At the dawn of abstraction in the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for artists and critics to locate in the decorative or ornamental a model of pure form. At the same time, the decorative’s varied associations with the “decorative arts,” “craft,” the domestic realm, femininity, utility, and the everyday always rendered it suspect as an art free from the material realm. Ultimately, the decorative as a source for the modernist notion of art’s purity or autonomy was aggressively suppressed by modern artists and critics. Ernst Gombrich observed, “There is nothing the abstract painter . . . dislike[s] more than the term ‘decorative,’ an epithet which reminded him of the familiar sneer that what he had produced was at best pleasant curtain material” (The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, 62). The level of disdain that eventually came to be connected with the term can also be heard in Clement Greenberg’s assertion that “decoration can be said to be the specter that haunts modernist painting” (“Milton Avery,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston: Beacon, 1961, 200). The decorative exposed an anxiety at the heart of the modernist conception of art as pure or autonomous. The threat Greenberg perceived—the fact that modern art or, more accurately, abstraction can never be completely isolated from the decorative arts and its multitude of associations to “non-art”—frames Jenny Anger’s original and important investigation Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art.

Of the many strengths of Anger’s study, three areas of her research stand out as particularly valuable contributions to a modernist art history in which the category of the decorative has long been ill-understood and marginalized. First, in contrast to previous scholarship about Klee—which the author demonstrates masks, dismisses, or distorts the artist’s investment in the decorative—Anger’s study provides a new, compelling picture of how Klee’s work was, in fact, deeply shaped by it in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Second, by focusing on the work of Klee—in Anger’s words a “veritable litmus test of when, where, and for whom” (5) the decorative and its associations were embraced or denounced—the book provides a much-needed analysis of the role the decorative has played in the constitution of modern art in general. Finally, Anger’s investigation of the decorative foregrounds the role of gender in the construction of its meaning, demonstrating its connection to aesthetic and artistic hierarchies and women’s historically low place within them.

Anger opens her study with a categorical discussion of the decorative, a challenging assignment she handles with adeptness and clarity. “What is the decorative?” she asks. Her answer avoids the all-too-common trap of trying to define the decorative once and for all or distinguish it from other related terms such as ornament—wasted efforts that usually result in the unintended reification of the category’s most negative associations. Rather, Anger focuses on the way the decorative “behave[s] parergonally” (8), that is, vacillates between form and matter in philosophical inquiries regarding the work of art. Among other advantages, this approach allows her to make a case for how the “experience of the decorative can delineate the experience of art itself” (30), and ask why, then, did modern artists and critics work so hard to erase it?

In the early 1910s when Klee began exhibiting in Munich, the decorative in painting was understood as an intersection of the German notion of ornament as meaningful linear design and the French conception of the decorative as a flat and agreeable arrangement of color. Anger carefully examines the emergence of an understanding of Klee’s work as decorative according to this conception between 1913 and 1917 and the artist’s renouncement of the decorative beginning in late 1919.

While Klee found his first professional successes based on his works’ decorativeness, the category was experiencing a radical shift in status in the early 1910s, going from a positive model of pure form to one associated with the denigrated realms of femininity, the domestic realm, and commodity culture. Most notable in this regard is the renunciation of the decorative by the German critic Karl Scheffler. In 1898, Scheffler wrote about his delight in finding some of the most satisfying examples of pure form in the abstract arrangements of silk and lace for women’s garments in department store window displays. Ten years later, in his notorious book Die Frau und die Kunst (Woman and Art, 1908), Scheffler’s position is one of complete rejection of the decorative. On the surface, Scheffler’s turnaround looks like straightforward anxiety over the growing commercialization of artistic products and the lack of interest in quality goods on the part of the public. Anger’s contribution here is to highlight how Scheffler’s dismissal of the decorative is premised upon his displacement of this anxiety onto “Woman.” What Scheffler had once championed as decorative, he now regarded as a debased, impoverished aesthetic particular to women and the home. Scheffler’s negative characterization of women’s inferior artistic abilities have been tied to the decorative ever since.¹

As Anger shows, Klee experienced the effect of Scheffler’s and other critics’ gendering of the decorative firsthand in 1919 when he was denied a teaching appointment at the Stuttgart art academy because the hiring committee, as he learned privately from Oskar Schlemmer, found his work to be too “feminine” (5; in a review from the same period, Klee was also attacked as Jewish and homosexual). In response, Klee signed with a new dealer, Hans Goltz, who with the artist’s participation launched a public relations campaign to revamp his persona and construct a new understanding of his work that excised the decorative. Goltz agreed to produce a major retrospective of the artist’s work the following year and supervised, again with Klee’s participation, the writing of the first major publications about his work. Although it is difficult to determine the degree to which Klee and Goltz’s joint efforts to salvage his career were calculated, Anger’s analysis demonstrates that the “Klee” presented in the retrospective exhibition and accompanying catalogue as well as three monographs from 1920–21 is in sharp contrast to the “decorative Klee” documented in exhibition records, reviews, and other archival evidence charting his career up to 1919. Anger’s analysis of the new story told about Klee and his work in the retrospective, its catalogue, and the monographs of 1920–21 is an authoritative analysis of the process of purification—that is, the purging of the decorative from modern art. In the case of Klee, central to this process of purification was the treatment of the artist’s two-week trip to Tunisia in 1914. Anger shows how all three monographs construct the trip as the site of the artist’s arrival as an abstract painter. “In these representations,” she contends, “Klee becomes the courageous, masculine adventurer, destined to master abstraction in a far-off land. The fact that pilgrimage, in which one finds oneself, is a standard trope of orientalism, ensures the story’s legibility and bolsters its ‘truth’-value” (153). Anger persuasively shows how this construction of Klee as a masculine orientalist replaces the feminine, decorative Klee. (In her conclusion, Anger shows how Matisse, another modern artist whose work is intimately tied to the decorative, also utilized the “oriental” to ward off the feminine associations of the decorative.) The “oriental and primitive,” as opposed to the decorative, she argues, “remained acceptable, indeed, became exceptionally feasible, as explanatory models, because the Western artist could be positioned as their master, their conqueror” (162).

Evidently the strategy of purification was successful, for in the fall of 1920, a year after the artist had been rejected by the Stuttgart art academy, Klee was invited to join the faculty of the Bauhaus. Yet, evidence suggests that Klee continued to pursue the decorative in art after 1920, albeit couched in terms acceptable to his colleagues and the German public at the time. Anger’s exploration in chapter 3 of the sharp contradiction between the image of Klee constructed in the 1920s and his actual practice and teaching at the Bauhaus challenges the long-standing view of Klee’s contribution to Bauhaus pedagogy. In fact, Klee directed the weaving workshop between 1927 and 1931, his last years at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Although official histories of the Bauhaus largely suppress Klee’s involvement with the weaving workshop, it is clear that he enjoyed a long-term, unofficial teaching relationship with the weaving students that began shortly after his appointment. Based on the notes of his women students in the weaving workshop, Anger demonstrates both the impact of his lectures on surface design for weaving and the reciprocal influence of weaving on Klee’s works from the Bauhaus period.

For scholars steeped in the modernist distinction between art and the decorative, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art offers a unique opportunity to consider the investment in the notion of purity essential to this distinction and the hierarchies of artistic practice, gender, and race it fosters. Above and beyond Anger’s book’s value as a revisionist history of Klee or a detailed history of the decorative’s rise and decline in the early twentieth century is its presentation of a long-overdue study that confronts the issue of hierarchy in the arts under modernism and its consequences.