HE Bethnal Green Museum is an elegantly I glass-roofed pleasure
dome administered by the Circulation Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Department, which does Trojan work in education, has just set up a modestly presented but engrossing exhibition of `Half a Century of Modern Design (1900-1950),' international in scope but slanted strongly to- wards the British contribution. Confronted by this `British contribution,' it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, a large, much worn, carpet designed in c. 1918 by Duncan Grant, called Pool of Blood (a fine emblem for the domestic hearth), is so astonishingly up-to- date in its informal-abstract severity that it could easily hang in any current anthology of American painting at Kasmin's Gallery. On the other, a massive oak desk designed by Sir Ambrose Heal in 1929 goes right back to Victorian schizophrenia in its frightful attempt to reconcile tycoonery with the loftier sentiments of religion. A good desk for a P and 0 padre with shares in the company, if such an invincible character could exist. The proportions are massive and uncompromisingly angular, redolent of what I can only describe as `Gaumont-British modern' in their heavy plainness, punctuated by staccato outbursts of wedge-like decoration. Like a stentorian belch in the middle of a dull sermon. The accompany- ing chair, like a pulpit for a clergyman nervous of heights, completes the sumptuously ecclesiasti- cal image. The familiar note of Heal's own fur- niture as we know it is struck by the pale, unshiny wood: its surface refreshingly un- darkened or distressed after the oppressive gloom of earlier furniture by other designers. But it isn't.good enough for 1929 when Marcel Breuer's furniture of about the same period is considered. Sir Ambrose Heal, Sir Gordon Russell and others were still in the Arts and Crafts movement; Breuer was firmly inside the twentieth century. In the Stravinsky revival at Sadler's Wells the Tom Rakewell of Alexander Young flourishes with the same fullness, completeness and truth. Mr Young doesn't merely sing and act Rakewell. He is Rakewell, as outlined and defined by Auden's wry, tender text and Stravinsky's in- sinuating neo-classicism. A tenor which some years ago was apt to sound pinched at certain levels and under certain stresses is now rounded out, yielding richness as well as bite in, for ex- ample, the big tirade at the beginning of Act 2.
But it does not serve to discuss the singing and the acting as though they ran on parallel tracks. In this Rakewell singing and acting are indivi- sible. His despair-laden haltings and listings when dragged bedward by Mother Goose in the brothel scene were trebled in their effect by the timbre and curve of his love paean (the Cavatina) a scene earlier. In the churchyard, with Shadow cutting cards for possession of his soul, his 'I cannot think, dare not wish . .' was vocally as well shaped as could be. But, like the creep and
Sir Ambrose Heal's Desk
By BRYAN ROBERTSON
As to conducting, there was little to choose between the two nights. Bryan Balkwill's speeds and touch in The Rake were as sensitive and embracing as those of Edward Downes in the Verdi. From a seat farther back than last Decem- ber I found Boccanegra more cogent and pleas- ing to look at, though there are questionable moments still in the production, including an almost blank stage for the `Lacerato spirito' post- lude, where a slow to-and-froing of townsfolk, as asked for in the stage directions, can be im- pressive. In the broad idiom he has justifiably adopted, Byam Shaw's touch in The Rake is in- fallible and counted, no doubt, for much in the excellence of Mr Young's performance. In both casts there were none to slap down and many I should have liked to praise. But this is an occa- sion for an extended salute to two male leads of a quality that should give English operatic
prestige a leg-up. CHARLES REID The 1916 furniture of the revered Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the architect, is nearer the spirit of the international modern style without finally touching it. It has a certain plain Scottish good taste, but lacks the passionate austerity of his foreign contemporaries—notably the Dutch architect-designers. Mackintosh was, of course, closely identified with the Art Nouveau move- ment, but his furniture, atmospherically, seems to relate more to the Gothic Revival than to the later movement or what succeeded it.
Here, a head-on collision between the Arts and Crafts movement—quickened by the exotic influx of Oriental art—and the first stirrings of twentieth-century simplification that the Con- structivists separated and resolved, produced some extraordinary work very much to present taste. This rapport is probably because the form of Art Nouveau comes essentially from a phase in art when all the usual rules were discarded and any strong, central guiding tradition dis- appeared. The result was a heady game without rules played at a time when society itself was satiated with materialism and enervated by a lack of constructive principles—the Edwardians summed it up. We are going through a similar period now, which is why a lot of modern painting and sculpture seems to reflect the heavily burgeoning amplitude of Art Nouveau, when slow-moving shapes had a disconcertingly flaccid, and thus ambiguous, energy. Louis Com- fort Tiffany, the American glass designer, was a genius in this realm: opulent and wholly at ease.
Mackintosh's prim furniture by contrast seems to be on another time-sequence and not wholly integrated: either with Art Nouveau or with the subsequent simplicity. He was a remarkable architect (the Whitechapel Gallery was the work of an associate), but his sense of form in furni- ture and decoration is unconvincing: half- hearted, too retrogressive, often confused. A chair in the Bethnal Green exhibition is really bad, with open arms squashed down, almost touching the seat. A yellow-decorated stool is better.
Leaving the other English exhibits, mainly tex- tiles, for a moment, three thoughts make me halt. One is the hard fact that the English have
not yet, with few exceptions, come to terms with the twentieth century. We are nostalgic for the past, socially and perhaps politically, and this shows at an obvious level in the general
run of furniture, china, glass and fabrics in any suburban store. The best modern design is still available tnly to a cultivated minority who can afford to pay for it. Some good modern mer- chandise is cheap, but you have to know where to find it. This shouldn't be so. Choice is limited by the lazy, opportunist and sadly restricted scope of the retailer's imagination. The second thought is that we fail to push ideas right through to logical conclusions which might disclose something new and conceivably better in the field of design, content too often to stop half-way: nostalgia sets in, fear of the future, and pious insulation. Sir Ambrose Heal's chair is a symbol of what I mean. As a kind of parallel, consider the fact that the first conception of a universal calculating machine was that of Babbage in Eng- land in 1832. Its first realisation had to await the work of Aiken in America a little over a century later. Last, we are now starved of ornament. Handbooks of ornament all stop at the turn of the century. We lack great decoration: possibly it appears only as an ebullient by-product of objects or art made with absolute conviction for a society certain of its ethics and its evolution. But we do have an inverted sense of luxury: a great white lobby will have a thin, recessed strip of black marble along the base of its walls —like a fur-lined coat. Lack of ornament and the need for disguised luxury explain a lot of abstract painting, with its glowing colour and silky surfaces.
The positive features of the exhibition are numerous enough to counteract these considera- tions. The fabrics put out by the Manchester cot- ton manufacturers in the 1930s are still fresh and lively, though I miss their extraordinary designs sold in Africa and India and never seen by the English except as precious remnants in a few connoisseurs' craft shops. Those deep indigos and other more brilliant—and unorthodox— colours and swirling patterns were unsurpassed. Only the benighted natives were allowed to have them. There are designs by Dufy for Bianchini- Ferrier, though not his best. Textiles designed by Vanessa Bell, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth are also represented, but are not a patch on other fabrics created by lesser-known names. Matisse is not shown in this section, and should be; as well as the designs of Francis Rose, or Ethel Mairet's work. But the excursion of well-known artists into industry, fabrics or whatever, has often been discouraging.
To end on the note of elation and gloom that the exhibition produces: the glass vases, bowls and plates of Tiffany are superb, though his spec- tacular lamps are conspicuously absent; and there is much to study by van de Velde, Lalique or Tchelitchev at random among the inter- national assembly. But the most solid English exhibit seems to be a case full of pots by Leach, Cardew, Staite Murray and others: impeccable, but in their archaism and Eastern inspiration dis- piritingly unauthentic. Modern design? A model of its kind, clearly labelled and set out, the show still needs a catalogue. All the V and A needs is time, and money, to carry on Prince Albert's intentions of bringing England up-to-date.
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