Top drawer

A brass-inlaid rosewood table, three of four Seasons bursting with colour and a rare pair of powder-blue vases should draw every eye at the forthcoming Decorative Art Fair in London

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THE hierarchy that emerged during the Renaissance, when the fine arts—sculpture and painting—were elevated above mere crafts, even when the latter were labelled the 'decorative arts', survived for a remarkably long time. For the first 95 years of its existence, the Royal Academy would not admit mere engravers to full membership, unless, like Francesco Bartolozzi and Giovanni Battista Cipriani among the founders, they could be presented as painters, rather than mere mechanicals. In their 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Tommaso Marinetti and Antonio Sant'Elia declared that 'the decorative must be abolished', a sentiment echoed four years later by the Constructivists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner with their rejection of 'the decorative line'.

William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement had advanced the cause of equality, but, until comparatively recently, the word 'decorative' was still used by some as a very British reverse compliment: he or it 'is very decorative'. In the 1970s, feminist American art critics began the fight to rehabilitate the word, helped by professional interior decorators, even if those in the US liked to enhance their status by terming themselves 'designers'.