The Design Prototype as Artistic Boundary: The Debate on History and Industry in Central European Applied Arts Museums, 1860-1900

Abstract

The twentieth-century association of modernity with utility validated a modernist design genealogy characterized by increasingly simple, mechanized forms. The thesis of historical development leading toward industrialization, which important historians of modern design like Nikolaus Pevsner, Siegfried Giedion, and even Reyner Banham argued, was based on the opposition of and regressive ontological realities: simple and complex, mechanized and hand-crafted, ascetic and historicist, avant garde and mainstream. Furthermore, the representation of modern design in terms of progress, and its unceasing flow of inventions, also pointed to the attainment of a heroic age, generally the period between 1918 and 1939, by which all other eras of modern design could be measured. More than any other movement, the Bauhaus was identified as that absolute laboratory of modern design. As such, historical representation of the characteristics of Bauhaus design became a point of reference for situating trends in both preceding and succeeding periods. Because historical representation gestured to specific and exclusive genealogies, it became incumbent upon historians to ignore or condemn unprogressive historical moments and praise progressive eras. In histories mentioning German design, for example, this historiographic approach resulted in the linkage of Bauhaus design to disparate historical movements such as the Biedermeier age between 1815 and 1848, solely on the basis of a perceived preference in each for simple forms and an absence of historical ornament.2 This representation of the culminating achievements of Bauhaus philosophy similarly amalgamated movements with sharply contrasting philosophies: the utilitarian (but anti-machine) ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement in nineteenth-century England and the advocacy for mechanization within the union of artists and industrialists known as the Deutscher Werkbund in Germany after 1907. What both of these movements held in common was their opposition to the rigid historicist and academic attitudes of the second half of the nineteenth century; we are told in each case that new design models emerged because historical artistic models were rejected.' 1) The overall argument, for example, of Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command, A Contribution to an Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), posited as the conflation of historical destiny and productive attainment, is that the heroic age was depicted as the absolute character of design modernity.