Art
Flash in the Pan THE marriage between Art and Industry, so long and so loudly heralded in the aesthetic gossip columns of our newspapers, has at last taken place, and the proud parents have, presented their first-born to the world, cradled in all the splendour which Burlington House can muster. And lo I this child, on which the fairest hopes of a nation. were fixed, this child which was to begin a new era of the harmonious union of utility and beauty, this child, I say, is a monster. Not a mere dwarf, a slight and feeble creature so delicate that we can hardly hope that it will survive its youthful struggles, but a strapping, vigorous malformation ; not- a mere sport of nature, apparently, but a deliberately procreated deformity, inheriting a double portion of those vicious qualities which its parents had made such a show of abandoning.
Take the vulgarity of Tottenham Court Road, the sham modernity of Wigmore Street, the expensiveness of. Bond Street, some of the ability to display goods which is associated with Selfridge's, add to the whole thing a touch of the self- conscious pomposity which these goods feel at being under the impressive patronage of the Royal Academy, and you will have some picture of the Exhibition of British Art in Industry.
Previous exhibitions at Burlington House have always aroused a regret that such splendid works of art should be shown in the unworthy setting which the large but unhand- somely decorated rooms at Burlington House provide. This year the case is reversed. Immense sums and endless trouble have been expended on transforming the interior. of the build- ing so that the rooms are unrecognizable, but this lavish setting was only designed to receive this curious medley of ill-designed pots and pans.
The extreme bitterness which the present writer felt on his first visit to the exhibition was largely due to disappoint- ment. The prospects had seemed so fine. For months past art. ides and books had been pouring out in which sane principles for industrial art had been expounded. Industrialists, it was said, have at last realized the fundamental errors which were made in the last century. They have grasped the fact that in order to produce an object both beautiful and useful they must first consider the demands of utility and make certain that these are satisfied ; that beauty comes only by a proper direction of the production at this stage and is not something to be slabbed on afterwards in the form of inde- pendent ornament. After all these happy prophecies it was a shock to find in the actual exhibition that almost every quality which disfigured industrial objects of the nineteenth century was present here, disguised only to the extent of being brought up to date.
Even in the decoration of the rooms these vices are to be found. On the whole the rooms have been cleverly reduced to a manageable shape by the use of cloth hung across the ceiling, and most of the backgrounds for the objects displayed are inoffensive. In Room II devoted to glass, the decoration is even appropriate to its theme. It consists of a huge panel representing glass-blowing, designed by Maurice Lambert in black vitrolite, and supported by decoratixe panels in the same substance by Eric Ravilious and by a frieze of huge photographs of the various processes used in the production of glass, reminiscent of the method of decoration used in the Fascist exhibition in Rome. This is reasonable, but what is the point of the colossal glass construction in Gallery IX or of the " decorative feature " entitled Wings in Gallery VIII, both galleries being devoted to dress materials ?
For the vices in individual pieces we may quote the fol- lowing : for false ingenuity, the breakfast table slung from the ceiling in the specimen library (1261) ; for just being ten years out of date (even among English work), the whole room of posters ; for neglect of practical demands, the " marble- stuc " chairs to the garden dining-room (1266) from which cramp and rheumatism are the least that one could catch. In general the wholly simple objects alone succeedbottles, cutlery, and leather dressing cases. Of the more ambitious types, some of the dress materials, a little of the silver and much of the more straightforward pottery are serviceable. Industry in fact seems more successful without its helpmate.
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