In the womb, the human embryo passes through the entire phase of evolution corresponding to the evolution of the animal kingdom. And when the human being is born, his sensory impressions are like those of a new-born puppy. His childhood passes through all the transformations that correspond to the history of mankind. At the age of two he sees like a Papuan, at the age of four like a Teuton, at six like Socrates, at eight like Voltaire. At the age of eight he becomes aware of purple, the colour that the eighteenth century discovered. Because before then the violet was blue and the indigo snail-red. Even today, physicists are pointing to colours in the solar spectrum that already have a name, but which will be known only to the human beings of the future …

The child is amoral. For us, so is the Papuan. The Papuan slaughters his enemies and devours them. He is not a criminal. But if modern man slaughters and devours someone, he is a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his rudder, in short everything that lies to hand. There are prisons in which 80 per cent of the inmates have tattoos. The tattooed people who are not in jail are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats.

The urge to ornament one’s face and everything that lies to hand are the primal origins of visual art. It is the babbling of painting. But all art is erotic.

The man of our own times, who follows his innermost urgings to smear the walls with erotic symbols, is a criminal or a degenerate. What is natural in the Papuan and the child is a manifestation of degeneracy in modern man. I have made the following discovery and given it to the world: the evolution of culture comes to the same thing as the removal of ornament from functional objects. I thought that by saying this I was bringing joy into the world, but the world has not thanked me. People were sad and hung their heads. What oppressed them was the realization that they would not be able to produce any new ornaments. What, those things that any Negro could do, which all peoples and ages before us have been able to do, we alone, the people of the nineteenth century, are not capable of doing them? Those things that mankind in earlier millennia made without ornament were heedlessly rejected and cast into oblivion. We have no workbenches from Carolingian times, but any trash revealing even the smallest ornament was collected and cleaned, and magnificent palaces were built to house it.

And we walked sadly from one display case to the next, ashamed of our impotence. Every age has had its style, and ours alone should be denied one?! And by style they meant ornament. And I replied: weep not. Behold, this is what constitutes the greatness of our age, that it is not capable of producing a new ornament. We have overcome ornament, we have fought our way through to ornamentlessness. Behold, the time is at hand. Fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will gleam like white walls! Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven! Then fulfilment will have come.

But there are Black Elves who will have none of it. Humanity should go on wheezing in the slavery of the ornament. Human beings had come so far that ornament produced no feelings of pleasure in them, so far that a tattooed face did not increase aesthetic feelings as they did in the Papuan, but reduced them. So far that they could take pleasure in a smooth cigarette box, while they refused to buy an ornamented one at the same price. They were happy in their clothes, and glad that they didn’t have to go around in velvet breeches with gold laces like monkeys at a funfair. And I said: behold, Goethe’s death chamber is more glorious than any Renaissance splendour, and a smooth piece of furniture more beautiful than any carved and inlaid museum pieces. Goethe’s language is more beautiful than all the ornaments of the Nuremberg baroque poets.

The Black Elves heard all this with displeasure, and the state, whose task it is to halt the development of their peoples, took the question of the development and reception of ornament and made it its own. For woe to the state whose revolutions are fought by court counsellors. Soon a sideboard was seen in Vienna’s Museum of Art and Craft, called ‘The Rich Catch of Fish’, soon there were wardrobes bearing the name ‘The Enchanted Princess’, and other similar names referring to the ornament with which these unfortunate pieces of furniture were covered. The Austrian state saw its task as precisely to ensure that footwraps did not vanish from the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It forces every cultured twenty-year-old man to spend three years marching in footwraps rather than machine-knit footwear! Because in the end every state proceeds from the assumption that a lowly populace is more easily governed than a cultured one.

Well, the ornament plague has state recognition in Austria and receives a financial subvention. But I see it as a backward step. I cannot accept the objection that ornament enhances a cultured person’s joy in life, I cannot accept the objection couched in these words: but what if the ornament is beautiful! Ornament does not enhance my joy in life, nor does it that of any cultured person. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choose a piece that is quite smooth, not a piece depicting a heart or a babe in swaddling or a knight covered from head to toe in ornaments. A man from the fifteenth century will not understand me. But all modern people will. The advocate of ornament believes that my urge for simplicity is like self-mortification. No, my dear professor from the School of Arts and Crafts, I am not mortifying myself. I find it tastes better that way.

The terrible damage and the devastation wrought by the awakening of ornament in aesthetic development can be easily got over, because no one, not even a state power, can halt the evolution of mankind! It can only be delayed. We can wait. But it is a crime that human labour, money and material are thus wrecked in economic terms. Time cannot heal that damage.

The pace of cultural development suffers from stragglers. I may be living in 1912, but my neighbour is living in around 1900, and that man over there in 1880. It is unfortunate for a state if the culture of its inhabitants extends over too long a period of time. The Tyrolean peasant lives in the twelfth century. On the occasion of the Jubilee festival procession we learned with horror that we in Austria still have tribes from the fourth century. Lucky the land that no longer has these stragglers and marauders! Lucky America! Here, even in the cities we have unmodern people, stragglers from the eighteenth century, who are horrified by a painting with violet shadows, because they can’t yet see the colour violet, who prefer the taste of a pheasant that the cook has worked upon for days and who like a cigarette-box with Renaissance ornaments better than a smooth one. And what is the situation in the countryside? Clothes and household equipment all belong to earlier centuries. The peasant is not a Christian, he is still a heathen.

These stragglers slow down the cultural development of the nations and of humanity. In economic terms, when two people living side by side, with the same needs, the same demands on life and the same income, belong to different cultures, we can observe the following process: the man of the twentieth century becomes richer and richer, the person from the eighteenth century poorer and poorer. I assume that both live according to their inclinations. The man of the twentieth century can cover his needs with much less capital, and thus make savings. The vegetables that he likes have been cooked simply in water and have then had a little butter poured over them. The other man likes them only if honey and nuts have been added, and if someone has cooked away at them for hours. Ornamented plates are more expensive, while the other man likes his food only from white crockery. One makes savings, the other runs up debts. It is the same with whole nations. Woe betide that a nation is left behind in its cultural development. The English are growing richer while we grow poorer …

Even greater is the damage that a productive nation suffers on account of ornament. As the ornament is no longer a natural product of our culture, and hence represents neither backwardness nor a manifestation of degeneracy, the ornament-maker’s work is no longer paid appropriately. The situation in the crafts of wood-sculptors and wood-turners, the criminally low prices that knitters and lacemakers are paid, are well known. The ornament-maker must work for twenty hours to achieve the income of a modern manual worker who works for eight hours. Ornament as a rule makes objects more expensive, but sometimes it may happen an ornamented object with the same material costs, and which has demonstrably been worked on for three times longer, is offered for half the price that a smooth object costs. The lack of ornament leads to a shortening of working time and a rise in price. The Chinese carver works for sixteen hours, the American worker for eight. If I pay as much for a smooth vase as for an ornamented one, the difference in working time belongs to the worker. And if there were no ornament at all – a situation that may occur in millennia to come – a person will need to work not eight but only four hours, because half of the work is now still devoted to ornaments.

Ornament means squandered manpower and thus squandered health. It has always been so. But today it also means squandered material and both together mean squandered capital.

As the ornament is no longer organically connected with our culture, ornament is no longer the expression of our culture. The ornament that is made today has no connection with us, it has no human connections, no connection with the world order. It is not capable of development. What happened to the ornament of Otto Eckmann,¹⁸ what to Van de Velde’s?¹⁹ The artist at the tip of humanity was always full of power and health. The modern ornamentalist, however, is a straggler or a pathological phenomenon. He himself repudiates his products after three years. Cultivated people find them unbearable straight away, and others only become aware of how unbearable they are after a number of years. Where are Otto Eckmann’s works now? Where will the works of Olbrich²⁰ be in ten years’ time? The modern ornament has no parents and no descendants, has no past and no future. It is greeted with delight by uncultivated people to whom the greatness of our age is a book with seven seals, and repudiated shortly afterwards.

Humanity is healthy, and only a few are sick. But those few tyrannize the worker, who is so healthy that he cannot invent ornaments. They force him to make the ornaments they have invented in a great variety of materials.

The turnover of ornaments leads to a premature devaluation of the product of labour. The worker’s time, the material used, are wasted capital. I have expressed it thus: Let the form of an object last for as long, that is, let it be bearable to us, for as long as the object lasts. I will try to explain it like this: a suit will change its form more often than a valuable fur. A woman’s ballgown, meant only for one night, will change its form more quickly than a writing-desk. But woe betide that we must change the desk as quickly as a ballgown, because the old forms have become unbearable; then one will have lost the money spent on the desk.

Ornamentalists know this very well, and Austrian ornamentalists try to make the best of this shortcoming. They say: ‘A consumer who has a piece of furniture that he finds unbearable after only ten years, and is therefore forced to buy new furniture every ten years, is better than one who only buys an object when the old one has become unusable through wear. Industry needs it. Millions are kept in employment by the rapid turnover!’ This seems to be the secret of the Austrian economy, because how often do we hear, at the outbreak of a fire, the words: ‘Thank God, now the people have something to do again!’ Set fire to a house, set fire to the Empire, and everything is swimming in money and affluence. Make pieces of furniture that one can put on the fire in three years, metal fittings that need to be melted down after four years because one cannot achieve a tenth of the labour and material costs, and we become richer and richer.

The loss does not only affect the consumer, it affects the producer above all. Today ornament on things which thanks to development have escaped being ornamented means squandered manpower and desecrated material. If all objects lasted as long aesthetically as they do physically, the consumer could pay a price for them that would make it possible for the worker to earn more money and work fewer hours. For an object which I am sure I can fully use and exploit, I will happily pay four times as much as I would for another that I could buy. I happily pay forty crowns for my boots even though I was offered boots in another shop for ten crowns. But in those crafts which languish under the tyranny of the ornamentalists, good or bad work is not evaluated. The work suffers because no one can be bothered to pay their true value.

And that is fine, because these ornamented things only seem bearable in the shabbiest execution. I can cope more easily with a fire when I hear that only worthless trash has been burned. I can be glad of the tat in the Artists’ House, because I know that it will be put up in a day and taken down in a day. But throwing gold coins rather than pebbles, lighting a cigar with a banknote, pulverizing and drinking pearls seem unaesthetic.

Ornamented things only seem truly unaesthetic when they are executed in the best material, with the greatest care, and have demanded long hours of work. I must take responsibility for having demanded quality work. The furnishing of the Apollo Candles Factory Depot in Vienna in soft wood, colourfully stained, which was carried out fourteen years ago, does not look nearly as unbearable as Professor Hoffmann’s contemporary works. Or what Hoffmann’s works will look like in fourteen years. But the café that was opened at the same time as that commercial business will only look unbearable when the woodwork comes apart.

The modern person who considers ornament wholly as a sign of artistic excesses from past times will immediately recognize the tormented, laboriously wrought and morbid aspect of modern ornaments. No ornament today can be produced by someone who lives on our cultural level. The same cannot be said of people and nations which have not yet reached this stage.

I preach to the aristocrat, I mean he who stands at the top of humanity and yet has the deepest understanding of the urgency and necessity of that which has not yet come into being. The Kaffir who, following a particular rhythm, works into the fabric ornaments that only become apparent when one pulls them apart, the Persian knotting his carpet, the Slovak peasant-woman making her lace, the old lady teasing wonderful things out of glass beads and silk – all of these he understands very well. The aristocrat lets them get on with it, he knows that these are their sacred hours. The revolutionary would go and say, ‘It’s all nonsense.’ Just as he would pull the little old woman from the wayside cross and say, ‘There is no God.’ But the atheist among the aristocrats raises his hat when he passes a church.

My shoes are covered all over with ornaments that come from spikes and holes. Work that the cobbler did, and which he wasn’t paid for. I go to the cobbler and say: you demand thirty crowns for a pair of shoes. I will pay you forty crowns. By doing that I have raised this man to a spiritual height for which he will thank me through work and material whose goodness will far surpass the extra payment. He is happy. Seldom does happiness enter his house. Here stands a man who understands him, who values his work and has no doubts about his honesty. In his mind the finished shoes already stand before him. He knows where the best leather is to be found at present, he knows which worker he will entrust the shoes to, and the shoes will have jags and holes, as many as an elegant shoe has room for. And now I say: but I have one condition. The shoe must be quite smooth. Now I have plunged him from the most spiritual heights into Tartarus. He has less work, but I have taken all his joy from him.

I preach to the aristocrat. I can bear ornaments on my own body when they bring delight to my fellow man. They are my joy. I can bear the ornaments of the Kaffir, the Persian, the Slovakian peasant-woman, the ornaments of my cobbler, because they have no other way of reaching the summits of their existence. We have the art that has supplanted ornament. Once the day’s toil and labour is over we go to Beethoven or to Tristan. My cobbler cannot do that. I must not take his religion from him, as I have nothing else to put in its place. But anyone who goes to the Ninth and then sits down to draw the pattern is either a fraud or a degenerate.

The lack of ornament has taken the other arts to unimagined heights. Beethoven’s symphonies would never have been written by a man who had to walk around in silk, velvet and lace. Anyone who walks around in a velvet jacket today is not an artist, but a buffoon, or a house painter. We have become finer, subtler. The people of the herd had to distinguish themselves with various masks, modern man does not need clothes as a mask. His individuality is so terribly strong that it is no longer expressed in items of clothing. The lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power. Modern man uses the ornaments of former and foreign cultures on a whim, as he sees fit. His own inventiveness is concentrated on other things.