The Modern Home
Its Origins
I HAVE been whiling away part of a wet week (ye gods—all nine of you—a wet week by the sea, in Italy, in May ! What an excuse for Lars Porsena !) by exploring the bookcases of this place. Next to a volume of stories; by a titled authoress, In which culture pulled level with morality, was a book entitled The Dining Room, published in the middle of the last century. Here, I thought, is something to point 'a pretty moral. But the first paragraph I read amazed me :
" All modern dinnerware fails in the matter of form in the 'rare cases when it-is even good in colour. The tops and handles of vege- table dishes and .tureens seem invented for the purpose of being tortured into every wild and unsuitable shape. They are tied on with bows and ends of ribbon, green, pink and blue. They are made to imitate canes and rustio wood work. They are shaped as if com- posed of cord and tassels, or strings of beads. They are, in fact, everything they ought not to be—ugly, useless, dirty and easily broken."
Was there then a voice crying in the wilderness even at that time—and in a series with so sinister a title as " Art in the Home " ? Greatly intrigued, I cast about a bit more. The illustrations were not reassuring; but I found a pretty half- dozen pages dealing caustically with the, various flowers of imagination into which the china ornament manufacturers of that time blossomed. At any rate, the comparison in views would be interesting. I settled down to read from the beginning, ignoring the pictures and trying to stifle a
wince at the word " artistic."
The authoress's creed was much the same as ours : the abolition of the inessential and the fitting of everything for its purpose. There was but one omission : she made no mention of the beauty to be found in every material by using it rightly. Instead, she laid great stress on the importance of " artistic " ornament. Exactly what her standards were I was unable to discover. Try the following extracts, in which she is discussing sideboards, and see if you are any more successful :
" The so-called ' baronial sideboards' we sometimes see, especially in exhibitions, are to be carefully avoided. They are of enormous size and are covered with carving. A frieze at the back represents Queen Elizabeth on a progress. A stag's head surmounts a high pediment. Every panel has a head projecting from it. Cornucomse full of impossible fruit form the framing of a gigantic mirror. . ..."
Or, worse still :
" After a time you may meet with some inlaid or carved panels. Take out your deal panels and put the old ones in their stead. Again, you may meet with some fat well-rounded balustrades. If you can find some old balustrades from the altar of some restored church they will do extremely well—beautifully moulded work being constantly turned out of our churches. Saw them in half and place them against the plain front at either side of the cupboard doors. A good set of brass handles and scutcheons may often be picked up, and will set off the drawer fronts and cupboard locks. In short, nothing that is good of its kind comes amiss, and your only difficulty will be to know when to leave' off. You must take care, however, to leave off in good time, and not to overload your sideboard with mere ornament for its own sake."
The seed is there—but how malformed its- fruit ! And why is the " baronial sideboard " inferior to the other one ? It would at least have the merits of consistency and homo- geneity. Perhaps the editor of the series had said to her : " And you must give them something they can make for themselves." But in spite of lapses in taste and strange inconsistencies we can see in this book the first uncertain steps towards " The Modern Home," the beginning of the revolt against superfluous ornament.
We can trace the various stages in the development of domestic art somewhat as follows. At first, each article was made for utility alone. Its form was conditioned by three factors : its work; the skill of its makers, and the materials at their disposal ; but its existence was entirely due to the first of these. Then came the artist, and began to decorate things. His earliest efforts would be crude, and were probably ignored by the rest of his tribe, while he, himself, then as now, was no doubt considered a poor sort of fish by the " huntin', shootin' " majority. In time, however, his work began to draw attention and, helped perhaps by association with magic, came to be eagerly sought. Richer men commissioned his efforts ; even among the sporting element it was presently the thing to admire art. There were set-backs, of course ; rude periods
when he was shouldered aside in the press to action ; but he emerged again, usually with increased powers. Then came the third phase : in many instances the object was made purely as a vehicle for his skill and not for any purpose of utility. Miracles of embellishment were achieved by workers in all the arts. I have just been refreshing my memory of some of them in Florence and Siena. The introduction of maChinery brought with it the -fourth phase : it became possible to make duplicates—or, rather, debased copies of beautiful ornament at great speed and little cost. Everyone could have all the ornament he wanted wherever he wanted— and he had it. Manufacturers vied with each other in pro- ducing extravagances wilder and wilder in form and colour. Classes unused to forming a judgment of artistic values found themselves the proud owners of objects which they believed to be beautiful. Taste in all classes was injured by the glut of spurious art. The Victorian Age had come.
Primarily, I think, the modern movement is a reaction from this ; but it is very much more. It is not content to decry false ideas of beauty and put nothing in their stead ; it is even more constructive than destructive. Confronted by a revolu- tion in the processes by which almost every article is made, it draws from these processes and their results new canons of beauty which may perhaps be found the purest, as they are the most austere yet attained: I am warned by a philosopher friend against the " functionalist " doctrine that perfect utility results in 'beauty. This he dismissed 'as a -fallacy, and quoted, if I remember rightly, a sewage-farm as• an example. He may be right. I am not a trained philosopher, nor am I an authority on sewage farms ; but, in that case, it seems that we need a subdivision of beauty into beauty of form and beauty of function, with some new word for the latter. I can see no reason why the perfect sewage farm should not be beautiful : I have • already seen from trains more than one having something of the charm of a formal garden. But such beauty would at first sight appear to be of a different order from that of a statue by Michelangelo, which has no obvious function but to exist. This difference is reduced when we consider the statue as having a definite space to fill. Compare the bronze copy of his " David " with Cellini's " Perseus," both of which I saw within the same hour in Florence. The former is magnificently placed in a great open space over- looking the city, and, most emphatically, "-comes off " (apart from an incongruous pedestal). The second, equally supreme as a work of art, does not—because it is badly placed under a loggia. It has an impossible function to perform, and thus loses almost all but technical value, except to the artistic snob or hypocrite.
Take now the beauty of function. This is not always obvious ; either because we find it difficult to rid our minds of the association of ornament with beauty, or because the function is not yet performed in the best possible manner. I saw lately two struts, some thirty feet long, whose function was to brace a water tower. Until quite recent years these would have been made of steel girders, and would not have appeared beautiful. The ends, which bear the smallest stresses, would have been—quite unnecessarily—as thick as the middle where the maximum stress occurs. In ferro- concrete, as I saw them, the section tapered gradually off towards each end in proportion to the decreasing stresses : the result was a thing of undoubted beauty. If these example, do not entirely bridge the gap between " functionalism " and " expressionism," they show that it is not so wide as might be thought. They show, too, how a work of apparently pure art is to be regarded in the modern home not for itself alone, but as a part—though possibly a most important part of a consistent whole. The functionalist is steadily losing ground with his theory that nothing is needed but stark fulfilment of purpose. Beautiful though such work can and—in my opinion —must be, there will always be room for purely decorative additions ; and these, used in the modern manner, gain both from their paucity and from their supreme fitness to their surroundings.
G. M. BOUMEHREY.
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