A New Exhibit Of 'Maximalism' Shows How Artists Trounced Modernism And Made Art Inclusive In The 70s

The prettiest exhibition of 1976 was probably also the most subversive. Ten painters exhibited unabashedly ornamental artworks at the Alessandra Gallery in downtown Manhattan. To a casual passerby, the paintings might have appeared to be innocuous wall covering made for a luxury hotel or condo. But Ten Approaches to the Decorative – the inaugural showing of a new movement called Pattern & Decoration – was nothing less than a full frontal assault on 20th century Modernism.

Although none of the participants became as famous as the artists they sought to supplant, and P&D is now largely forgotten outside of academia, the consequences of their offensive remain pertinent today, as can be seen in an important new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. Titled Less is a Bore, the show explores "maximalism" in many of the guises it's taken from the '70s through the present. Works by P&D artists such as Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon are shown with those of prominent contemporary artists ranging from Pae White to Stephanie Syjuco to Virgil Marti.

Pattern & Decoration had significant predecessors: artists and designers who rebelled against the austerity and minimalism of "serious" art. The two most important, both of whom remained active beyond the brief tenure of P&D, are Robert Venturi and Andy Warhol.

Trained as an architect, Venturi laid much of the theoretical groundwork in his classic 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. "I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure'," he wrote, "compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' ambiguous rather than 'articulated'.... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality." More specifically, Venturi advocated vernacular architecture and design, especially as found in Las Vegas, as a manic counterforce to the rigid Modernist grid. He had no patience for arch-Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous maxim, "less is more". His retort, "less is a bore", not only serves as the title for the ICA exhibit, but also encapsulates his derisive view of orthodox architecture.

Warhol matched Venturi's intellectual rhetoric with masterful deployment of irony. The great fear of Abstract Expressionists was that viewers would consider their paintings decorative, and defenders of their art spared no amount of bluster arguing against this possibility.  "That such pictures should escape collapsing into decoration, mere wallpaper patterns, is one of the miracles of art in our age, as well as a paradox that has become necessary to the age's greatest painting," proclaimed the critic Clement Greenberg in 1948. Warhol's response to this attitude – if not Greenberg specifically – was to exhibit wallpaper as artwork. His Cow Wallpaper, exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in the same year as Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, effectively declared an affinity for the decorative as an act of Pop perversity.

Coming a full decade after Venturi's book and Warhol's exhibit, Pattern & Design should by all rights have been retrograde. But the truth is that, with a few notable exceptions (such as the zany sculptures of Lucas Samaras), the art world remained stubbornly closed-minded.  As Kozloff later recalled, "pattern painting was a reaction against the pieties of modernist thinking." Moreover she saw "the politics of art as connected with larger politics" including discrimination against women and minorities. By embracing decorative traditions, sometimes realized through craft, Kozloff and her fellow P&D artists transformed a kind of contrarian avant-gardism – a game of Modernist one-upmanship – into a sincere bid for aesthetic inclusiveness.

In 1977, the critic John Perreault conjectured that Pattern & Decoration might become "more an art of the people than most forms of social realism". Although his prediction did not come to pass as he imagined, P&D fostered a more pluralistic community of makers. Those artists have indeed made art meaningful to a much broader public – bringing a whole new meaning to maximalism.