Illustration: Emanuel Josef Margold. Wallpaper design, c1910.
Wallpaper design work is often looked down upon as one of the lesser decorative skills. William Morris was particularly sneering and saw no real creative value or point to wallpaper pattern work. However, that did not stop him from producing prodigious rolls of the stuff throughout most of his career and to a certain extent, it could be said to have kept Morris & Co afloat through the most difficult economic times of the company.
Wallpaper design work is often indicative of a specific design style and can be easily identified and associated, often more so than textiles, with a particular decorative era. Sometimes wallpaper pattern work could even be slightly ahead of the more generalised decorative periods, and examples of wallpaper work can be seen that pre-empted a number of the major interior styles and movements, particularly in the twentieth century. However, even when considering nineteenth and indeed eighteenth century wallpaper work, styles and pattern work were often relatively immediate and topical. Whether this had more to do with the immediacy of the medium, compared to other areas of interiors such as textiles and furniture, or whether it had more to do with the large number of companies involved in the business of wallpaper making and the extreme competition that that engendered, is to be debated.
Wallpaper decoration and the professional designers that fed the industry, usually on a freelance commission basis, were wide-ranging and covered a host of skills from illustration to architecture. Many had little or no experience in the basics of wallpaper design, which is a technical as well as creative occupation. That a large proportion of designers, both commissioned and employed by wallpaper companies were primarily textile designers, suggests a similarity in both design fields. This would help to explain why textiles and wallpaper design are often so closely linked as disciplines when discussing the history of interiors.
The Austrian architect and designer Emanuel Josef Margold produced the two wallpaper designs that illustrate this article at the turn of the first decade of the twentieth century, in about 1910. Margold was known to have produced a range of work during the early twentieth century that included printed and woven textiles, embroidery, and wallpaper design. He was a member of the Wiener Werkstatte where he was for a while Josef Hoffmann's assistant. This relationship often gives the impression that Margold's work was derived from that of Hoffmann, and while there is a certain similarity, it only really corresponds when seen in the larger light of Austrian and German Jugendstil decoration. It has to be remembered that while Margold was indeed a member of the Wiener Werkstatte, he was also a one time resident at the Darmstadt Artists' colony, and also a member of both the German and Austrian Werkbund. This perhaps gives Margold a much larger and more comprehensive appreciation of the decorative arts in Central Europe before the First World War, and also that of his place within it, than perhaps the generalised moniker of being an assistant to Josef Hoffmann.
Illustration: Emanuel Josef Margold. Wallpaper design, c1910.
As to the two examples of his decorative wallpaper work, both appear bold, strikingly confident and graphically motivated. Neither show any of the complexity and involved style that was popular in both France and Britain. To be fair there was an element of pairing down and simplifying of wallpaper design even in France and Britain, although both came to this result from different directions, which was often the result of revivals and historical precedents. However, neither country was involved in modern ideals on anywhere near the scale produced in Central Europe. The movement in Germany and Austria was very much a matter of looking for new concepts and ideas and using many of the new skills being rapidly developed in both architecture and illustration.
This initial discovery and exploration was to become an unstoppable movement that would take decoration and pattern into a whole new area of exploration during the 1920s and 1930s. Inevitably due to the start already made by Margold and others like him throughout Germany and Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century, the notion of true modernism and the exploration and development of that decorative ideal went much further and faster than that of France with its conservatively and elitist led Art Deco formula.
That decoration and pattern itself was to suffer the shock of being removed or at least disassociated from architecture, and to an extent interiors by the Modernist movement, has led to a seemingly permanent disruption of the central role decoration played for centuries in the cultural life of Europe. That Modernism generally saw the decorative arts as an irrelevance, is still very much with us today and can clearly be seen when considering the very subservient role that the decorative arts play in the world of contemporary architecture.
This was clearly not in the minds of those who designed wallpaper pattern work in 1910. However, the direction of increased simplicity on all fronts of the decorative arts during this period, does beg the question as to the reasoning behind the simplifying and de-cluttering of interiors. It seems as if there was perhaps more significance to the downsizing and eventual downgrading of decoration and pattern than being merely that of the removal of the more ornate excesses of late Victorian decoration and the increasingly scientific approach to health and interiors. Not a conspiracy as such, but perhaps a generalised shift in emphasis and ideal.
Further reading links:
Wallpaper: A History of Style and Trends
Pattern Design: Period Design Source Book
Wallpaper, its history, design and use,
Twentieth-Century Pattern Design
German Modernism: Music and the Arts (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)
Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford Modern Languages & Literature Monographs)
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)
Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity)
German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924
German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945
The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism
Wiener Werkstatte: 1903-1932 (Special Edition)
Wiener Werkstatte: Design in Vienna 1903-1932
Textiles of the Wiener Werkstatte: 1910-1932
Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstatte
Wiener Werkstatte: Avantgarde, Art Deco, Industrial Design (German Edition)
Wonderful Wiener Werkstatte
