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Whilst ornament was regarded merely as decoration – as emotional and feminine – ‘high’ art, by contrast, was expected to be abstract, masculine and intellectual. At least, that was how Wassily Kandinsky saw it. Wilhelm Morgner, on the other hand, was not afraid of ornament. With bold lines, he created ornamental compositions that echo landscape painting.
At the Bauhaus, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer inevitably engaged with the applied arts. Klee, who taught weaving for a time, added the word ‘ornamental’ to the titles of some of his works. As with Matisse, Oriental art proved to be a guiding influence for him. Oskar Schlemmer simplified the human figure to a framework of lines, which he compared to an ornament. During his time at the ‘Lacktechnikum’ in Wuppertal in the early 1940s, he also designed décors that he developed from the human figure.
For Ewald Mataré, too, the idea of ornament was central. However, he was not concerned with the decorative, but with clear and universally valid forms. He believed that in nature, everything is interconnected and interdependent: ‘… it is an immense ornament. I must always try to move from the particular to the general; that is my path.’