Adolf Loos believed that “ornamentation was crime.” Although his beliefs were radical, his underlying message that, moderately, the modern man ornamentation is excessive is plausible and a recurring theme through art history. Most explicitly seen is from Professor Muzaffar’s lecture about Loos himself. Loos, through his beliefs, started a reform in art. Following Loos, and with the help of the introduction of “more primitive” cultures allowed for abstraction and the overall simplification of the form to become a new art style. Yet, this need for simplicity isn’t only shown through newer styles of art. The modern man refuses to acknowledge that the “classical” style is an illusion created by ourselves in order to ground tradition. The modern …show more content…
Though there are many stages which led to this, it all started with Loos and his belief that ornamentation is crime. Contributing to the movement of modernism is Picasso. He is believed to have drawn from the african culture Dogon for both have a strong sense of geometricism and abstraction and ordering of the form; the simplification of the form. The goals of Picasso, and Braque, is to “combat the european tradition of representation.” After the influence of the two, one arrives at the works of Mondrian and Malevich. Following Mondrian’s work, one sees Mondrian start to take on the influence of analytical cubism and approach an object systematically. Once again opposing traditional representation, he centers his grid, and later evenly grids the entire canvas, to take away the sense of being grounded. Mondrian takes this concept even further to arrive at pieces such as “Composition with red, blue, black, yellow and gray” in 1921. In Bahaus, after the start of modernism or abstraction, artists attempted to simplify the form as much as possible and to only portray its function. Unlike its influences for its creation, Bahaus differs in that it aims to make its students “step out of their culture to discover the universal principles.” Yet the goal was to portray the subject’s essence and the essence alone. So then the influence of Bahaus leads to work like Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway. There is a content shift along with the simplification of the form, the removal of the