dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Henry-Russell Hitchcock
titel: Painting Toward Architecture
+: New York, 1948
«At the end of the [19th] century most of the 'modernists' in architecture were putting their faith in naturalistic curvilinear ornament as a novel embellishment of new types of structure and believed that with it they were achieving at last a new art form. As Louis Sullivan's writings indicate, advanced architects of this generation continued to hold, quite as much as their public, that ornament was essential to architecture. But neither the emulation of plant forms in architectural decoration, nor the later use of simple geometry as a basis for ornament after 1900, provided a catalyst potent enough to fuse the new structural elements of building into a positive and recognizable architectural style.»
«[Frank Lloyd] Wright also at this time [1900—10] introduced two-dimensional geometrical patterns in his leaded glass windows and in other decorative accessories subordinate to the scale of his abstract architectural compositions as a whole. It is these decorative details, or rather his continued use of this sort of ornament, that brings Wright's work closest to that of the advanced European architects of the opening of the century such as Wagner and Mackintosh. Later, in 1913, at the very moment when abstract art was reaching its first climax in Europe, he designed large abstract murals and also abstract sculpture as decorative accessories for his Midway Gardens in Chicago.»
«Natural resemblance was not discarded [by cubism], but the shapes and colours of objects were distorted, that is, consciously transformed, in order that they might serve the painter's creative ends. This is true of all the advanced painting of the first decade of the new [20th] century.»
«During the years of the War from 1914 to 1918, and for several years thereafter, building production largely ceased, even in neutral countries. But young architects, particularly those who had barely begun practice before the War, seem to gave been unusually active intellectually. […] Many young architects also developed close personal associations with painters and sculptors of their own generation, often coming to accept rather completely their increasingly rigid abstract doctrines as a new gospel for all the arts. At the fringes of advanced experimentation architecture, painting and sculpture came very close — doubtless too close — together in those years. Indeed, in a certain theoretical sense, the three arts really merged in the constructions and stage sets of the Russian constructivists. Some of their works of abstract sculpture were really models for buildings intended to be executed at monumental scale; and their sets were built up of large abstract elements arranged in the real space of an empty stage with no backdrop and no illusion of representation whatsoever, so that they constituted a sort of temporary architecture. At this time many architects began to try their own hands at abstract painting and sculpture also.»
«Despite the early leaded glass and abstract murals of Wright and the somewhat later tiled floors and stained glass windows of the neo-plasticists, abstract art of the more rigidly geometrical sort has not been much utilized by leading modern architects for accessory decoration. Moreover, the later paintings of Le Corbusier, many of them murals, and the murals of Miro and Léger are notably less geometrical and generally also less abstract than the painting of the '20s which had the greatest early influence upon the development of modern architecture. If architects are to utilize the work of painters and sculptors in their buildings, painting or sculpture that is partially representational, or at least very free in form and color, seems to complement most effectively the geometrical and spacial character of the architecture itself.»
«The tawdry modernistic decoration that confused and delayed the general public acceptance of a sound modern architecture in the late '20s and early '30s should remind us, however, that there is always danger of vulgarization in the decorative use of the characteristic elements of modern painting and sculpture as mere surface embellishments of architecture. Only real collaboration as equals between architects and painters or sculptors can be expected to enhance rather than diminish architectural integrity.»