Historical and British Wallpapers at the Suffolk Galleries.
ART
MR. SACHEVERELL SrrwELL's introduction to the lavish catalogue of this elegantly conceived exhibition, voices contempt for the use of distemper and colour wash as wall covering. " Simplicity," he says, " in interior decoration avoids the virtues and obscures a multitude of sins." I dare say he is right, providing that the wall- paper he advocates, together with the other furnishings, are of suffi- ciently fine quality, and providing he can stand a specifically "decorated " room in which to work, relax, eat, and possibly sleep. The real trouble lies in the fact that in these days quarters are cramped for most of us. If you have sufficient rooms you can move from one to another as it suits your mood, but in the average flat, cottage, maisonette, or Portal which constitutes, and will con- tinue to constitute our living accommodation, you look at the same walli, the same carpet and the same furniture, day in and day out for years. Simplicity in these circumstances has obvious virtues,. where the pocket prevents perfection in complexity.
Anyone who has lain ill in a boarding house or in a suburban villa must know that nothing can produce a more grisly emotional condition than a patterned wallpaper, a floral frieze or a lincrusta dado. What depression results from counting the flowers, what dementia is the product of repeated ornamental birds, and the curious illusion of motion produced by vertical stripes makes suicide or escape the only alternatives. It can with justice be said that this argues a bad design, but I have spent a month working in a room papered with an -original William Morris pattern of intertwined leaves, an exquisite and elegant design which eventually drove me to sitting in the garden, early in a freezing March. The mood inspired by a wallpaper, good or bad, is pervasive and powerful. Give me the dark green flock of the room designed by Cecil Beaton on a summer morning, but save me from it on a winter's afternoon ; give me a splendid damask—a fine background for pictures—after a large lunch but not after a thick night. Let it be a new and interesting paper, say by Graham Sutherland or Edward Bawden, or a delicate floral design by A. H. Williamson or Betty Tanner if I am fit and well, but let me not run mad counting blobs, leaves, or grassheads if I am in bed with 'flu. Give me a country mansion and paper all forty rooms with work from this exhibition and I will suit my choice of a room to my frame of mind, but if I must live in two rooms let me obscure the multitude of a landlord's sins with a single colour, and hope for the best.
The exhibition itself is excellently chosen and displayed to per- fection_ The historical section is a pleasure and there is great ingenuity, perhaps a little too much ingenuity, in the designs by contemporary artists. My major criticism of this section is that many of the designs are either too dominant or too fussy. I suggest that a variation of tone within a single colour is the most successful method of approach to a modern paper, and that in this particular form of design the artist's personality be strongly self-controlled.
Nothing could be more admirable and heartening than that the design of necessities should be so studied and so shown, and that so many living artists should be asked to contribute to the solution of such problems. The Central Institute of Art and Design is to be congratulated, but there remains, apart from those disadvantages already stated, one further difficulty to be overcome. For years it has been possible to obtain excellently designed paper, textiles, crockery, and indeed all the assembled requirements of the home, but at a price which prohibits the majority from enjoying these benefits. Simplicity itself has been too expensive. The hideous pattern used to be cheaper than even the unadorned, because the pattern covered the defects in the material, whether paper of cloth. For years the retailer has insisted that he gives the public what it wants—superfluity of debased ornament, cheaply produced. To do justice to the original designs in this exhibition, excellent production and a low price will be required. Given these, this exhibition will
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