WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN AND E.W.TRISTRAM

Festival Titling typeface by Phillip Boydell

I misrepresented William Rothenstein’s views on design teaching in my last post, commenting on his association with the arts-and-crafts colony in the Cotswolds and his appointing E.W.Tristram, a medievalist, to the post of professor of design at the RCA. Rothenstein wanted to modernise design education at the College and was well aware of new developments on the continent.

After having been in post at the RCA for a while, Rothenstein recorded his impressions. In a memorandum to the Board of Education, he wrote in 1921:

I hope I have your support in looking on the College as a centre which serves, not so much to give a vocational training, as to give each student, whether he intends to be a simple designer of cotton fabrics or an ambitious painter or sculptor, the best general education through the arts. Some commercial men hold that an industrial designer does not require so complete an education as a more ambitious artist. But I feel sure that Board considers this to be a short sighted view, and that well educated designers will finally prove of greater service to British industry than less well educated men.

Much of the work in the Schools of Pottery, of Painting and Decorating and of Metalwork is too unexperimental and derivative. No consistent attempt has been made to deal with the interpretation of the contemporary world in design and execution. A wrong understanding of the spirit which made mediaeval art so vital persists at Kensington, and the research work towards the discovery of new subject matter and new treatment, so noticeable on the Continent, seems to have ben wanting. It is important that we do not fall behind the Continental industries, and the freshness of design, execution and subject matter which s characteristic of the best French, German and Austrian work has not been sufficiently encouraged and sought for at the college, in my opinion.

Rothenstein recommended E.W.Tristram, faute de mieux, for the post of professor of design on the resignation of Anning Bell.

For some time I thought it would be possible to find an artist as renowned as Professor Bell to undertake the direction of the most important school of the College. But the movement started by William Morris and his friends seems to have spent itself. I know of no younger men associated with the arts and crafts society endowed with the wide culture which was, and still is, characteristic of Morris’ immediate disciples. It is true that a new life Is stirring among the younger painters and craftsmen. But this movement, which had its origins in France, has not yet taken firm root in this country. Of the present men associated with traditional English craftmanship and design, I know of no-one more capable and scholarly than Mr Tristram. His patient and profound study of English wall painting – in fact of every kind of English painting – has at last won for him a unique position among his contemporaries.

Ernest Dinkel poster for London Underground

Noting Tristram’s shyness, Rothenstein recommend the appointment of Paul Nash, Ernest Dinkel and Philip Boydell to work with him in the design department. Nash is well-known. Dinkel was a bold poster designer for the London Underground and Boydell designed the Festival Titling typeface used in Festival of Britain publications. Tristram’s main work was in medieval wall painting, and although Rothenstein referred to his work in modern textile design, it is still questionable whether he was the best representative of design education for the Gorell committee.

THE GORELL REPORT

The Gorell report, Art & Industry, was a milestone in the design debate in the decade before the Second World War. The Board of Trade set up the Gorell committee to consider “the production and exhibition of articles of good design and everyday use”. Its result was the Council for Art and Industry, a precursor of the Design Council.

Fiona MacCarthy has perceived the long arm of the Arts and Crafts Movement reaching as far as the Festival of Britain and Terence Conran and it certainly influenced the Gorell report. Of the committee’s nineteen members, three were artists or designers, five were industrialists and the largest cohort were politicians and public officials. Lord Gorell was a Liberal politician, an author and journalist. The industrialists were: A. E. Gray, the Staffordshire pottery manufacturer, who employed Susie Cooper and Gordon Forsyth; C.H. St John Hornby, the successful head of W. H. Smith, who was also President of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society; Charles Richter, director of Bath Cabinet Makers and a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society; Howard Robertson, a leading architect and later President of the RIBA; and H. Trethowan, president of the china and glass retailers association. It’s clear that the business representatives were chosen for their arts-and-crafts bent and that they were untypical of businessmen in Britain.

The arts representatives were Roger Fry, E. W. Tristram, professor of design at the RCA, Clough William-Ellis, now known mainly for his whimsical creation at Portmeirion, and the art writer Margaret Bulley, author of Have You Good Taste? The committee looked at the problem of design from an arts-and-crafts perspective, saw it essentially as the “divorce of design from execution” that had taken place during the industrial revolution and sought “a reunion of Art and Industry”. It focused wholly on consumer goods and it considered design as good appearance rather than product engineering.

The committee’s brief limited it to devising a standing exhibition of good design in London but it was still able to embark on an analysis of what it considered to be the causes of poor design, reflecting the views of the committee members and possibly the civil servants who appointed them, who lay under the shadow of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its suspicion of the factory, mass production, the division of labour and machinery and its preference for the work of the artist craftsman. Yet there were other currents of design thinking in Britain at the time. The Design and Industries Association had taken modest steps towards a modern continental approach to design, particularly that of the Deutscher Werkbund. There was an emerging design profession committed to the needs of industry and the idea of essential design rather than applied art. And in 1930 Milner Gray had founded the Society of Industrial Artists. But those currents were not represented.

A pressing matter for industry while the committee was sitting was world recession and the lack of competitiveness of British goods. There was a long-standing view that our exports suffered because of poor design compared to continental goods, particularly French and German goods. Germany had developed the arts and crafts into modernism under state sponsorship of the Werkbund, while Britain compromised with what Michael Saler has called “medieval modernism”, modernism mitigated by the ideas of Ruskin and spiritual uplift, and there was no comparable public subvention of design.

C. H. St John Hornby, director of W. H. Smith, at his Ashendene Press

Gorell urged training in principles of design for everyone – manufacturers, craftsmen, buyers and sellers – so that they could appreciate good design when they saw it. Its ideas about improving design were confused with the idea of improving taste, which was a long-standing feature of the art-and-industry debate. Fry in his memorandum to the committee said that many manufacturers had lost contact with educated taste. Gorell insisted that that the new central design body it recommended should be staffed by “persons of taste and cultural standards” – by which it had in mind persons such as themselves.

The report lacks recommendations for improving art education at secondary and tertiary level. The presence of Tristram on the committee may have made its members reluctant to criticise the RCA. Rothenstein had shaken up the RCA, but his main improvement was in the teaching of fine art and his ability to change the design school may have been compromised by his association with the Cotswolds arts-and-crafts colony. When he toured continental art schools in the 1920s, the Bauhaus was not on his itinerary. Tristram himself was a medievalist and was probably not the best representative of design education for deliberations of this sort.

Herbert Read was critical of the Gorell Report at the time, and a modern writer, Tanya Harrod, has described it as muddled. But Nikolaus Pevsner described it as “the first official document to emphasize the vital importance of improvements in British industrial art and to confirm the urgent necessity of immediate action.”

WILD BEASTS AND TAME

We rushed to watch Becoming Matisse on BBC TV the other day because of his association with Colliure, the seaside town in the southeast corner of France that we like so much.

The programme made much of Matisse’s 1905 portrait of his wife (above), which caused a stir because of its wild colours and introduced fauviste into the vocabulary. Matisse was irritated by the incomprehension he’d caused but sort of enjoyed it.

I said earlier that 1905 was the high tide of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. The difference between London and Paris at that date was great. Arts and crafts in the continent were straining towards modernism but the followers of William Morris had become timid now he wasn’t there to shake them up. The Studio magazine was comfortable with the paintings of the New English Art Club but not with the new French art. Fry’s Fauvist exhibition revolutionised the style of his little Bloomsbury circle, but they too became stuck and didn’t change in forty years. The art schools were stuck in arts-and-crafts mode right up until 1945, when Britain finally woke up to the need for competent industrial designers.

It wasn’t until the Tate’s retrospective in 1960 that Picasso ceased to be regarded as a charlatan in Britain and began to be taken seriously as an artist. But Matisse, whom Picasso admired, was ahead of him: in 1905, when Matisse was sticking up two fingers with his Woman in a Hat, Picasso was still in his Rose Period.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN AND WILLIAM MORRIS

Evelyn and William de Morgan, c.1900

Sarah Hardy of the William de Morgan Foundation gave a lively talk on Facebook the other day about de  Morgan and William Morris. I thought I knew about them but I learned a lot.

The character of the men came out well. Morris liked to cajole artists into working in crafts he didn’t know about, and as he never turned his hand to pottery he persuaded de Morgan, who had begun as a painter and stained-glass artist, to take it up. I liked the account of Morris bounding up the stairs in de Morgan’s home in Cheyne Row, shouting “Bill!” at the top of his voice, and of the different personalities of the two men – de  Morgan’s nickname was “Mouse” – who nevertheless were lifelong friends

De Morgan was the Arts and Crafts potter par excellence, but in 1907 his business failed and he turned to writing. His success as a novelist was great – he was classed with Dickens – and the obituaries overlooked his ceramics.  Disappointed, Evelyn de Morgan asked May Morris to remedy the omission. She wrote this memoir of de Morgan in The Burlington Magazine.

Hard to credit but de Morgan’s pottery was out of favour for many years, but who, I wonder, reads his novels now? Few are available. An American bookseller is asking $750 for a first edition of his most famous, Joseph Vance, but I’m going to try A Likely Story  on Kindle (99p).