Abstract

Art

The author's sense is that people owe the invidious distinction between the fine and the decorative arts, as people do so many divisions both hidden and obvious that define attitudes toward the things of life, to the French Revolution. It was painter Jacques-Louis David, functioning as artistic commissar, who decreed the division, classifying furniture-making as an inferior art in contrast with the high arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. He did so on two grounds. That order of furniture which might compete with painting in terms of skill, ingenuity, expressive power and beauty he associated with the discredited values of the ancient régime. This, if true, means that aristocratic patrons did not especially discriminate between painters and furniture-makers of the highest quality, and hence did not respect a boundary greatly attractive to David, which exalted artists as natural aristocrats, so to speak.