PRESENT LAUGHTER.(Dagobert Peche, crafts and design, Neue Galerie, New York, New York)

The most exciting retrospective of the current New York art season presents more than four hundred objects of craft and design--furniture, fabric, wallpaper, women's fashion, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and jewelry, along with works on paper--by a nearly forgotten Viennese named Dagobert Peche (pronounced "Pehka"), who died of cancer in 1923, at the age of thirty-six. The show, which runs through February 10th, fills the top floor of the Neue Galerie, the lustrous little museum of early-modern Austrian and German art on the Upper East Side which is barely a year old but already feels like an indispensable New York cynosure. A hallway hung with wallpaper samples--the first thing a visitor sees--commandeered my attention with the instantaneous authority of great art. Tensile linear and bold floral patterns overlie glowing, subtle colors, which dissolve the wall surface into deep radiance. The rhythmic play of the patterns is like visual music. I was stunned. What do I know or, normally, care about wallpaper? Especially wallpaper that, like everything else by the prodigiously inventive Peche, appears to banish all human values save that of gorgeous caprice.

Peche's achievement memorializes a now obscure period in which decorative indulgence was radical and combative. His career blazed in the grim years of the First World War, in Austria, when he became the guiding spirit of the vanguard design firm Wiener Werkstatte. He turned that institution and its leader, Josef Hoffmann, away from tendencies toward stripped-down formalism. The change was probably inevitable, given the retrenching tastes of high-bourgeois patrons in Austria at the time. Still, no one was prepared for Peche's crusading brilliance. In a famous polemic of 1908, "Ornament and Crime," the Viennese architect Adolf Loos had argued that ornate decoration was a grotesque relic of humanity's unwholesome past. For Peche, however, ornament was everything. He once outraged Loos by covering apples on a tree in gold leaf, thereby doing to nature roughly what his passion for embellishment had done to the architect's axiom of functionality. He exalted uselessness.

Peche made chairs whose legs are as massive as a rhinoceros's. One could sit on them, or not. One could also pour liquids into his glassware, but that would be beside the point, which is to enhance patterns with transparency. His hectically decorated display cases would overwhelm any objects inside them, except his own. Pity the poor flower that tries to maintain its natural aplomb in one of his exuberantly distended vases. His gilded mirror frames colonize the space around them with brainstorming zeal. His jewelry--ivory diadems!--announces the arrival of its wearer like a train's headlight in a tunnel. His bric-a-brac, in silver or gold, is intricate without fuss, as instantly satisfying as fireworks. When he drew, he often glued little gold stars onto the paper, perhaps with ironic self-approval. His sensuous and eclectic stylizations in every medium--a Pentecost of visual languages, including that of his particular hero, Aubrey Beardsley--might seem archly decadent, but they don't feel decadent. Peche's artistry vibrates with life. It radiates optimism--not for a utopian future but for the endurance of present joys.

Peche's manner is intentionally insubstantial, even haphazard. Individual objects yield little to contemplation except wonder at the easy economy of their eclat. Consider the bird-shaped candy box, silver with coral eyes, that was chosen for the cover of the show's catalogue. (The image comments wittily on Peche's revival of ornament: the peacocklike fowl turns its head and gazes backward.) The piece's effect of dazzling opulence actually involves quick, simple procedures, such as the creasing and crimping of three cut-out, overlaid silver sheets to represent an elaborately feathered tail. One feels that almost anybody might have done it, for Peche's aim was never to advertise his skill. If God is in the details, his God is affable and easygoing.

"He was pale and ...