Door handle to the bathroom in the Military Museum in Vienna.
But does the crafts industry itself not know what it’s best products are? Oh no. It knows as little about its own production as the poet, the painter, in fact any artist at all can know about his own art. Such an artist will always value most highly those products of his muse which have cost him the most effort and vexation. Those creations, however, which he produced almost naturally, without effort, to which he was predisposed and which bear most strongly the stamp of his own individuality, his own character—these he dismisses as not particularly important. Only the unanimous agreement of the public is able to convey to him the correct opinion of his products.
. . .We in fact have something most people lack: our celebrated Viennese good taste, of which some could even be jealous. It is only those unreasonable schools of ours which are to be blamed. They have inhibited the natural development of our arts and crafts.
But the answer to that persistent question goes like this: everything that an earlier period has already produced, insofar as it is still useful today, can be imitated. But the new phenomena of our culture (railway cars, telephones, typewriters, and so forth) must be resolved without any conscious echoes of a formal style that has already been superseded. Modifications of old objects in order to assimilate them to modern uses are not permitted. And so the rule is this: either imitate or create something that is totally new. Of course, I do not necessarily mean by this that that which is new is always the opposite of what came before.
As far as I know, this challenge has never before been expressed so exactly and so precisely, even though similar statements have been made abroad and in professional circles, and even recently in the Austrian Museum. But people have actually been working according to this principle for years now. And this is perfectly comprehensible. A copy of an old master is also a work of art. Who can forget Lenbach’s magnificent imitations of old Italian Masters in the Schack Gallery in Munich? But what is totally unworthy of being called a true work of art is the conscious effort to express new ideas in the style of an old master. It is destined to fail. This is not to say that a modern artist, through an extensive study of a particular school, through a predilection or a reverence for particular period or master, cannot make that style so much his own that his work strongly bears the spiritual imprint of his master. I only have to think of the old-master feeling in Lenbach, or the Quattrocento pictures by the English. But the true artist cannot paint now a la Botticelli, now a la Titian, now a la Raphael Mengs.
What would one think of a writer who today wrote a play in the style of Aeschylus, tomorrow composed a poem in the style of Gerhart Hauptman, and the day after tomorrow, a farce in the style of Hans Sachs? And worse, what writer would have the pitiful courage to reveal his own impotence by confessing his sources? And now let us consider a state school for poets where young artists would be emasculated by being constrained to follow this doctrine of counterfeit, where this kind of literary servitude would be raised to a principle. The whole world would pity the victims of such a method. Yet such a school exists, not for poets, but for the arts and crafts.
. . .
The School of Applied Arts sets the fashion for useful objects. In Vienna it is no easy task to get a hold of a good coal scuttle or fireplace fender! And how difficult it is to find good hardware for doors and windows! I once wrote somewhere that in the last two decades we have gotten Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo blisters on our hands because of our door handles. There is, however, one proper door handle in Vienna to which I have access; I make a pilgrimage to it whenever I am in the neighborhood. It is located in the new building on Kohlmarkt and was designed by Professor König. But do not go there, my dear reader! They would suspect that I was teasing them if you did. That is how unobtrusive this handle is. (15-17)
This book contains the essays I wrote up to and during the year 1900. They were written at a time when I had a thousand things to think about. For didactic reasons I had to express my true opinions in sentences that years later still cause me to shudder when I read them. Only at the insistence of my students have I in time come to agree to the publication of these essays.
Adolf Loos, “Foreward” Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, [Vienna August 1921]
When we stick close to our own turf, we never become aware of the treasures hidden at home. That which is first-rate is gradually taken for granted. But when we have have taken a look around us, outside of us, then a sudden change occurs in our estimation of our homespun products.
I left home some years ago to acquaint myself with architecture and industry on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. At the time I was still totally convinced of the superiority of German crafts and handiwork. With pride and enthusiasm, I went through the German and Austrian sections in Chicago. I glanced with a sympathetic smile at the budding American “arts and crafts movement.” But how that has all changed! My years of residence over there have had the effect that I still today blush with embarrassment when I think of the disgraceful representation of the German crafts in Chicago. These proud and splendid pieces of workmanship, these stylish display pieces—they were nothing more than a philistine sham.
There were, however, two crafts that saved our prestige. Our Austrian prestige, that is, not the German, for here as well the Germans have nothing good to show for themselves. These crafts were the production of the leather fancy goods and the gold- and silversmith trades. They did not operate in the same way. While the producers of the former items were inclined to perform honestly in every line of work, one encountered some of the latter trade’s products in the camp of the shams.
At the time I harbored a silent rage about these objects. There were wallets, cigar and cigarette cases, picture frames, writing implements, suitcases, bags, riding whips, canes, silver handles, water bottles, everything—all of it—smooth and polished, no ornament, no decoration. The silver was at the very most, fluted or hammered. I was ashamed of these pieces. This was not the work of the arts and crafts! This was fashion! Fashion! What an appalling word! The greatest insult to the true and proper craftsman, which I still was at the time.
Of course, the Viennese bought such things gladly. They were called “tasteful,” the efforts of the School of Applied Arts notwithstanding. In vain were the most beautiful objects of earlier periods displayed and their production encouraged. In the end, the gold- and silversmiths did what they were told. They even had their sketches made by the most famous men. But the objects thus produced just would not sell. The Viennese were incorrigible. (Of course, it was different in Germany. There the wallets were overloaded with the loveliest Rococo ornamentation and found a great market. “Stylish” was the ticket.) The Viennese individual was persuaded only with great difficulty to submit his home furnishings to the new regime. But in matters of useful objects or of his own body he followed his own taste exclusively, and here he considered all ornament to be vulgar.
At any rate, I was still of a different mind at the time. But I do not hesitate to make it clear now that at the time even the silliest fop could have surpassed me in matters of taste. The strong wind of America and England has since stripped me of all prejudices against the products of my own time. Totally unprincipled men have attempted to spoil this time for us. We were always supposed to look back; we were always supposed to take another age as our model. But all of this has now retreated from me like a bad dream. Yes, our time is beautiful, so beautiful that I could not see living in any other. Our age is beautiful to look at, so beautiful that, had I the choice of picking out the garment of any other time at all, I would reach for my own with joyful hands. It’s a pleasure to be alive.
In the midst of the general characterlessness of the arts and crafts we must recognize the great service of the two branches of the Austrian arts and crafts already mentioned. They had enough backbone not to conform to the general denial of the time. But respect must also be paid to the Viennese people, who, in spite of all the reforms in the arts and crafts, supported these two industries by their desire to buy. Today we must say confidently that it was only through the productions of leather fancy-goods and through the gold and silver industries that the Austrian arts and crafts received recognition in the world market.
Indeed, the manufacturers in these industries did not wait until the state, by introducing the English models, ended the universal commercial stagnation—a step that now has proved necessary in the furniture industry—but rather, having already gathered strength from the English ideas fifty years earlier, they were renewed and solidly established. For the furniture industry is English from A to Z. Yet, despite this fact no decline has become noticeable, as had been prophesied by pessimists in the furniture business. “England means the death of the arts and crafts.” They say the death of arts and crafts, but they mean the acanthus ornament—about which it was probably true. But our time places more importance on correct form, solid materials, precise execution. This is what is meant by arts and crafts!
(“The Leather Goods and Gold- and Silversmith Trades” Neue Freie Presse, May 15, 1898 p.7,10)
The architectural library is demanding that I give this one back, and there are many notes and expositions on craft in this slim little volume that I want to record.
Cartoon by Theodore Thomas Heine contrasting German and English Fashions. Caption for the image at left: “Herr and Frau Schmidt look like this when they travel to London”; for the image at right: “And like this when they return after a week there as Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” From Simplicissimus: Illustrierte Wochenschrift, Munich, 1902.
An American philosopher says somewhere, “A young man is rich if he has a good head on his shoulders and a good suit in his closet.” This is sound philosophy. It demonstrates an understanding of people. What good are brains if they do not express themselves with good clothes? For both the English and the Americans demand of an individual that he be well dressed.
But the Germans do them one better. They also want to be beautifully dressed. When the English wear wide pants, the Germans point out to them immediately (I don’t know whether this is thanks to old Vischer or to the golden section) that these are unaesthetic and that only narrow pants may be considered to have any claim to beauty. They bluster, they grumble, and they curse, but nevertheless they have their trousers widened from year to year.
Adolf Loos, “Men’s Fashion” Neue Freie Presse, May 22, 1898
It’s easy to get pissed at Adolf Loos, especially when he passionately argues that tattooed people are either savages or criminals. The difficulty in researching him, for me, is trying to figure out some context for his polemic declarations. In the introduction to the 1982 collection Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, Aldo Rossi suggests that Loos’s writings are best taken in the spirit that they were offered. Sadly, virtually every book I found, and every PDF littered about the web, has the context stripped away along with all the dates and attributions. Even recently published collections offer no documentation about where the articles first appeared.
The power to irritate is closely related to the ability to amuse oneself, and the reader who is not overly confused by the academic pedantry will amuse himself a great deal with the writings collected here. Certain pieces, written in the “journalistic” manner, have provoked me to laughter and remind me of another artist who love to confront problems with a sense of humor, namely James Joyce. There is no doubt that these contemporaries of Freud were well aware that “every joke is a murder,” and may be placed among those artists whom Manfredo Tafuri defines as “villainous.” But Loos, apart from being “villainous” in a higher sense, is often “impudent” in the usual sense of the word. While preaching the uselessness of furnishing provided by architects at the same time of the do-it-yourself method—and from this we should logically deduce that one style is as good as another—he considers Secession [art nouveau] furniture actually to be criminal: “The day will come,” he writes, “when the furnishings of a prison cell by the court decorator Schulz or by Professor Van de Velde will be considered an aggravation of the penalty.” This is a statement which, deprived of its sarcasm, could be said to contain a moralism much like that of Gropius. (viii-ix)
Henri Van de Velde Tea table, Padouk 1896
It appears to me that the designer whose ornaments are so heinous that the ought to be jailed, has produced a tea table that is far less ornamental than the designer who railed so sharply against ornament. In fact, the designs of Professor Van de Velde, a leading Belgian art nouveau designer, are far more restrained than the norm. Loos’s critique is obviously not only sarcastic, but also tongue-in-cheek. That’s the problem of reading things divorced from their context.
I find it downright irritating that there isn’t much out there that isn’t in German on Adolf Loos. Apparently, he was a big fan of America and visited the Columbian Exhibition in 1893, so like Muthesius’s obsession with the English, he provides an interesting view from the outside. The passage from Rossi continues:
In speaking of his mythic America, the significance of which we shall see more clearly below, Loos seems to be delighted with a meal whose main dish is oatmeal; elsewhere he notes the fine eating habits of his much maligned countrymen, “for the Austrians know a lot about good cooking.” This unexplained assertion is equivalent to another on German cuisine: “The German people eat what they are served; they are always satisfied, pay the bill and leave.” (ix)
I am always struck by the way that gastronomy interweaves with architecture; both, one must assume, are matters of taste. In Loos, it seems, sarcasm is a way of life.
Throughout Loos’s writings one can find many quotations of this sort, some even more amusing and sarcastic than the above, and above all supported by a rigorous sense of logic, a persistent sense of involvement, and an anger akin to disillusionment. This feeling of disillusionment is much broader than any sort of disappointment with society or personal matters; it is centered on an abstract idea, a battle in which the enemy is a priori elusive, ungraspable, and not unlike the enemy of the mystic—sin. (ix)
Rossi’s assertion here brings out an aspect I’ve really not considered before. That the punk spirit (e.g. John Lydon’s “anger is an energy”) has some shared consciousness with the puritan aesthetic. It attempts to rid the world of the sins of bad taste.
In this case the enemy is stupidity and the lack of understanding and a sense of the end of things. Speaking of Karl Kraus, Loos summed up his friend’s thought and anxiety, saying, “He fears the end of the world.” The end of the world here is also the end of a world without meaning, where the search for authentic quality involves a man without specific qualities, where the great architecture of immutable meanings carries with it a sort of paralysis of creativity and the non-recognition of any progress of reason. Truth, architecture, art, the ancients—all this is behind Adolf Loos who, like all men of this kind, was well aware that he was traveling down a road without hope. (ix)
No future? John Lydon would be proud. The name Karl Kraus rang a bell, and I eventually remembered that I read an essay by Walter Benjamin on Karl Kraus years ago, and revisiting it today I remembered that Benjamin was also deeply moved by Adolf Loos, who features prominently in critical parts of that essay. The Benjamin essay on Kraus is worth revisiting another day. Returning to Rossi on Loos, what does it mean when one is “traveling down a road without hope”?
This attitude also calls into question the meaning of trade, of day-to-day labor, and consequently, of how one earns a living. On the one hand are the static architecture of monuments, the great architecture of the ancients, and the rather complicated possibility of “becoming” an architect; on the other hand are the minor activities whose efficacy he denies, such as the ordering of a house, it’s furnishing, its interior design. Loos does not hide this contradiction—on the contrary, he posits it as a part of his working terminology, and in one of his responses to a reader of Das Andere he actually affirms that he will continue to furnish stores, cafes, and private homes, even though such an activity is not by any means architectural—especially in an era when “every carpet designer defines himself as an architect.” (ix)
This places the matter of domestic design and fine art front and center; Benjamin’s Karl Kraus essay connects this line of questioning to art and technology instead, although there’s a telling fragment from around the same time period (1931-2) which includes a citation from a book given to Walter Benjamin by Franz Gluck:
On ships, mine shafts, and crucifixes in bottles, as well as panopticons.
“While reading Goethe’s rebuke to philistines and many other art lovers who like to touch copper engravings and reliefs, the idea came to him that anything that can be touched cannot be a work of art, and anything that is a work of art should be place out of reach.” Franz Gluck on Adolf Loos in Adolf Loos: Das Werk des Architekten [Adolf Loos: The Architect’s Works] by Heinrich Kulka (Vienna, 1931) p. 9.
Does this mean that these object in bottles are works of art because they have been placed out of reach?
(Collected Works of Walter Benjamin v. 2, p. 554)
Leaving aside the mind-blowing conceptualization of surveillance as art, this unpublished fragment really highlights the complexity of these questions, and shows strong connections with Benjamin’s concept of “aura,” The separation between day-to-day labor and artistic labor—the importance of and inaccessibility of the artist’s touch—is featured in Benjamin and Loos’s writing on the topic.
What separates the carpet designer from the designer of architecture, of monuments, from the carpet designer? Rossi offers this thesis for Loos’s acceptance of the paradox:
And why does he do all this? Because his trade gives him something to live on, and because he can do it well: “Just like in America where I earned my living for a while by washing dishes. But one could support oneself just as easily by doing something else too.” The contradiction between art and trade is so played down that the argument touches on an aspect that the idealist point of view has always neglected, that of the artist’s means of subsistence. As always, Loos condemns the moralism of action that is directly opposed to the economic romanticism of the Modern Movement. Each person will live in his own house, according to his own personality, but in all probability someone will ask for advice about this or that problem, or more simply will have better things to do than furnish his own house; then the architect, trying to do his job well, will advise him. That is all. In this light, Loos’s sarcasm directed against the Secession is easier to understand; what Loos is really attacking in his contemporaries is not so much their style or their taste (even though he finds it abominable)—what he cannot tolerate is the “redemptive” value that they assign to their own actions. One trade is as good as another; and even a trade like washing dishes can be done well provided one breaks as few as possible.
This certainly is the one aspect which “modern architecture,” so committed to mythifying its relations with industry and reformist politics, has been unable to admit and unwilling to discuss. (ibid., ix, x)
It seems clearer now why arts and crafts, art nouveau, and even the modernists with their imperatives would bear the brunt of such savage critique. Read in this way, all the high minded moralizing about the value of labor seems strained coming as it does, filtered down from bourgeois artists and designers sitting on their high moral thrones. For Loos’s most scathing thoughts on the topic, read “The Poor Little Rich Man.”
The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his paddles, in short everything he lays his hands on. He is not a criminal.The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the inmates show tattoos. The tattooed who are not in prison are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies at liberty, it means he has died a few years before committing a murder.
The urge to ornament one’s face and everything else within reach is the start of plastic art. It is the baby talk of painting. All art is erotic.
The first work of art, the cross, was erotic. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist, in the urge to rid himself of excess energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her. The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, we was in the same heaven in which Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony.
But the man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. It goes without saying that this impulse most frequently assails people with such symptoms of degeneracy in the lavatory. A country’s culture can be assessed by the extent to which its lavatory walls are smeared. In the child this is a natural phenomenon: his first artistic expression is to scribble erotic symbols on the walls. But what is natural to a Papuan and the child is a symptom of degeneracy in the modern adult. I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. I believed that with this discovery I was bringing joy to the world; it has not thanked me. People were sad and hung their heads.
Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime”
The French and the Germans obviously couldn’t be further apart on these issues. Van Gogh and Gauguin had a completely different perception of “primitives” than Hermann Muthesius and Adolf Loos; the same could be said of other European artists like Picasso and Braque.Joan Miro’s embraced of children’s drawings, and it’s also worthwhile to note that Paul Klee, a Swiss-German, didn’t have any difficulty as seeing children’s art as worthwhile and even “progressive.” Further, even Loos himself deployed ornament on utilitarian objects, despite this shrill protest.
Knieschwimmer chair
Aesthetic puritanism never seems to work out, but nonetheless, Loos was its most impassioned advocate:
If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I choose one that is quite smooth and not a piece representing a heart or a baby or a rider, which is covered over with ornaments. The man of the fifteenth century won’t understand me. But all modern people will. The advocate of ornament believes that my urge for simplicity is in the nature of a mortification. No, respected professor at the school of applied art I am not mortifying myself! The show dishes of past centuries which display all kinds of ornaments to make the peacocks pheasants and lobsters look more tasty, have the opposite effect on me. I am horrified when I go through a cookery exhibition and think I am meant to eat these stuffed carcasses. I eat roast beef.
A fan of roast meat and boiled vegetables, Loos had a big impact on kitchen design, although somewhat indirectly. Loos outlook was utopian in the extreme. He sought to conserve the labor expended in ornamenting things to use it more productively furthering humanity. He did concede that some did get pleasure in the creative labor invested in ornament, and claimed that he would wear ornamented products to please others, though he took no pleasure in it himself. But he stood by his claim that the urge to ornament was counterproductive and wasteful, a primitive affectation for the masses.
The Taylorist “Frankfurt Kitchen” designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was thought to be a liberatory design— freeing women to work in factories instead of the house. The simplified version of a kitchen, which dispensed with most food storage, sought to streamline the social habits and inheritance of the kitchen in the same way that Loos sought to strip away ornament.
Historical culinary practices were thought by the German modernists to be a “primitive” affectation with no place in modern life.
The most telling comment, as translated by Wikipedia, was this:
On her 100th birthday Schütte-Lihotzky commented “You’ll be surprised that, before I conceived the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, I never cooked myself. At home in Vienna my mother cooked, in Frankfurt I went to the Wirthaus [restaurant/pub]. I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife.
Schütte-Lihotzky worked closely with Loos in the 1920s, and the changes to the kitchen wrought by her designs and the emerging new philosophy of the kitchen have had a deep influence on domestic design. Schütte-Lihotzky conceived the kitchen as an integral part of the living area, though it could be partitioned off if need be. This is in stark contrast to the English manor house tradition of a completely separate wing for domestic activities. This change presents interesting problems, both socially and architecturally.
Loos offered his solution in a 1926 lecture entitled “The Modern Settlement” suggesting that unpleasant cooking smells were best avoided, not by separating the kitchen from the living areas, but rather by only cooking foods which had pleasant aromas—ham, eggs, and beef steak. His argument for a rationalized system of food production and management has echoed across the twentieth century, with many unwanted side effects. I’m trying to track down much more material on this.*
Curiously, there seems to be an obsession among German architects of the early twentieth century with fire. Hermann Muthesius goes into great detail on the subject:
But an open fire is still indispensable for several activities at the English stove. First among these is the toasting of bread that forms so important an element of the English breakfast; toast entirely replaces our continental breakfast bread and rolls. The English are also still very fond of roasting meat on an open fire, a method of preparation that undoubtedly has great advantages; for the juices remain in the meat and meat prepared in this way is tastier and more easily digested. It would not occur to the English to add any kind of sauce to roast meat; and indeed, it needs none. At most they use one of the piquant sauces that can be bought ready-made such as the famous Worcester sauce. Consequently an important aspect of the higher culinary art, the preparation of sauces, is practically non-existent in the English kitchen. If one adds to this fact that vegetables are also simply boiled in water with nothing added and that all the dishes consisting of several ingredients combined and cooked together which our German cooking is so rich, are entirely unknown, it becomes obvious that English cooking is extremely simple, almost primitive. (The English House, 97)
So, the conclusion is—open fires, no sauces, no fancy breads, plus boiled vegetables equates with “primitive.” For culture, the English are (according to Muthesius) dependent almost entirely on the French. However, this doesn’t mean that their aren’t good things to say about this “primitive” English life:
But all English dishes are made from the best raw materials. Nowhere will you find a leg of mutton to equal that in England and their beef and vegetables are also excellent. Good materials make up for the lack of style; indeed, once one has become used to the artless English cooking, one has the feeling that embellishments would not find favor there; and once has made its acquaintance, the sophisticated French cuisine seems spineless, almost insipid. (ibid.)
It’s easy to see from this that the lack of embellishment in English cooking is the most positive thing about it, an aesthetic trend grasped by the Germans with a revolutionary zeal. Stripped down kitchen facilities, and stripped down food, become the hallmark of the twentieth century. Rationalized kitchens go hand in hand with rationalized food.
*After writing this, I discovered this passage in Adolf Loos’ 1910 essay titled “Architecture”:
If we were to come across a mound in the woods, six feet long by three feet wide, with soil piled up in a pyramid, a somber mood would come over us and a voice inside would say, “There is someone buried here.” That is Architecture.
The Taylorist “Frankfurt Kitchen” designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was thought to be a liberatory design— freeing women to work in factories instead of the house. The simplified version of a kitchen, which dispensed with most food storage, sought to streamline the social habits and inheritance of the kitchen in the same way that Loos sought to strip away ornament.