The Feminists of the Pattern and Decoration Movement

Written By: Amayah Meas

Centuries of art and textile history are flooded with discourse about what constitutes art, characterized by general art movements that are the utmost contradictory from their preceding and following ones. While they all emanated as a rejection to the ever-growing advancements of the world, for example, the Arts and Crafts movement sought to revive craftsmanship as a direct response to industrialization, or the Wiener Werkstätte of Vienna who prioritized handcrafted goods over mass production and seceded from the art education system; one aspect that can be coined as universal in the history of art is that art itself, its production, distribution, and analysis, has been claimed by the ultimate authority of Western male sophistication. One movement in particular is Modernism, popularized during the late 19th century up until the mid-20th century, a style that adopted basic forms of shape, color, and technology as characteristics of good art. It rejected ornamentation and focused on experimentation with new materials and advancements in science to embody a utopian revolutionary spirit aligning with the Western zeitgeist following World War I. Modernism was an exceedingly white male-centric movement that left no room for women or their ornamentation, fueling the motivations behind the Feminist Art Movement of the 1960s and the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) Movement of the 1970s. The P&D Movement rejected ideas of Modernism by reinventing ornamentation to be as complex and sophisticated as Modern art. Using decorative techniques with textiles, wallpaper, embroidery, and other nontraditional media, the movement created a space for female artists to redefine the use of alternative materials and be prominent alongside their male counterparts.

When discussing the meaning of art, Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote, “real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out,” (Tolstoy, 1897). This implies that ornamentation is counterfeit, metaphorically equivalent to a shameful prostitute when compared to a wife, both equally an accessory to the man. Similarly, art historian Herbert Read wrote “all ornament should be treated as suspect... legitimate ornament I conceive as something like mascara and lipstick – something applied to make more precise the outlines of an already existing beauty,” (Art and Industry, 1953) and art critic Clement Greenberg wrote “art is to be stripped down to this [the experience of aesthetic value] end. Hence, modernist ‘functionalism,’ ‘essentialism’ it could be called, the urge to ‘purify’ the medium,” (Detached Observations, 1976), highlighted in the article, Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture by American artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff eight decades following. These assertions pursue a responsibility to purify a basic form by stripping its decoration and makeup to its most essential character. While the language of these statements is outdated, some more than a century old, the sentiments they express continue to guide the biases of contemporary art. They represent beliefs that create a distinct separation between white men and art, and women (among other minorities) and decoration. By grouping art with science, innovation, holiness, and sophistication above sensualism, ornamentation, and play, the idea of women as an inarticulate inferior is perpetuated.

The Feminist Art Movement in the West emerged in the late 1960s among movements for gender, civil, and queer rights. In reference to the Modernist ideals of the early 20th century, this movement aimed to rewrite a falsely male dominated art history. It provided a space for female artists to challenge the existing art canon by inviting intersectional perspectives, embracing alternative materials, and expanding the definition of fine art through discussion and visibility. These motivations would fuel the artists who led the P&D Movement. P&D’s first theorist and scholar of Islamic art Amy Goldin writes, “art historians, absorbed in the rational and moral superiority of Western art, seldom notice that most of the world’s artistic production has grown out of the impulse to adornment,” (1977), alluding to hypocrisy among Modernist enthusiasts. Feminist artists embraced nontraditional media or, those not historically dominated by European men like painting and sculpture, such as textiles, embroidery, mosaics, glassware, et cetera, to expand the definition of fine art and invite a wider variety of artistic perspectives.

Anatomy of a Kimono, by Miriam Schapiro. Fabric and acrylic on canvas. 1974

A major leader of the P&D Movement was Miriam Schapiro (1923 – 2015). Born in Toronto, Canada, she began sketching at the age of six and developed skills in painting, sculpting, and printmaking as she grew, taking inspiration from the Cubist and Abstract art movements of the early 20th century. One of her most notable works is Anatomy of a Kimono (1977 – 1980), a collage of fabric, paint, and embroidery among other decorative techniques based on the art of Japanese kimonos, fans, and robes. Combining handkerchiefs she collected on a tour of the country with other scraps of fabric, she formed ten large panels adorned by Japanese-inspired shapes and angles. The installation measures more than fifty-two feet long and displays a mix of both abstract shapes and recognizable images such as a kimono or legs in motion. It starts with pale tones shifting to dark, and eventually ends with an explosion of vibrancy. The final panel features a “kicking” shape, alluding to a sense of empowerment and breaking boundaries. “I ended the painting with a kick so that it would strut its way into the ‘80s,” says Schapiro. Kimono making is a traditionally female dominated task, which further connects to Schapiro’s goal of redefining the types of production referred to as “women’s work” (theartstory.org). Known as “femmages” Schapiro’s collages incorporate abstract compositions, vibrant colors, and hard-edged forms with traditionally feminine and marginalized media including quilts, fabric design, and embroidery to redefine abstraction beyond the long- established Eurocentric, male-dominated art movements of the 20th century. They embrace ornamentation and redefine abstraction by using fabric as the primary medium in lieu of paint. Through the monumental scale of the piece, Schapiro elevates feminine materials and expressions to the realm of “high art,” emphasizing ornamentation’s (therefore women’s, according to Modernist philosophies) inherent right to be considered just as sophisticated as Modernist techniques.

Though fueled heavily by the Feminist Art Movement, the P&D Movement was not a feminist movement. It elevated women’s work and craft and included men as well, but rather focused on creating a large, amorphous, collaborative network with inclusive attitudes and open- mindedness. It focused on intersectional representation among that of women by inviting a global range of perspectives from countries in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. This approach gave visibility to diverse cultural landscapes and initiated P&D artists to explore more aspects of their identity related to race, gender, queerness, et cetera.

Modernism was more than simply just a rejection of ornamentation. Countless examples of misogynist sentiments grouping the work of women and other marginalized groups with the concept of decoration perpetuates this authoritative notion that is still present in aspects of society today. There is a level of contradiction with the P&D Movement; not its motivations, but within the movement itself. To elaborate, the movement sought to empower women’s crafts to be on the same level of sophistication as Modernist techniques by focusing on fabric, textiles, embroidery... but the art of fabric and textile design are still fields dominated primarily by male- centric ideas, artists, and fashion designers throughout history. The 19th and 20th centuries have seen numerous groups of marginalized textile designers who sought to create a voice for themselves. For example, the Bauhaus was an art and design school that emerged circa 1920 in Germany and reduced women to the art of weaving and ceramics while men took on more “elaborate” tasks in engineering and 3D craftsmanship. The women of the Bauhaus believed in reducing textiles to their ultimate form as a grid, stripped of ornamentation, with a utilitarianist perspective of emphasizing color, line, and shape. When considered objectively, these ideas can be seen as congruent to those of the Modernist movement which favored a bare and practical perspective. Women throughout history have fought to make a space for themselves in the art world and have continuously been shut down, no matter what the subject matter of their ideas encapsulated. The idea of removing ornamentation in Modernism appears more to be a cop out behind its true intention, which is to remove, or rather, further suppress, women from the art world.

Primary Reference

Miriam Schapiro "Anatomy of a Kimono" (1976). Women & Art. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://womenandartblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/miriam-schapiro-anatomy-of-a- kimono-1977-80-chapter-12/

Secondary References

Feminist art movement overview. The Art Story. Retrieved May 1, 2023, from https://www.theartstory.org/movement/feminist- art/#:~:text=The%20Feminist%20Art%20movement%20in,rights%20movements%20arou nd%20the%20world

Jaudon, V and Kozloff, J. (1978). Art Hysterial Notions and Progress and Culture. Miriam Schapiro Art, bio, ideas. The Art Story. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/schapiro-miriam/

Miriam Schapiro. Widewalls. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/miriam-schapiro

Thackara, T. (2020, January 31). Understanding the pattern and decoration movement. Artsy. Retrieved March 26, 2023, from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-pattern- decoration-movement-challenged-machismo-modernism

Tolstoy, L. (1897). Father of Christian Anarchism. What is Art? Ch. 18. Retrieved May 1, 2023, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1897/what-is-art/chapter-18.html