Stattler, Herbert: Spitzenwaren. Ein Album 1900-1954 With 38 drawings, Herbert Stattler explores a story that encompasses other and further histories. It is about the biography of a Stuttgart company that manufactured and sold lace. Stattler's drawings are based on the company's archive, offering a kaleidoscope of fragments of time that simultaneously reveal the history of textiles, technology, culture and consumption. Because it is about the history of handicrafts, Stattler's cycle deals not only with their techniques, but also with the production conditions of female homework. The social and economic history of the first half of the century thus extends into the album: the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists' seizure of power and the Second World War. However, the production of lace has more than just material and historical dimensions. Their patterns also reflect a good deal of both older and more recent art history. The development of the ornament can be observed from its rise in the Renaissance, its devaluation as mere decoration, even as a crime by Adolf Loos, to its emancipation as an aesthetic practice of autonomous form-finding. ger., offset print, embossed hardcover twinbinding, 168p, 9.4 x 13.4 inch, Leipzig, 2025, Spector Books Request of availability backnext