The chair, the poster, the flag and the teapot were all designed by somebody. Here is why calling that work decorative was a mistake, and how to look at it properly.

In 1915 the Newark Museum put toilets in a gallery. They were porcelain sanitary wares from the Trenton Potteries Company, and they were the centrepiece of an exhibition called Clay Products of New Jersey, mounted by the museum’s founding director, John Cotton Dana. Dana had started the museum six years earlier, in 1909, while still running the Newark Public Library, and he had a settled view of what a museum in a manufacturing city was for. A good department store, he once wrote, was closer to a real art museum than most art museums were.

He was not being funny. He was making the argument this article is about: that the division between art you look at and art you use is an administrative convenience of the nineteenth century, not a fact about objects. A Trenton washbasin was designed. Someone decided its curve, its glaze, its proportion, and how it would feel under a hand at six in the morning. Calling that decision something other than art requires a definition of art that most of the world has never used.

Applied art is what you get when artistic decisions have to survive contact with a customer. That constraint is not a handicap. It is the discipline of the field, and it is why applied art tends to age better than the fine art of the same decade: an object that had to work is an object that was tested.

Where the split came from, and why it is younger than you think

The vocabulary of “fine” versus “applied” art is largely Victorian, and it has an address. In 1851 the Great Exhibition filled the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park with manufactured goods from across the world, and the British organisers came away convinced that their own industrial design was being beaten by France’s. The response was institutional. Out of the exhibition’s profits came a Museum of Manufactures, opened in 1852, which grew into the South Kensington Museum and was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899. Its founding purpose was not contemplation. It was to give British designers and manufacturers better models to copy.

So the modern applied-arts museum was invented as a trade school with a collection. That origin explains both its strength and its blind spot. The strength is that these institutions took seriously objects nobody else was collecting: chairs, textiles, cutlery, wallpaper, type. The blind spot is the hierarchy that came bundled with them, in which the painting is the art and the chair is the “decorative” or “applied” version of art, a step down, a lesser thing that happens to be useful.

That hierarchy is not universal and it is not old. For most of European history the painter belonged to a guild alongside the saddler and the goldsmith, and in a great many cultures outside Europe the distinction was never drawn at all. The word we should be suspicious of is not “applied.” It is “mere.”

Flat and solid: the two families of applied art

Practitioners usually sort the field by dimension, which sounds like a technicality and is actually a useful distinction, because the two families fail in different ways.

Two-dimensional applied art

Graphic design, typography, illustration, printed textile, signage, interface design. The common problem is legibility under pressure: the work has to be understood quickly, often by someone who is not paying attention, frequently at the wrong size and in bad light. A road sign, a paperback cover, a pill bottle label and a hymn board are all solving versions of the same problem.

This is why two-dimensional applied art is so unforgiving of self-expression in the wrong place. A type designer who makes an elegant lowercase g that a tired reader misreads as a q has failed, however beautiful the g is. The craft is in the constraint.

Three-dimensional applied art

Ceramics, glass, furniture, metalwork, jewellery, product design, industrial design. Here the additional problem is the body. A three-dimensional applied object is used, carried, sat on, gripped, washed, dropped. It has to be strong enough, light enough, and pleasant to touch, and those three requirements pull against each other and against cost.

The test of a three-dimensional applied object is not how it photographs. It is how it behaves at the fiftieth use. A teapot that pours a clean stream and stops without dripping is doing something a great many handsome teapots cannot do, and the difference is invisible in a picture.

Architecture: the applied art you cannot walk away from

Architecture is the most consequential applied art, for a reason that has nothing to do with prestige: it is the only one you cannot decline. A book you dislike can be closed. A building you dislike is imposed on everyone who passes it, for as long as it stands, which may be two hundred years.

That permanence changes the ethics of the work. An architect is making decisions on behalf of people who were not consulted and are not yet born. It also changes how architecture should be judged. The question is not only whether a building is beautiful now, but whether it will be adaptable later, whether it will weather well, and whether the street is better for its presence.

New Jersey offers an unusually clear case study, because so much of its architecture was built for industry and then had to become something else. The Ballantine House in Newark, completed in 1885 for a brewing family, is now part of the Newark Museum of Art, and you can walk through it as a set of restored period rooms: a private house that became a public exhibit of how such a house was furnished. Paterson’s mill buildings, raised around the Great Falls to run silk and locomotive works on water power, have been reused for housing, studios and offices. In both cases the building outlived its purpose and was saved by being useful again. That is the applied-art test applied to architecture.

Fashion: the applied art with the shortest memory

Fashion is the applied art most often denied the title, usually on the grounds that it is commercial and that it changes. Both objections apply equally to architecture and to printing, and nobody uses them there.

What makes fashion genuinely distinctive is that its material is a moving body. A garment has to be resolved in three dimensions from a flat pattern, and then it has to keep its shape while the wearer walks, sits, reaches and sweats. The technical core of the discipline is cutting, and cutting is closer to engineering than to drawing.

Paterson, New Jersey, was called Silk City for a reason: by the late nineteenth century it was the centre of American silk manufacture, and the design work done in its mills fed the garment trade of New York. The city’s 1913 silk strike is remembered as a labour story, which it was, but it was also a story about an industry whose product was design. What the mills sold was not thread. It was pattern, weave and finish, decided by people whose names are mostly lost.

Decorative arts: the same subject under an older name

“Decorative arts” and “applied arts” overlap so heavily that many museums use them interchangeably, but the words carry different weather. “Applied” points at function. “Decorative” points at surface, and it is the term that has done the most damage, because it implies that the object’s design is something added to it rather than the reason it exists.

In practice, “decorative arts” is the curatorial name for objects made for use in domestic and ceremonial life: ceramics, glass, metalwork, furniture, textiles, jewellery, and the fittings of a room. It is a department name more than a category of thought. Knowing that is useful, because it tells you why a museum’s decorative-arts wing is organised by material rather than by idea, and why so much of the best writing about these objects comes from specialists in a single substance.

From clay to glass to metal: what the materials decide

The most reliable way to understand an applied object is to ask what its material would not let the maker do. Each substance imposes its own argument.

Clay

Clay is the most forgiving material at the start and the least forgiving at the end. It can be pushed into almost any form while wet, and then the kiln decides. Shrinkage, warping, crazing and colour shifts in the glaze are all determined after the maker has stopped working. Ceramics is therefore a discipline of prediction.

Trenton was one of the great American pottery cities, and the reason was geological and logistical at once: clay, coal, and a canal. Walter Scott Lenox founded the Ceramic Art Company there in 1889, aiming at something American potteries had not seriously attempted, which was porcelain good enough to compete with Europe’s. The verdict arrived in 1918, when the company delivered a 1,700-piece state service to the White House for Woodrow Wilson. Flemington had its own line in the same story through Fulper and later Stangl. Almost none of this production survives as manufacturing in New Jersey today, which is itself part of what a decorative-arts collection now records.

Glass

Glass is worked hot and thinks in seconds. The maker is negotiating with a material that is cooling while being shaped, which is why glassmaking is a team craft with a choreography, and why so much of its vocabulary is about timing.

American glass begins in South Jersey. Caspar Wistar established his glassworks at Alloway, in Salem County, in 1739, and it is generally credited as the first commercially successful glass factory in the Thirteen Colonies. It turned out bottles, window glass and tableware, and it also blew the glass globes Benjamin Franklin used in his electrical experiments, which is a fair summary of what applied art does: it supplies the equipment other people’s ideas need. The industry it started ran for two centuries through Millville, Glassboro and Bridgeton, and the successors of that tradition are still visible at WheatonArts in Millville, where the Museum of American Glass sits beside a working glass studio.

Metal

Metal is the material of the second life. It can be cut from something that was already something else, and that quality has made it the medium of some of the most inventive applied art anywhere.

The clearest example in the Caribbean is Georges Liautaud. Born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, in 1899, he worked for the Haitian American Sugar Company repairing the rail track that served the mills, and ran his own forge, where among other things he made crosses for the local cemetery. In 1953 DeWitt Peters, the American painter who had founded Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944, saw the crosses and pressed him to work as a sculptor. Liautaud began cutting figures from flattened oil drums, and the technique spread through Croix-des-Bouquets until metalworking became the trade of a whole district. He died in 1991.

That sequence matters for the argument of this article. Liautaud did not move from craft to art. He was making funerary ironwork, which is applied art of the oldest kind, and then somebody with a gallery decided to call the same hands’ work sculpture. The objects did not change. The category did.

Fibre

Textiles are the applied art most likely to be dismissed and most likely to carry information. Weave structure, dye source and motif are all evidence, and because cloth travels and wears out, textile history is a history of trade routes and of what people thought worth repairing.

Decoration as identity: the part the word gets wrong

If applied art is design that had to survive contact with a customer, decorative art in most of the world is design that had to survive contact with a community. Its patterns are not ornament in the sense of surplus. They are notation.

Haitian drapo Vodou, the sequinned and beaded ceremonial flags of the temples, are the case that makes this obvious. Made on cloth with thousands of sequins and beads, they carry the vèvè of a specific lwa and are carried in ritual before they are ever seen by an outsider. They are now collected by museums and sold in galleries, which has produced a real and unresolved tension: the same object is liturgical equipment in one room and decorative art in another. Nothing about its making was decorative.

The same point holds across the Caribbean and far beyond it. Carnival costume in Trinidad, Jonkonnu masquerade in Jamaica, the beadwork of southern Africa, the textiles of the Andes and of West Africa: in each case the object is functional within a system of meaning, and the European vocabulary of “decorative art” registers only its surface. That vocabulary is not neutral. Historically, calling a culture’s most demanding work “decorative” was a way of not calling it art, and the consequences are still visible in how collections are catalogued and how insurance values are set.

This is the point at which a magazine that works in four languages and looks at New Jersey, Haiti and the wider Caribbean at the same time can say something an encyclopedia cannot. The fine-versus-applied hierarchy is a local European invention that was exported with a great deal of confidence. It is worth knowing where it came from, and it is worth declining to use it as a ranking.

How to look at an applied object

Five questions, in order. They work on a chair, a poster, a knife, a flag or a building.

What problem is this solving? Name it in one sentence. If you cannot, you are looking at ornament, which is fine, but judge it as ornament.

What did the material refuse? Every object shows the negotiation somewhere. Find the place where the maker gave ground, because that is where the real decision was made.

Where does the hand go? Handles, edges, thresholds, the first line of type. Applied art puts its best thinking where contact happens, and its laziest thinking where nobody touches.

What would it cost to make one more? Unit cost is an aesthetic force, not just an accounting one. It explains repetition, standard sizes, and most of the twentieth century.

Who is the object arguing with? A form is usually a response to the form before it. Find the thing it is refusing to be, and the design starts to read as a sentence rather than a shape.

Where to start, specifically

If you want to see the argument of this article in one afternoon, go to the Newark Museum of Art and walk the Ballantine House first, then the decorative arts galleries. The house gives you objects in the rooms they were made for; the galleries give you the same kinds of object isolated and labelled. Noticing what changes between the two is the whole subject.

For glass, WheatonArts in Millville, where you can watch a piece being made and then find its eighteenth-century ancestors in the museum a few steps away. For ceramics, look for Lenox and Stangl in any New Jersey historical collection, and read the marks on the underside, which are a manufacturing record hiding in plain sight.

For the Caribbean material, start with a single object rather than a survey: find a Liautaud figure cut from an oil drum and look at the edges, where the shears stopped. Then find a drapo Vodou and look at the back, which is where the sewing tells the truth.

And if you want one habit rather than one destination: turn the next well-made object in your house upside down. The base is where applied art keeps its notes.

This article consolidates and replaces nine shorter pieces previously published separately on applied art, decorative arts, two- and three-dimensional applied art, architecture and fashion as applied arts, decorative arts and cultural identity, and the forms of decorative art from ceramics to jewellery. The earlier URLs now redirect here.

Sources for dates and attributions in this article: the Newark Museum of Art and the Newark Public Library on John Cotton Dana and the 1915 exhibition Clay Products of New Jersey; the Victoria and Albert Museum on its founding as the Museum of Manufactures in 1852; the Lenox company and contemporary records on the 1889 founding in Trenton and the 1,700-piece 1918 White House service; published histories of the Wistarburg Glass Works, Alloway, Salem County, founded 1739; and the Haitian Art Society on Georges Liautaud, 1899 to 1991, and his encounter with DeWitt Peters in 1953.