ART
The mixed summer shows are with us again; the art schools go through their paces. Most important of these latter displays is the exhibition, mounted with considerable panache by Sir Hugh Casson, of work done by students and ex-students of the Royal College of Art since its reorganisation five years ago, which may be seen for a few more days yet at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
There has always been a close connection between the College and the Museum. Four years after it was founded, however, it began to train teachers and soon lost sight of its original purpose, which was industrial design, until the major shake-up of 1947-8. Last year, of the fifty students leaving, thirty-five took jobs in industry, five became freelance designers and only eight went into teaching. Nowhere does happy surprise at this reversal of its unfortunate tradition seem to be greater than at the College itself. Great play is made of the students' practical outlook and the confidence with which they have come to terms with the machine. After all the money, talent and plant that have been poured into the College during the past five years, it would be a shocking thing were it otherwise. The main preoccupation of the College must be to place its graduates in jobs, but from the outside one cannot help wishing there were in this exhibition a few more signs of dash and devil-may-care, of ruthlessness and vulgarity and fierce fires of faith.
Consciously or unconsciously, the College seems to have set itself the task of re-introducing decoration into an industrial design left over-arid by functionalism (even, perhaps, of creating a national style of decoration). In this it shows the more romantic side of the design penny, the more austere and classical face being represented by the L.C.C.'s Central School of Arts and Crafts. The R.C.A. style is based on a series of fashionable shapes—the crescent, the tapering limb or line, the spike and the blob—and shows itself in fields as far removed from one another as sculpture, stained glass, industrial glass, commercial and graphic design. Unlike the only real existing tradition, that inherited from the Bauhaus, it is a style based essentially on the curve. To eyes accustomed to the former
it appears rich, a little sweet, terribly gracious living, well-bred and well-mannered, very upper-crust. Student typographers, for-example, prefer Profil or swash capitals to Gill Sans, and invitation cards for exhibitions to catalogues.
It would, perhaps, be unfair to stress overmuch a certain lack of gusto, for this is the central problem that faces design everywhere— how to reconcile an element of vulgarity with a modicum of good manners. There are some very excellent things to be seen at the V. and A, as well as some which belong in the bargain basement. Geoffrey Clarke and the other stained glass workers who are going to be responsible for the glass in Coventry Cathedral are by now well known; David Mellor, Geoffrey Bellamy and Gerald Benney show some admirable metalware, the re-introduction of china handles in Mr. Mellor's cutlery being especially noteworthy; Miss Pat Albeck's are among the better designs of some rather routine textiles; of the industrial glass, some simple, unaffected things by first-year students are very pleasing, and Geoffrey Baxter has a new line in intaglio decoration. Of the Painting School, William Lacey, Richard Platt and Jack Smith stand out; of the sculptors, most of whom are technically excellent but a little too fashionable, John
McCarthy, and Miss J. R. Gibson. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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