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Document Details : Title: De leugen van Victor Servranckx, behangpapierontwerper voor UPL (1917-1925) Author(s): STOOP, Eline Journal: Tijdschrift voor Interieurgeschiedenis en Design Volume: 41 Date: 2019 Pages: 107-120 DOI: 10.2143/GBI.41.0.3286033 Abstract : Notwithstanding Servranckx’s ambiguous attitude towards the decorative arts in general and wallpaper in particular, he has contributed greatly to Belgian wallpaper production in the interwar period. However, Servranckx’s wallpaper designs often tend to disappear into the background in (contemporary) literature and retrospectives. On the one hand, this might be due to the fact that wallpaper belongs to the so-called artes minores. These ‘minor arts’ generally receive less attention than painting and sculpture, which are considered artes majores or ‘fine arts’. On the other hand, a possible explanation might be Servranckx’s dissatisfaction with his own wallpaper designs, which he overstated to fit the typically ‘classic image of modernism’. When Servranckx refers to his time at UPL in his 1947 text or in the 1961 interview with Fonteyne, he especially emphasises the impact of the large tubs of colour on his personality and on his abstract avant-garde painting. In this way, he reduces his time at UPL to a ‘creation myth’, a formative period that merely served his abstract art. In addition, in his 1947 text Servranckx stresses that he wanted to introduce innovation, un assainissement (literally a sanitisation), in UPL’s production. He thereby reiterates what is said in the 7 Arts article of 1924, which introduced him to the reader. It is possible that the (unknown) author of the piece tried to shed a ‘modernist light’ on Servranckx’s activities at the wallpaper factory: Servranckx did not only design wallpaper, but managed to innovate wallpaper production (in line with modernist conceptions of wall finishes). However, this research indicates that Servranckx was particularly innovative in introducing an art deco colour range to UPL’s wallpapers. In addition, his early introduction of abstract (expressionist or futurist inspired) patterns to UPL as a precursor to the purely geometric motifs at the end of the 1920s can also be called innovative. Patterns such as De boomhakkers [The Woodcutters] and Zeenatie [Sea Nation] are invariably included in the literature precisely because they correspond to the typical image of Servranckx as ‘the abstract modernist’. They are nevertheless an exception in his wallpaper oeuvre, but are presented as emblematic examples in order to avoid the ‘modernist paradox of wallpaper’. |
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