilion at the Belgian Colonial exposition in Tervueren in 1898, van de Velde avoided any political position on the colonial incursion, and availed himself of the aesthetic opportunities, utilizing Congolese motifs in his designs and wood from Congo, “carved and bent,” Kuenzli tells us, “to constitute dynamic, curving lines, which would become the signature feature of Art Nouveau or the so-called Congo-Style.” He was appointed by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar to revive the regional economies and bring earnings into the hands of local artisanal workshops, an activity that naturally led to the creation of the Applied Arts School in Weimar, precursor to the Bauhaus. The erudite and rich introduction to this volume — written by Kuenzli, the author also of a scholarly study, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale, 2019) — tells us that Nikolaus Pevsner, the influential German-British art historian and architecture theorist, declared van de Velde “undoubtedly the most comprehensive brain in the group” of artists and designers working in 1900 Europe. The book brings to life this exciting era, made up of complex social, aesthetic, ethical and historical strands that tangle and weave, shuttling back and forth from England to Belgium and France, the Congo, Germany, Austria, and Greece; between rural artisans, urban theorists, industrialists, engineers, fine artists, architects, and statesmen.
The thoughts and work of John Ruskin and William Morris, founders of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, were central influences not only on van de Velde, but a whole generation of designers and architects. Ruskin — who infused his revival of traditional crafts in the English countryside with a moral fervor — believed that materials should be “honest,” not masking what they were or how objects were made. Morris’s lecture collection, Hopes and Fears for Art (1882) and his utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1890), urged readers to “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be beautiful or believe to be useful,” where every object should be made with pleasure and without exploitation or waste. Morris’s artisan workshops modeled the harmonious and joyful creation of stained glass, textiles, furniture, wallpapers, carpets, embroideries and other objects through revival of traditional artisanal processes in stark contrast to assembly lines and soulless division of labor. Van de Velde took much from Ruskin and Morris, particularly the central idea that the separation of fine “high” art from applied or “minor” arts was a travesty, but he veered away from his mentors in his rejection of Socialism, specifically on the grounds that great art could not be manufactured solely on the basis of ideal social conditions. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s well-known essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” wherein Wilde posits the counter-intuitive idea that Socialism might make people more individualistic — and thus more likely to become artists. Van de Velde insisted that happiness and beauty came from within the individual, and could not be dictated by state or religion or any other institution. Another important deviation from his mentors is van de Velde’s hopeful embrace of the machine age and its materials — steel, concrete, electric lighting, even in certain cases celluloid and linoleum. His sole concern with new materials was that they be allowed to express their own unique properties, and not be made to imitate traditional materials for a cheaper price. This embrace of technological innovation, combined with a fervor for simultaneously fostering traditional handicrafts, was mediated only by his insistence that the artist and craftsperson, along with the engineer — not the business owners and profit mongers — lead the innovation in manufacturing.
Henry van de Velde, Tropon Poster, 1898. Lithograph. MoMA.
Along with the formative English influence, van de Velde’s style was inspired by francophone writers, like the Belgian poet and critic Émile Verhaeren, the French symbolist Mallarmé, and by Walt Whitman, the American poet of the material and the spiritual. Kuenzli’s introduction tells us that he was influenced by Baudelaire, but does not specify whether van de Velde read his programmatic essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” although its ideas seem to permeate the book. In arguing that artists must find the timeless and universal in the modern milieu, Baudelaire concludes that this elusive modern-universal resides in abstraction — as the makeup upon a woman’s face may bring out the general forms and repress the particulars. Referring to Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life” himself, van de Velde writes: “We need to have known the emotion that made us tremble upon beholding the line of the iron ship’s prow that Krupp exhibited in 1902…to feel the same trembling upon seeing the profile of the colossal statue of Ramses lying in the sands at Memphis….to have enjoyed the allure of the feverishly excited line of Guy’s grisettes, Degas’s dancers, and Lautrec’s spectral apparitions, in order to enjoy the feverishly sensual excitation of lines in the long row of silhouettes that march in low relief upon the stone walls of the underground tombs of the mustaba of Ti at Saqqara”.
The move to Germany in 1900 precipitated or deepened van de Velde’s engagement with German thinkers like Richard Wagner — whose idea of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) was translated from the operatic stage into architecture and design by a whole generation of modern designers. Van de Velde’s idea that the line is a force, which led to the idea of architecture as the interplay of opposing forces residing in building materials, seems to have been inspired by Charles Henry in France, and the writings of German thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Heinrich Hübsch, Karl Bötticher, and Gottfried Semper. Semper and Bötticher traced the development of architecture to the materials that were used to build: the blankets that first served as walls determined our more solid versions, just as an empty gourd determined the shape of clay bowls and the braiding of basketry was later imitated in ornamental patterns. Semper’s idea of “ornament as life giving” was most relevant for van de Velde’s project. More elusive but nonetheless intriguing is Schopenhauer’s idea, often repeated by van de Velde, that all matter aspires to immateriality. Nietzsche runs like a red thread through all of the essays. Van de Velde responded to “Herr Dynamite’s” championing of materiality and sensuality over Christian otherworldliness, to his transvaluation of values and genealogy of morality. Nietzsche’s story of the usurpation of ancient Greek values by Judeo-Christian ones is reiterated in the Belgian’s own narrative of “fine” art’s insidious arrogation of distinction vis à vis applied arts and crafts. Perhaps most importantly, Nietzsche lurks behind the Belgian’s particular definition of a new morality which, in van de Velde’s words, comprises “everything that exists in harmony with the nature of things and natural processes; I assert that everything in nature aspires to the apex of strength, well-being and happiness; and everything that deviates from this, I call immoral.”
The naval section of the Krupp works, Essen, pre-WW1.
Before he was an architect, designer, reformer, and pedagogue, van de Velde was a painter, associated with the post-Impressionists of Belgium and France. He writes of himself and his comrades as members of a new religion of light, preaching the new international scientific faith of optical mixing that inspired and justified the pointillism (called “divisionism” by van de Velde) of Seurat, Pissarro, and others. Van de Velde regarded the new technique — whereby the viewer mixes the color daubs left separated by the artist — as a miraculous salvation for the poor artist, who had struggled valiantly over many centuries against the inevitable muddying of colors that begins the moment one mixes one pigment with another on the palette. Under the influence of Socialism and the Arts and Crafts movement, however, he came to believe that paintings and sculptures should be in service to a larger whole. When not conceptually integrated into their surroundings or architectural niches, but instead bought up by greedy collectors, they are “born…from the depraved hearts of men and from their egoism.” Rather like Oscar Wilde, who noted that people “nowadays know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” van de Velde was an early critic of the culture industry and its vitiating influence on human life. While the philistine collector was roundly condemned, van de Velde anticipated the Austrian painter Hundertwasser’s Mold Manifesto (1958) in envisioning a future utopia wherein individuals would design and build their own homes and decorate them as expressions of their own individual selves. Van de Velde, sounding very much like Hundertwasser — who railed against the use of the straight line and romanticized and anthropomorphized mold as an organic artist — writes: “A city in which every home is the reflection of a character, an idea, a will [like a] harmonious and moving impression of a garden in which all flowers…have blossomed freely. It is the spectacle of every innovation, every struggle, and every will; it is the free fulfillment of life.”
The Hundertwasser House in Vienna.
The idea that paintings and sculptures should be integrated into a Gesamtkunstwerk was common among architects and designers of this period, perhaps best exemplified by the 1902 Beethoven exhibition in Vienna, which featured Max Klinger’s Beethoven sculpture, Klimt’s famous frieze, and the work of nineteen other artists, designers, and architects; the “total work of art” was also attempted by the many architects — including van de Velde in his own home, Bloemenwerf — in the following decade whose designs for houses included not only their walls, windows, and rooms, but murals, sculptures, furniture, clothing, textiles, and tea pots. Van de Velde’s attacks on paintings and sculpture seem, nevertheless, to be polemically exaggerated, as he deigned elsewhere during the same period to speak rapturously about certain paintings, especially those that eschewed narrative and subject for what he and his fellow faithful called “the tableau.” The tableau was a return to ancient appreciation of formal surfaces and simultaneously an innovative step toward abstraction: the harmony of a painting’s forms should be, he writes, an evocation of happiness “from the sheer arrangement of lines and colors” which orchestrate a “general symphony that moves us with its uniquely painterly virtues.” The frame, he declared, was like an umbilical cord connecting the painting with the architectural forms and the living world around it. And art of all kinds — from architecture to dresses to paintings to the bowls we eat out of — would ideally be bound to life — a life of sensuous pleasure and logical apprehension of nature.
One particularly fraught debate of the period revolved around whether ornament arose from the mimetic impulse of representing what the eye sees or, rather, from an innate natural force of energetic, emotional gesture. The burning question: was it more or less “moral” to ornament the tapestry covering your divan with floral and bird designs or only with non-representational abstractions? The abstract forms may participate in the same energies that make the flowers unfurl or the birds fly, but according to van de Velde, “naturalistic,” i.e., representational ornamentation is actually (paradoxically) less natural, actually more artificial than the abstract sort, because it presumably veils and obscures the genuine form, materiality, and use of the object it decorates. The aesthetic sin of superfluous ornamentation could be charged with causing the general degradation of life. The acanthus leaf, which — one coterie of thinkers affirmed — spread like an invasive species over the previously perfect columns of ancient Greek architecture, was thus responsible for the very fall of Rome. Bad design, van de Velde warned, had a deleterious effect on humans, even in utero. Hearkening back to ancient Greek superstitions about pregnancy, he tells us that if a mother is surrounded by ugliness, “when the child comes into the world, it will carry within it the seed of all these abominations.” The occasional destructive urges of a child are naturally explained thus, “by the presence within it — after all — of an infinitesimal particle of its ancestor’s sense for beauty.” In an essay on William Morris, van de Velde notes that the Englishman at first was tempted to become a priest, because the “general perversion caused by an essentially religious education makes us more sensitive to moral ugliness than to material ugliness.” While children are sometimes still unaccountably destructive and the world is even uglier now than in his time, we can be glad that Morris — and van de Velde after him — hearkened to his more sensuous tendencies.
Acanthus leaf capitals at the ancient city of Ephesus in modern Turkey. Xixerone.
Van de Velde affirms in early essays that the unadorned life is basically not worth living, and despite his criticisms of what he deemed the profligacy and dishonesty of much 19th century ornament he nevertheless insisted on the need for both beauty and utility for human happiness. “The unadorned life,” he writes in one essay in this collection, “is no more the true life than that in monastic communities, where men and women live in the continuous negation of their purpose and their sex.” Yet, his questions about what sort of adornment was honest and beautiful seem to have unintentionally paved the way for the extremes of the minimalist and unadorned modern design and architecture of the Bauhaus and beyond. Abstract ornament devolved, after van de Velde, into scant ornament. Whatever side of the abstract vs. representational controversy one finds oneself on, it is indeed refreshing to live for a while in a world where it is understood that, as van de Velde writes: “There is an absolute correlation between men in general and the setting in which they live; there is an absolute correlation between the individual man and the home, the room in which he lives”. This is a world wherein questions of beauty matter intensely.
Especially nowadays, but really always when one is entrenched enough in a discipline to have taken sides on its debates and controversies, one encounters a new thinker and immediately attempts to ascertain “which side” he or she is on, to determine whether the ideas or evidences will support or deny one’s own dearly-held beliefs. Really interesting thinkers, however, disrupt this reductive form of reading by creating previously unimagined collections of ideas, strange bedfellows, odd confluences which, if we dare continue on despite our initial confusions, refresh and open our minds to new thought. Van de Velde is that sort of thinker. This complexity may be one reason van de Velde is not as well-known as he should be—he is not easily conscripted into one school or other, not easily instrumentalized for any polemical purpose. Other related reasons are explored by Kuenzli and Tucker in their separate introductions, in prefaces to each essay, and in detailed and fascinating endnotes. They suggest that the fact that van de Velde spanned not only disciplines and ideologies, but also geographic distances and languages, inhibited his reception until now.
Kuenzli explains that since van de Velde wrote in French, occasionally in Flemish, and participated in the translation of his work into German, “linguistic and geographic displacements have impeded the reception of his writings, with scholars prioritizing a single language or geographic location.” This English language edition, which presents works published in French and also those that were translated into German for publication during van de Velde’s German period, makes his work more widely accessible and recovers the inherently international nature of his oeuvre. The process and philosophy of transmission, eloquently elucidated in Elizabeth Tucker’s translator’s introduction, seem to suggest that all of van de Velde’s work may be regarded as a study in translation: translation between the world and the words and images used to describe or express it and translation as mediation: between high and applied art, between visual art and music, between Flemish, French, German and English language and culture, between logic and poetry, industrialization and handicrafts, tradition and modernity. Thus the translation in this edition from German and French texts into English works continues van de Velde’s own synesthetic process of destabilizing, as Tucker writes, “accepted definitions of words and discursive conventions so as to inscribe them with new meaning and relevance”.
Title page to Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra by Henry van de Velde, 1908. Swann.
Tucker describes how when there were multiple versions, she relied not just on one authoritative text, in German or French exclusively, but often availed herself of the different qualities of each language in the different versions: while the French texts, for example, often used bodily imagery, the German texts (often used by van de Velde to clarify and refine his ideas through subsequently acquired theoretical terminology), sometimes tamed the emotional intensity of the originals. Thus, as in all acts of translation, something is lost — but also gained. This sensitive English translation seeks to restore what was lost, by deftly combining the clarity of the German with the euphony of the French versions. One might also imagine that van de Velde is himself translating the technique of optical color mixing in painting to his own writing, where word-images and phrases are left un-connected for the reader to mix in his or her mind — a technique that may occasionally result in confusion (another form of muddiness), but also retains freshness. In an essay on Le Libre Esthétique of 1896, van de Velde suggests that one young painter, Jan Thorn-Prikler from Holland, has a future as “the decorator of tomorrow, utilizing materials other than colored paint — he will twist iron and pour in quantities of glass, fabricating materials that will permit him to evoke…his dream of art.” The assumption is that his transubstantiation from paint to applied art materials will clarify and make less confused, just as van de Velde’s French texts undergo clarification when translated into German. Elsewhere we are called to consider the relationship between dance and gesture and the artist’s line (consider, as van de Velde and Mallarmé did, the famous Loïe Fuller, whose illuminated “Serpentine Dance” with voluminous silks made her the muse of Art Nouveau). These are valuable object lessons in the richness of interlingual and interdisciplinary Symphilosophieren (communal philosophizing) — to use a term from the age of German Romanticism, an earlier movement of aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific confluence. Verily, van de Velde emerges as a rare instance of a writer who is capable of describing works of art — his essay on “The Line” alone is a masterpiece. And writing about art is itself a rare feat of translation.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller, 1893. Color lithograph.
All of this serves to suggest that van de Velde may have been neglected not because he was insignificant, but because he was all too rich in varied and unfamiliar signifiers, too unique to fit into one discipline, one literary or aesthetic movement, or national legacy. Another possible reason for his neglect, only discreetly suggested in Kuenzli’s introduction, may have been that Walter Gropius was “loath to admit” van de Velde’s overwhelming influence, preferring to suggest that the unity of painting, sculpture and architecture, “as a salvific ideal, a ‘crystal symbol of a new faith’,” was his own brainchild. Gropius took over van de Velde’s applied art school in Weimar, when the Belgian was forced to leave Germany in 1919 (the building that van de Velde designed served as a military hospital) and subsequently turned it into the Bauhaus. A rewriting of history came with the not-insignificant added value that van de Velde’s ideas were now considered the cultural capital of a German, rather than of a Belgian. Despite Gropius’s erasure of our subject, much, Kuenzli writes, “about the Weimar Bauhaus originated in van de Velde’s practice and writings — including its attempt to marry art and industry, ‘primitive’ craft and advanced aesthetics, and individualized experimentation with industrial production”.
Van de Velde not only lost control of the direction of the applied art school in Weimar, but also, in 1914, lost the epoch-making debate of the Werkbund, an organization he had co-founded in 1907 to improve relations between artists and manufacturers in Germany. In two essays in this volume, we see van de Velde defending the freedom of the individual artist against the encroachment of industrial standardization advocated by his fellow Werkbund members, Hermann Muthesius and Friedrich Naumann. When Muthesius issued a set of ten “theses” affirming that production should be limited to a few established types, van de Velde led the opposition with his “Counter-Theses,” which was signed by other members who shared van de Velde’s creative vision. While much of Modernism grew increasingly stark and minimalist over time, and eventually eschewed most if not all ornament, the spectrum of artists involved not only in the Werkbund, but also in the early Bauhaus itself, suggests that it might have turned out otherwise. Consider utopian visionaries like Bruno Taut, a member of the Werkbund and associate of many of the Bauhaus artists, who dreamt of buildings of colored glass, musical waterfalls, crystal domes, and designed garden cities; or Johannes Itten — an early Bauhaus instructor — progenitor of a decidedly expressive color mysticism, or Kandinsky and Klee’s playful poeticisms. Standardization won the day, and van de Velde’s heroic defense of individual artistry was unfairly relegated — before this volume appeared — to the increasingly sterile dustbins of history. Yet van de Velde’s vision of the living organic ornament is aspirational — a line: “that would make the objects around us rise, breathe, and sing; a line that can achieve the miracle of giving rise to Arabesques in which we can enjoy all the states of excitement, longing, intoxication, and sensuality that we find in music and dance”. In this day and age, when art is all too often expected to educate us morally rather than aesthetically, van de Velde’s belief in Beauty alone as inherently regenerative is a radical revelation.
Bruno Taut, The City Crown, 1919. Hidden Architecture.
