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“An expensive variety of wallpaper,” John Updike once scoffed, describing a painting by Richard Diebenkorn.¹ This use of wallpaper as a sneer embodies much of the medium’s historical ambiguity. For centuries, there was no clear hierarchy between the decorative and fine arts. In the sixteenth century, for example, Albrecht Dürer designed wallpaper motifs with the same seriousness as his woodcuts, considering everything he made to be ‘fine art’ intended for wide and inexpensive distribution.² However, with the Industrial Revolution came impersonal mass decoration, and the idea gradually emerged that decoration was less valuable. Since wallpaper became broadly available, its status has been debated: is it background or foreground, surrogate or the real thing, art or decoration?³
A similar tension is reflected in the history of painting. The Symbolists and Fauvists deliberately chose a decorative style in order to move beyond mimetic representations of the visible world an…
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“An expensive variety of wallpaper,” John Updike once scoffed, describing a painting by Richard Diebenkorn.¹ This use of wallpaper as a sneer embodies much of the medium’s historical ambiguity. For centuries, there was no clear hierarchy between the decorative and fine arts. In the sixteenth century, for example, Albrecht Dürer designed wallpaper motifs with the same seriousness as his woodcuts, considering everything he made to be ‘fine art’ intended for wide and inexpensive distribution.² However, with the Industrial Revolution came impersonal mass decoration, and the idea gradually emerged that decoration was less valuable. Since wallpaper became broadly available, its status has been debated: is it background or foreground, surrogate or the real thing, art or decoration?³
A similar tension is reflected in the history of painting. The Symbolists and Fauvists deliberately chose a decorative style in order to move beyond mimetic representations of the visible world an…
