TRENDS IN DESIGN
Stg,—I have been particularly interested to read the correspondence in your columns on the influence of popular art on contemporary industrial design, because, as far as my experience goes, Britain is one of the few countries which completely neglects this aspect of her national culture, at least in its more recent manifestations. The French, by contrast, even during the war, managed to continue publication of the Imagerie Populaire series, a magnificently illustrated and scholarly production. Surely it is no accident that a country whose industrial art has set so high and so sophisticated a standard should derive inspiration from the humblest aspects of its national aesthetic. The Unites States, too, has devoted a special inquiry to its traditional art. To argue, as does your reviewer, that these things have no standards as art is to fall into the same heresy as those eighteenth-century purists who threw away the stained glass of Salisbury Cathedral, because, no doubt, it appeared "quaint rather than anything else " to contemporary highbrows.—I am, &c., 70 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris 6. JOAN RIFFIN.
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