FRANS HALS

Detail from Family Group in a Landscape by Frans Hals, 1646. Exhibited in the National Gallery’s superlative homage to this great artist. Black servants in paintings are arresting and problematic. What was the boy’s place in the family: was he a servant or a slave? Forced servitude was illegal on Dutch soil, but he may have been brought to the country as a result of the Dutch Republic’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Hals, whose close observation combined with speed and dexterity in painting enabled him to put life into any face, has given to the boy what the curator describes as “a distinct personality, portraying him with dignity and humanity.”

NEWS FROM NOWHERE

The opening page of the Kelmscott edition.

I read William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) decades ago and re-read it recently to see what I’d think of it now. As the work of an artist, it makes much of how things look and it describes clothes, buildings, interiors and domestic artifacts in the society of the future. Morris had an interest in utopian fiction and Thomas More’s Utopia was one of his favourite books. News from Nowhere may have been written as a riposte to Edward Bellamy’s popular Looking Backward, which envisaged a society where property was owned by the state and machinery freed work from drudgery. Morris thought Bellamy’s system to be “too urban, too modern, too centralist, too technological” and describes a bucolic communism. Peter Kropotkin called Morris’s tale “perhaps the most thoroughly and deeply Anarchistic conception of future society that has ever been written”. As it happens, the anarchists in Morris’s socialist society milked him of his money, but despite that he was too generous to imagine that the heralds of the new world may be as bad as the defenders of the old. He implicitly followed Rousseau, regarding civilisation as undesirable and thinking that everyone’s natural goodness would flourish without it. Something straight may indeed be made from the crooked timber of humanity.

In Nowhere there’s no law, no courts and no punishment. If someone murders someone he immediately sees the error of his ways and resolves to improve. There’s a passage in the book that’s startling for its apparent lack of feeling. A murder is encountered and the murderer, in the way of Nowhere, is remorseful and considers exile. The Nowhereites think it will be bad for him, discourage him from it and won’t countenance punishment, reparation or correction. In his greater sympathy for the murderer than for his victims Morris seems here to combine heartlessness with a psychological naivety that throws light on the difficulties he experienced in his personal relationships.

Although there was inevitably violence in the revolution that overthrew the old system, Morris is squeamish about it and doesn’t describe it realistically. The revolutionaries aren’t well armed and there’s no bloodthirsty element among them. They take their name from the Committee of Public Safety but Morris doesn’t consider the possibility of a descent into revolutionary Terror. After a few weak attempts to put down the revolution, the ruling class crumple and see the light of reason.

In Nowhere the machinery of the old factories has been given up and everyone has reverted to handicrafts. But even here we see Morris’s ambivalence about machinery, because he allows a few machines to help with the heavy work. The machines appear but we don’t know how they emerge from the craft workshops. Morris was unable to envisage a liberatory technology because of his resistance to modernity and his framing of the problem of production in simple binaries: machines/craft, slavery/freedom, trash/luxury.

It’s likely that Morris and his revolutionary colleagues spent much time talking about the future society because they couldn’t do much to change the present. But even pragmatists might be expected to imagine what a better society would look like in order to give themselves a sense of direction. It might be possible however to take a more sceptical view of utopia and to question the value of utopian thinking entirely, not for the glib and obvious reason that it’s unrealistic but because the idea of a perfect world is in itself objectionable.

Nowhere appears to be subject to the tyranny of the General Will. Everyone is the same and everyone wants the same. Diversity exists only in variations on an arts-and-crafts theme, for example, in different countries people decorate their clothes in a different style. There are no differences of personality. Everyone is good and nice. The buildings are the same as well, made in a quasi-medieval style and decorated by stonemasons. Buildings that William Morris doesn’t like have been torn down and rebuilt in the William Morris style. Manchester has been literally demolished. In essence, everyone is William Morris.

Utopia is uniform and perfect, so it’s incapable of improvement. That explains why Morris says there are no new inventions in Nowhere, because everyone has reached the bliss point. And if utopia can’t get better, it can’t change, and if it can’t change, no-one can be permitted to change it because any change must surely make it worse. That means that everyone in utopia has to accept it as it is and that the kind of disruptive arguments that took place in the Hammersmith Socialist League can’t take place in Nowhere. No-one in Nowhere could write a fantasy called News From Elsewhere. Architects of utopia design it as a realm of freedom but they seem to have an instinctive understanding that it can’t be free. That’s why the characters in Nowhere are all so similar. Everyone in utopia has to behave in the way of utopia. There is even something rather sinister in the niceness of the Nowhereites, like the smiling niceness of cult members.

As it turns out, utopia entails conformity and tyranny of a sort. Utopia is actually dystopia. Five years after News From Nowhere, another socialist, H. G. Wells, wrote a darker vision of the future, The Time Machine.

THE ELEVATION OF TASTE

For about a hundred years or so, from 1850 to 1950, design reformers muddled product improvement with the elevation taste. It’s difficult to extricate their ideas about the need to make things more attractive from their desire to make better human beings — people with finer sensibilities, greater powers of discrimination and the ability to choose what’s right. They said that, without the elevation of taste, the standard of goods would never improve and British producers would lose out to competitors. But the elevation of taste was actually an end in itself, irrespective of its cash value, and its moral aspect was sometimes tacitly admitted.

Henry Cole, the organiser of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and a major force in design reform, would have no truck with the idea that de gustibus non est disputandum – there’s no accounting for taste. “I think to act upon the principle of ‘every one to his taste,’” he said, “would be as mischievous as ‘every one to his morals’; and I think there are principles in taste which all eminent artists are agreed upon in all parts of the world.” A later writer, Margaret Bulley, put it more bluntly: “The mass production of ugliness is not merely a blunder in aesthetics: it is a crime in morals.”

The Great Exhibition, where improvements in manufacturing technique brought forth wonderful machines and an abundance of elaborate decoration, proved that whatever can be done will be done. The displays were entrancing to many but lamented by others, even by the organisers. The new South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) showed examples of bad things from the exhibition in a moralising display that came to be called the Chamber of Horrors.

The Chamber of Horrors was satirised in Charles Dickens’ journal, Household Words, where a common fellow, Mr Crumpet, reported on his chastening visit to South Kensington: “ I could have cried, sir. I was ashamed of the pattern of my own trowsers, for I saw a piece of them hung up there as a horror. I dared not pull out my pocket-handkerchief while any one was by, lest I should be seen dabbing the perspiration from my forehead with a wreath of coral. I saw it all; when I went home I found that I had been living among horrors up to that hour. The paper in my parlour contains four kinds of bird of paradise, besides bridges and pagodas.”

The tone of the Chamber of Horrors was continued in a mass of books on good taste. Charles Eastlake achieved very good sales with his Hints on Household Taste (1868) His book sought to instruct the middle class (it cost eighteen shillings) about the best way to furnish their homes. The root of bad taste, advised Eastlake, was that taste had become detached from art. Left to himself in an art gallery, the average man of education and breeding would overlook the great masters and make straight for the cheap and sentimental pictures. It was the same in the home. Because there is no art, bad taste crosses our path everywhere: “It sends us metal-work from Birmingham which is as vulgar in form as it is flimsy in execution. It decorates the finest possible porcelain with the most objectionable character of ornament. It lines our walls with silly representations of vegetable life, or with a mass of uninteresting diaper. It bids us, in short, furnish our houses after the same fashion as we dress ourselves, and that is with no more sense of real beauty than if art were a dead letter.”

William J. Loftie, the editor of Art at Home (1876 -8) , thought that right judgement was close to godliness. He believed a lovely home was “the prototype for the home hereafter … a sacred thing, beautiful and pleasant.” He wasn’t the only one to see a religious significance in the elevation of taste. Diana Maltz, who has written about aesthetic missionaries, quotes one who defended East End art exhibitions on the grounds that they might open a window “into the invisible and eternal.” These moralising books on taste found an eager audience among the middle class in the late 19th century. There was intense competition over The House Beautiful.

But this aesthetic moralism (or moralising aesthetics) was brought to the poor as well. They may have had less choice in the matter. In the university settlements of the late 19th century, which did social work in the inner city, there were aesthetic missionaries who believed that poverty might be made bearable if the poor could have beautiful things. Lectures, pictures and music were chosen by settlement volunteers and were brought to the slums for the benefit of the poor.

It was said of this period, when Britian’s superiority in international trade was faltering, that “the most widespread and fundamental weakness of British business was its failure to study adequately the needs of markets and to adapt goods to changing tastes and demands. A certain contempt for the customer’s wishes and a stubborn insistence on putting old styles and patterns on the market were very characteristic of British commerce all over the world.” Ironically, this habit of indifference to consumer preference returned in the idea that trade could be improved by elevating taste, envisioned as manipulating demand rather than finding out what people actually wanted and selling it to them. Business complacency found an ally in aesthetic evangelism.

W. H. SMITH

The Newsboy hanging sign outside the St. Albans store.

W. H. Smith built its success in the early 20th century on the rapid distribution of newspapers, which were available on its bookstalls before they could be picked up anywhere else. Within a few weeks of losing their advantageous contract for bookstalls in railway stations they’d opened 200 new shops around the UK.

Eric Gill’s lettering designed for W. H. Smith in 1903. Also St. Albans.

As a business they’re interesting because in this period they combined profitability with artistic interests. The lettering on their shops was designed in 1903 by Eric Gill. The Newsboy sign was designed in 1905 by Septimus E. Scott. Both Newsboy and Gill lettering remain on my local store in St Albans. (The images are from Building our Past – a History of Everyday Buildings.)

Rickmansworth.

This artistic tendency was due in no small measure to the influence of their director, C. H. St John Hornby, a collector who ran the Ashendene Press, one of the great private presses. Hornby had met William Morris and was associated with many Arts and Crafts people.

The Ashendene Press ‘Song of Songs’, iluminated by Florence Kingsford Cockerell.

He had a long connnection with Emery Walker, employed Louis Powell and Florence Kingsford Cockerell as illustrators and worked with Graily Hewitt, Charles Gere and Gwen Raverat. He was a Master of the Art Workers Guild and a President of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. W. H. Smith even had its own artistic press — nowhere near as grand as Ashendene, but still working to a high standard.

Fine printing by W. H. Smith for the posthumous appreciation of Hornby.

Hornby died in 1946 and his son and grandson succeeded him. After the company went public it lost its olde-world look and now seems rather muddled and an0nymous.

ART DECO

One of a series of posters for London trams designed by Oliver Burridge and exhibited in Paris in 1925. Solid design in a style developed by James Pryde and William Nicholson twenty-five years earlier.

The Paris Expo, 1925 — the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — was probably, in terms of its style, most influential international exhibition of the 20th century — and there were dozens of them, most of them forgotten now. It introduced Art Deco to the public and promoted it, leading it to spread like wildfire in the following decade. It remains popular today.

The British Pavilion. It illustrates how the Paris Expo lay at the crossroads of Arts and Crafts and modernism. It was designed by Howard Robertson, who later designed the Shell Centre in London and participated in the design of the UN HQ in New York, but the decoration was by Henry Wilson, past president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.

Coming up to the 100th anniversary, it will be interesting to see how many books are devoted to it, not least because, despite its fame and importance, there actually few, and none in English as detailed as the official UK government report published at the time.

A. K. Lawrence’s decorative frieze “The Altruists”, part of the British entry, seemed to come from 1475 rather than 1925.

The style was called “moderne” or “jazz modern” in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, and the term “Art Deco” only became current following Les Années ’25’: Art déco. Bauhaus. Stijl. Esprit nouveau, the 1966 exhibition curated by Yvonne Brunhammer. Shortly after, it was popularised in Britain by Bevis Hillier in Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. There was also a personal memoir by Frank Scarlett and Marjorie Townley in 1975, full of interest but partial and brief.

Dining room designed by R. Quibel for Mercier Frères, an old-established French firm who had moved into Art Deco.

Art history focuses on innovation, and the histories of 1925 highlight only Art Deco — the French pavilion created by Le Corbusier, the Russian pavilion, with displays by Rodchenko, the Austrian Pavilion by Josef Hoffman, and so on. The British report was more comprehensive and reveals that in reality most of the exhibits were traditional. The editorial committee — Hubert Llewellyn Smith, a government economic adviser, Reginald Blomfield, an arts-and-crafts architect, Eric MacLagan, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Frank Warner, a silk manufacturer involved in official trade initiatives— weren’t likely to be in tune with the newest styles but the illustrations do show a mix of the new style and the old-fashioned exhibits that have been sidelined since.

The Italian pavilion. Despite the attatchment of Marinetti and the Futurists to the Fascist regime, its bombastic entry was one of the stuffiest and backward in the exhibition.

Print by Golden Cockerel Press and image by Eric Gill. The print entry was reviewed by St John Hornby, the boss of W. H. Smith who also ran a private press. He said that good printing was bound to be conservative.

Grill in wrought iron and bronze by Edgar Brandt, who integrated fahionable Egyptian motifs with traditional design and sound workmanship.

Not everything exhibited by the USSR – like this knitted and embroidered woolwork – was as stripped down and functional as Rodchenko’s Workers Club (below).