The development course of decorative art of door head

The form of door decoration evolved from the original hanging signboard, which has a long history in China. About two thousand years ago, our ancestors recorded it. At that time, the expression was extremely simple, that is, combining the hanging signboard with the commodity name, and directly defining the business scope and content of the store, which made people clear at a glance. For example, using the gourd as a medicine storage vessel and as a symbol of a pharmacy and hanging it on the street or in front of the pharmacy is the original decorative art of the door.

Since the Tang Dynasty, lanterns have been popular in China and lit at night, which is a conspicuous form. The shapes of lanterns in all walks of life are also quite diverse. For example, lanterns hanging in restaurants are shaped like wine bottles. The number of lanterns is urgent and the colors are exquisite. The number of lanterns represents the level of the store (just like the "star" level of hotels today), and different colors indicate the characteristics of store management. At that time, when people went to restaurants, they always looked around for lanterns to find their own restaurants. There are also colorful flags embroidered with patterns or shop names as signboards, which are mostly used in hotels. This scene was described by Du Mu, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, in "Poems of Spring in Jiangnan". "Thousands of miles of Ti Ying are reflected in the river, and the water town is full of wine flags".

Zhang Zeduan, an outstanding painter in the Song Dynasty, wrote a realistic picture scroll The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, which truly depicts the prosperity of Kyoto, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty. At that time, all kinds of doorways, signboards and doorways in streets and shops provided rich materials for us to study the decorative art of doorways at that time. Foreign archaeologists have also found more than 1000 ancient Roman wall signs in the ruins of Pompeii. At that time, messy signboards were erected on the streets of ancient Rome, which made the originally narrow streets more crowded, even affected the city appearance and hindered traffic, so it was later stipulated that all signboards should be changed into fences. In the Middle Ages, doors became more and more decorated. For example, a shoemaker hung a shoe at the door of his workshop, a bakery owner hung an "8" shape similar to a bun, a hat maker hung a hat, and the inn was represented by a shield pattern. There are also three patterns embroidered by nuns representing cloth shops; One arm waved a hammer, representing a goldsmith's workshop; Three pigeons and a scepter represent textile mills. ...

At the beginning of this century, people used neon lights for the first time at the first international automobile exhibition held in Paris. A year later, a fashion shop in Paris's Avenue de Montreux was decorated with neon lights for the first time. Since then, decorating doors and facades with neon lights has become popular all over the world. In the United States, the design and manufacture of door decorations has long been a professional industry. Colet company was established in 1923, and it is one of the larger companies. They have factories casting copper, aluminum and neon lights, and more than 300 designers often cooperate with architects to create them. Many large enterprises in the United States, such as General Electric Company, Kodak Company and Meng Gaohua Mail Order Company, have designed and manufactured door decorations. In form, American door decorations tend to be three-dimensional, while in materials, there are enameled aluminum, plastic light boxes, neon lights and fiberglass, which can be described as varied and colorful.

The method of absorbing foreign forms to decorate the door head in China began in the 1920s. Decorating the door head with red, white and blue rotating columns is a typical example.