Giulio Cesare Procaccini. Clockwise from top lef: St Matthew, St Paul, St Simon, St Thomas.
We saw Procaccini’s paintings of four Apostles in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, depictions of ordinary men, people from the street, as no doubt he wanted us to think of them. They were completed in 1621 and became part of the collection in around 1730. They’re part of a series of twelve, now dispersed, originally complemented by images of Christ and the Virgin, commissioned by the art collector Giovanni Carlo Doria. Procaccini was Bolognese by birth and Milanese by adoption. He is regarded as an artist of the late Mannerist/early Baroque style. These particular paintings are notable for their chiaroscuro and the exaggerated postures of the figures and his previous experience as a sculptor on the construction of Milan Cathedral no doubt influenced his pictorial style. What attracted me to them was their combination of dramatic intensity and stark realism.
Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Sir Galahad and the Ruined Chapel.
Tate hyped the Rosetti exhibition by presenting the Pe-Raphaelite Brotherhood as radicals, basing their judgement on the fact that they annoyed the establishment. “These young artists,” Tate said, “Aimed to overturn everything artists were being taught at the Royal Academy School. These teachings held up the Renaissance painter Raphael as the pinnacle of artistic achievement, but that the PRB saw as formulaic and backward looking. By going back ‘Pre-Raphael’ to medieval and early Renaissance painters, they planned to recapture what they saw as simplicity and truth in art.”
It would be fair to describe the PRB as reactionary rebels. Their rejection of art after Raphael is a preposterous prejudice that no-one can take seriously. Their representations of an imagined Middle Ages are silly, fey and cloying. They accelerated the Victorians’ medieval obsessions. They and the subsequent medievalising applied arts were driven by a gentlemanly distaste for trade and a refusal to accomodate to the changes taking place in society. Rosetti himself is the worst ever advert for the bohemian lifestyle.
Counter-intuitively, Pugin, the major ideologue of medievalism, anticipated modernist principles in his buildings, and the design ideas that emerged out of the 19th-century descendants of the PRB inspired the modern movement, which harnessed mass production to public welfare.
Bernardo Strozzi, St. Cecilia with the heads of Valerian and Tiburtius.
Cecilia, a Christian virgin, was forced to marry Valerian, but converted him. They and Valerian’s brother Tiburtius were martyred by the Emperor Alexander Severus. She is the patron saint of music, hence the organ and trombone. The National Gallery, London, has one painting by Strozzi, a master of the Genoese Baroque, but he is well represented in Genoa. Beheadings were a common theme in Baroque art, which was passionate and disturbing: David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, Salome and John the Baptist. This painting is in the Palazzo Bianco. Cecilia is historical but the details of her life and those of her husband and brother-in-law are imagined. Strozzi used the model for Cecilia more than once and she is recognisable in many of his paintings.
Pevsner praised the design of EKCO radios, the work of Serge Chermayeff and Raymond McGrath. “The shape of it was something completely new, nothing comparable existed, either in England or abroad.”
Of all the reports and initiatives of the 1930s design reform movement in Britain, probably the most convincing and informative is a book written by a German, Nikolaus Pevsner’s Industrial Art in England, published in 1937. It’s remarkable in many respects. Pevsner, who had been forced out of his university position by the Nazis, was new to England. His was a private investigation undertaken on his own initiative, although he had secured a position as a research assistant in the Department of Commerce at Birmingham University. He believed there was a need for a survey such as his because, if design standards were to be raised, one had to understand the design of consumer goods and how the design process worked in practice. It’s the kind of detailed and accurate survey that we later became familiar with though The Buildings ofEngland and it’s written clearly and elegantly in a language he’d only been using regularly for three years.
Pevsner had greater familiarity with the industrial art of Continental Europe than most English writers, and so he throws an interesting light on the question I’ve been considering: was British industrial design really worse than that in continental Europe, as design reformers had been saying for a hundred years, or did the idea spring from a British inferiority complex and was it spread by a replication error – something that one person copied from another and then repeated and passed on?
The first thing to be said is that Pevsner strives to produce detailed evidence for everything he says and masters a large mass of detail, giving examples from manufacturers in England, Europe and the USA. He does, however, rely partly on the authority of others. He judged that 90 per cent of English industrial products were, in his phrase, artistically objectionable and to support his assertion he quoted some distinguished witnesses: Frank Pick, who had told the Royal Society of Arts that Continental manufacturers gave closer attention than we did to the need for good design in industry; Herbert Read, who wrote in Art and Industry that the artistic quality of manufactured goods, especially in those countries influenced by the Bauhaus, was undoubtedly higher than that in Great Britain; John Gloag, who had said that European countries were far ahead of us in industries that depended on design; and Noel Carrington, who had argued that Germany’s economic collapse after the First World War had forced industrialists and designers into a partnership with one another. But his comparison of British and overseas industries is argued case by case and his judgment is even-handed.
The simple, plain furniture produced by Gordon Russell meets with his approval and he notes that the public like it too. Their willingness to purchase well-designed furniture is confirmed by the earlier successes of Morris’s and Voysey’s designs and the fact that the new tubular furniture, notably the chairs designed by Marcel Breuer (above) and Mies van der Rohe, appeared to be having a significant impact in the UK.
Wallpaper and fabrics with light textures of the kind developed by the Bauhaus were being made here and British textile manufacturers were buying continental designs. Some traditional textile prints, derived from old and well-established patterns, had, he believed, achieved a perfection which is undated. In surface design he repeatedly praises Voysey’s work, much of which had been done fifty years earlier. But Germany shows that the modern style is not less popular than the Arts and Crafts style and the tendency of Pevsner’s critique is that the style of the Modern Movement was most appropriate to the age he was writing in and to Britain’s most pressing social problems. Apart from the rationality of modern design, Pevsner believed in Zeitgeist and implicitly shared the view that in art not everything is possible at all times.
The design of pottery was determined by the English preference for earthenware (generally referred to as “china”), whereas on the Continent there was more widespread use of porcelain, which was more expensive here and was bought by richer and older customers. Pevsner observes that one of the obstacles to good design in the UK was ingrained class distinction and snobbery.
Economic considerations and technological innovations could produce work of a high standard because it inherited no history of ornamentation. The best glass in Britain was often the cheapest, the sort bought in Woolworths, because cheapness ensured plainness and functionality. Ferranti’s reasonably-priced reflector fire was simple and attractive. (Like the tubular chair it became ubiquitous after the Second World War, the chair in schools, hospitals and village halls, the heater in bedsits.) Wristwatches, being current only for generation, were well-designed because there was no tradition behind them.
The motor industry, which was not generally considered by other writers on design reform, made goods of exemplary appearance compared to other industries. Not only that, but the design of British motor cars (above) had been better than that in the USA and had exerted a good influence on American design. It was actually British conservatism that produced a better-looking product and avoided the excesses of “streamlining” and “modernity” that plagued car design in America, France, Germany and Italy. Pevsner thought that the industry also had a different type of leader from other UK industries, and in a revealing comment observed that, “The manager of an automobile factory never seems to be the narrow-minded, badly-dressed provincial bourgeois whom one meets in so many other industries.”
I had two hobbies as a boy: plants and matchboxes. It seemed natural to me to know the names of trees and flowers. Children shared plant lore: woody nightshade was poisonous; if you were stung by nettles, dock leaves healed you; you could suck the nectar out of clover; you could make a reed instrument with a blade of grass; if you held a buttercup under someone’s chin, you could find out if they liked butter.
The matchboxes were more geeky, more pointless, inviting the observation of minute differences of the kind that philatelists like. Collecting them had a name too – phillumeny. Bars, restaurants and clubs produced book matches as promotional gifts. Out of inertia, I’ve kept the collection, which has turned out to be a record of defunct West-End clubs — The Cabana, The Columbia, the New Tahiti and Siegi’s. Siegi’s was the most swanky of all, run by Polish emigré Siegi Sessler in Mayfair and patronised by Frank Sinatra, Marylin Monroe, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. (It’s now Annabelle’s.) I don’t know how that came into my collection.
The match books also record the graphic design of the late 1950s, some of it very attractive, and recall a long-gone style of catering in the economy restaurants run by J. Lyons — The Grill & Cheese, The Minute Room, Lyons Teashops and the Seven Stars. Lyons offered fried egg, grilled bacon, omelettes, scrambled eggs on toast, grilled pork chipolatas and grilled tomato. You’d be hard-pressed to find scrambled egg on toast on any menu now. Although there’s nowhere quite like Lyons, Nando’s occupies a similar social niche but its standard offer is very different, including grilled halloumi with chilli jam dipping and chicken thighs with cheddar cheese, smoky red pepper chutney, lettuce and mayo in a bolo do caco.
At the Oxmarket Gallery in Chichester, the Society of Designer Craftsmen has its 2023 summer exhibition until Sunday 10 September. Oxmarket Contemporary Gallery, St Andrew’s Court, off East Street, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 1YH. Entrance free. Opening Times: 10am to 4pm Tue-Sat / 12pm to 4pm Sundays. My introduction to the exhibition catalogue.
In 1900 Britain led the world in design and craftsmanship. In 1887 our Society, then called the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, was formed by a group of artists, designers and architects, including Walter Crane, William de Morgan, W. R. Lethaby and Lewis Foreman Day, who saw the need for a body that would exhibit the best in decorative art, raise standards of workmanship and improve the lot of artisans. They believed the decorative arts to be as important as easel-painting and sculpture, but they had never been included in the exhibitions of the Royal Academy
Walter Crane, the Society’s first president.
The Arts and Crafts movement took its name from the Society but it encompassed wider range of organisations and activities that had grown out of concerns about the effects of industrialisation on design, workmanship and the lives of ordinary people. It advocated design reform, changes in the way things were made and the simplification of everyday life. It struck a chord and developed a large following. Its values and achievements helped to shape the world we live in today. |By the end of the century, Arts and Crafts furnishings were to be found in every middle-class home in Britain. The art schools were led by people from the movement. Design in Europe and North America was influenced by it. The Viennese Secession followed the ideas of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The Bauhaus set out from the ideas of William Morris. Ruskin was even read in Japan and encouraged the revival of folk crafts there. It has been said that its influence was felt right up to the 1950s, in the 1951 Festival of Britain and the design philosophy of Terence Conran.
In 1896 the death of William Morris, the president of the Society, deprived it of its driving force, and without his creativity, passion and energy it seemed to drift. Its 1912 exhibition made a loss and the 1916 exhibition was considered to be tame and repetitive. After the First World War, few imagined Britain would abandon the factory system or that craftsmanship had the power to cure all social ills, and the Society was forced to reconsider its identity and purpose. One response was an attempted rapprochement between the artist and industry, another was withdrawal into a pure craftsmanship of solitary makers.
The first exhibits of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had been designed by artists and made by others, sometimes in factories, and a point was made of crediting the maker as well as the designer. Walter Crane and Lewis Foreman Day had fierce disagreements about this, Crane insisting that the designer should make everything himself, Day arguing that, without some specialisation, both standards of design and standards of workmanship would decay. Only in the 1920s did Crane’s ideas triumph, and there crystallised the now familiar notion of designer-crafts, in which the designer and the maker were one.
One of the Society’s original concerns, the relationship of the artist to industry, was taken up elsewhere. In 1915, Lethaby, together with Harry Peach of the Dryad company and the shopkeeper Ambrose Heal, formed a breakaway group, the Design and Industries Association, which looked to the Werkbund in Germany, a large state-sponsored body that included industrialists, artists, designers and makers. In 1931, a British government committee directly addressed the question of how the artist could improve the standard of mass-produced goods. Although its principal concern was industry, it had no doubt about the importance of the crafts, which was not surprising, considering that one of its members was the president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Charles St John Hornby.
Designs for mass production were cautiously introduced into the Society’s 1935 and 1938 exhibitions on the intiative of its president John Farleigh, who designed this poster.
These concerns were bound to impinge on the Society itself, and there emerged a group of reformers, led by the wood engraver John Farleigh, who thought that it wouldn’t survive if it didn’t accommodate itself to mass production. The exhibitions of 1935 and 1938 cautiously included designs for industry, but not without rows and resignations.
The Second World War challenged the crafts again as younger makers were called up for military service and the shortage of materials forced others to seek alternative occupations. But the Society bravely continued to exhibit, and the 1944 exhibition at the Wallace Collection attracted 20,000 visitors, doubtless cheered up in a bombed city by a display of originality, beauty and creativity. Especially pressing at the time was the need for craft societies to work together, and the Society collaborated with five other national bodies to plan a permanent exhibition centre, which came to fruition after the war in the Crafts Centre of Great Britain. John Farleigh, its chairperson, had persuaded the Board of Trade to give it a grant, but he offered a hostage to fortune in the promise that it would be relevant to industry. Now that a distinct design profession had emerged and the crafts were produced by self-sufficient makers, it was a promise he couldn’t keep, and funding was withdrawn. But after several changes and moves, the Crafts Centre emerged as a thriving independent body, renamed Contemporary Applied Arts.
Dora Billington, president of the Society in the early 1950s, was on its modernising wing.
Feeling the need to reflect the different conditions in which the crafts operated, and recognising that the old name might deter younger people, in 1960 we changed our name to the Society of Designer Craftsmen. Today we are the largest multi-craft society in the UK.
Being a member of the Society gives designer-makers professional recognition, helps them develop their practice and links them in a network of 350 other craftspeople. We have three levels of membership, Licentiate (LSDC), Member (MSDC) and Fellow (FSDC), who are supported through a range of initiatives including meetings, exhibitions, workshops and mentoring sessions. Members are chosen for their innovative designs and their craft skills, which you will see in the wide range of disciplines represented in the Wonder exhibition.
MARSHALL COLMAN 