Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Grotesquerie

Long before there was Mackenzie-Childs, as in Victoria and Richard, there was Dagobert Peche. The eccentric mixing of black and white geometrics with bright colors, the layering of pattern on pattern, the ideas taken to exaggeration and beyond - it's all there, in every conceivable medium. You could furnish an entire home with nothing else, although the result would be hectic.

When the Austrian designer Dagobert Peche (1887-1923) died of a malignant tumor, at first his illness was blamed on his damp, derelict apartment. Photographs taken by friends, who hoped to convince the authorities to aid the ailing artist, show a water-stained, caving ceiling, and an equally hole-pocked floor, so the (mis)diagnosis is easy to understand. What jars is the contrast or coexistence of the smart black and white geometric designs on the warped cabinetry, the accents of jaunty color amid the mildew. Grotesque was the word that came to me.

How curious, then, to discover that Peche had credited the graphic style of Aubrey Beadrsley for awakening him to the grotesque possibilities of ornament.

Peche joined the Wiener Werskstaette in 1914 and became its director in 1916. His specialty - aside from everything, it seemed - was the totally designed interior, something about which Peche had distinct views.

"It would be a blessing for every woman to have a presentment, then to shut them away alone with only beauty, with no sound, with heavy curtains, gold chandeliers, with candlelight now flickering gently, now flaring. I think that is where they were all born, for the batik curtain, for white-and-gold furniture, for rooms with infinitely high ceilings, for delicate ribbons and silk. "

The quotation is typical of Peche's writing, moving between tenses, creating temporal confusion. Just as in the objects Peche designed, proportions are distorted for effect.

What surprises is that things work, at least if you acquiesce to the Peche aesthetic. The blue showcase has its legs wrapped in silk cords, as if things need to be held together, as perhaps they do. A black and gold lacquer cabinet seems to have wandered out of an opium den with extra pairs of legs. You might question why the covered silver bowl has four pagodas sticking out of the lid until you notice the improbably matching pagoda-legs.

While a student in in Zurich, Peche had painted the fruit on an apple tree with gold leaf, causing his friend Adolf Loos to decry the ruining of an entire season’s crop. But eccentric experimentation was what spurred Peche's designs. No surprise then, that he considered Daphne, the goddess who mutates into a plant, to be his muse. After a time spent studying in Paris and absorbing the 18th century Rococo that he saw around him, Peche seems to have begin his pursuit of the marriage of harmony and distortion.
Peche married the suitably eccentrically named Petronella Daberkow in 1911; the couple had two daughters, Doris and Viola.

Towards the end of his life, Peche fretted about the narrowness of his audience among the well-to-do. He wrote an occasionally coherent manifesto for the reorganization of the Wertstaette along lines he had long eschewed. As usual, it is difficult to know what Peche had in mind. This is the same man who described the legs on his furniture as 'organic' expressions of form: "ornament seems to grow naturally from the material." The corollary was that his ornamentation had not been "imposed by human thought." What could he have meant? It is for the imposition of his quirky human thought on materials of all kinds that we still marvel at what Peche wrought.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos are from the Neue Galerie, New York City.