Design for Modern Life
BY G. M. BOUMPUREY.
THERE are signs that the year 1933 will prove to be a turning point in the course of British commercial art. As a result perhaps of the Gorell Committee's report on " Art in Industry " (which was in itself but the climax to many years' hard work by various devoted bodies and individuals), it is at last dawning on those elusive entities, the Powers that Be and the Man in the Street, that design is of importance to others beyond artists and the arty—more—that loud design may actually be good business. To the cynic who would argue that it is merely a case of the drowning man clutching at a straw and that in these days of depression our manufacturers are ready to try anything, even art, in the hopes of improving their sales, one can reply that the case of Sweden, among other countries, goes to prove that good design offers considerably more support than any proverbial straw. Be that as it may, the public will only have itself to blame if at the end of the present year it has not formed a clear idea of what good design can be. June and July will see an exhibition of " Industrial Art in Relation to the Home " at Dorland House in Lower Regent Street ; and for April, May and June the B.B.C. has arranged a series of discussions on " Design in Modern Life," in connexion with which there will be various illustrative exhibitions all over the country.
Those who wish to get a bird's-eye view of the position of design as it stands to-day cannot do better than turn to the Studio Year-book of Decorative Art for 1933.* To see so many, excellent examples as are illustrated in its pages would take many weeks of exploration and a highly specialized topographical knowledge. Here they are all assembled within one cover, and one may trace in a pleasant hour or two the progress of the various branches of design throughout the year and note which tendencies are persisting and which are dying out:. AS the survey is world-wide in range, it affords an opportunity of eomparing the work of British designers with that of their fellows in other countries. , So far as interior decoration-anct-equipmerit go, they appear to fiaVe reached the stage of knowing what they want to do and are now settling down to do it. The adherents of traditionalism and hand-craftsmanship make a very small showing, and— even more significant—it would seem that several of them are delicately shifting their ground so as to conform as imper- ceptibly as possible with the general trend. If the evidence of this miscellany is to be accepted, the school of design ineptly called modernist has won the day and, though this will no doubt cause pain to those whose opinions are no longer pliant, it is all obviously as it should be. The circumstances of life to-day call for a period of simplicity no less for reasons of economy than that we may recover from the nausea consequent upon an age of bad ornament and over-decoration. and assimi- late all the machine has to teach us. When this simplicity has been explored to the uttermost, no doubt we shall be ready to move forward towards elaboration once more— but with a renewed and proper respect for the essentials of construction. It is possible, too, that the increasing leisure of the masses will by then be partly occupied in various forms of art work, and the result may be a real renaissance of crafts- manship. But the time for this is not yet ripe. The world is poor and the world is sadly muddle-headed. In spite of the * Decorative Art, 1933. (The Studio. is. Od.)
sneers of the reactionary it is groping its way towards the simplicity it needs without knowing it. To take an extreme case : tubular steel furniture, which had to meet considerable opposition in this country, has now established itself beyond all doubt and a large number of firms is engaged in its pro- duction. It is cheap, comfortable and easily-cleaned ; more- over, it conforms aesthetically with what the present day requires—and so no jests about operating-theatres have been
able to hold it back. In this book it figures in dozens of illustrations, consorting happily with furniture of all kinds. One can only regret, therefore, that the editor has seen fit to pass a weak remark about chairs looking like bicycles." One might as reasonably expect Jews to eschew brick houses because of memories of the bondage in Egypt which the material must hold for them. Indeed, there are hints in both the short prefatory articles that the editor's sympathies lie rather with the arts and crafts school and that he deplores inwardly the direction in which design is running. Nor are his statements of fact always accurate. " The flat-roofed concrete house " is not of its very nature a ` uniform' house " and it can most emphatically " be given individual character." He appears to treat bricks and concrete as antitheses, not realizing that there is no reason why concrete houses should not be faced with bricks as is done widely in Holland. Even more strongly to be condemned is his approval of those architects who are imitating in other materials the forms dictated by the use of concrete, thus evolving a bastard art that can have no possible value.
It is presumably unavoidable that the reduced amount of building should have affected the output of our younger architects more seriously than that of the older men whose positions are more assured. To this•cause must be attributed the extreme dulness of the examples of. British architecture illustrated. But one misses mention of Wells Coates and Amyas Connell, two of the younger men whose progress is most worth watching and who have both made contribu- tions to design in the past year which should not be ignored. It is amusing, too, to notice in the pictures of another house, whose only claim to modernity can be the year in which it was built, the same steel table dragged into two pictures to give a spurious effect of modernism. But these are small faults to find with a large and beautiful book, containing hundreds of admirable illustrations and published at a remarkably low price. Those who wish to see the direction in which design is moving, those who are afraid of modernism, and those (like the lady who wrote to me from Canada the other day) who want to know whether and how good furniture of the traditional type can be fitted into a modern house— all such people cannot resolve their doubts more satisfactorily than by examining this book. It embraces every department of the home, from the architecture to the dinner service, and almost every illustration is of value. In particular, among the work of British designers, I would commend the music- room by Brian O'Rorke, on page 48, the chairs and settee by Arundell Clarke (which were recommended on the " Modern Home " page some months ago), on page 58, the bunk bed by Betty Joel, page 68, and the room by Angus Grant, on page 117. One of the best things in the book is the rug by Robert Lallemant, on page 111, but it will be a strange taste, indeed; - that can find nothing to admire.
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