RECO CAPEY

Reco Capey in Yardley’s design studio. (Design Council Archives)

Reco Capey (1895-1961) had one foot in industry and the other in the crafts and his career illustrates the emergence of the design profession out of the applied arts. He was born in North Staffordshire and, as was usual for young people with artistic talent, he was apprenticed to the pottery industry. He produced intelligent designs at Burslem art school and did similar work for Doulton. He went to the Royal College of Art in about 1921, where he studied under Dora Billington, another artist from North Staffordshire.

Glazed tiles made at Burslem art school, 1916.

Ceramics for Doulton, 1920s.

After he graduated from the RCA, William Rothenstein asked him to set up a new textiles course. He was one of a group of young teachers and students – including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden – who introduced advanced ideas to what was still a fairly conservative college.

From ‘The Printing of Textiles’.

Capey’s course concentrated on printing and covered hand-block and machine printing, contributing to the advance of both craft-based and industrial textile design. The course content, with its solid grounding in materials and methods, is recorded in his book The Printing of Textiles (1930). His students included Lucienne Day and Astrid Sampe, who became a leading textile designer in Sweden and adopted his teaching methods.

Rothenstein’s principal ambition was to elevate the teaching of painting and sculpture at the RCA and, although there were more design students at the college than fine artists, commercial art was rather looked down on. When Rothenstein took up his position in the early ‘twenties he made a tour of continental art schools but omitted the Bauhaus. Capey was one of the few tutors to introduce Bauhaus ideas to the RCA and the only one to call himself an industrial designer.

At the same time as he was teaching, Capey was chief designer for Yardley Cosmetics. He spent a couple of years as an adviser to the Rural Industries Bureau and he was an active member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. In 1928 he showed lacquered boxes and printed fabrics at the Society’s exhibtion alongside textiles by Phyllis Barron, Enid Marx and Ethel Mairet.

Filigree metal doors to Yardley’s Bond Street Shop, 1933. (Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collection)

In 1933 Yardley moved its retail operation to a new building at 33 Bond Street, to which Capey had made significant contributions, notably its doors and a frieze above the fourth storey. He is credited with designing the company trade mark, the Yardley bee, but his ex-wife, Katherine Bertram, who also worked for Yardley, said it was her design and that Capey failed to acknowledge her contribution.

Katherine Bertram’s bee design for Yardley, for which Reco Capey took credit.

Capey became involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the time when it was struggling to find an identity for itself and when there was strife between modernisers, who thought it had to adapt itself to modern industry, and conservatives, who wanted it to serve craftsmen working by hand and to have nothing to do with machinery. He became its president in 1940 when the dispute was at its height, and it’s significant that at that moment it was thought that an industrial designer was an appropriate person for the post. But he was unable to contribute to the debate because he was immediately transferred to Yardley’s New York office.

His view of craftsmanship was actually fairly similar to that of other members on the modernising wing: machine production was unavoidable but civilisation couldn’t exist without craftmanship; the manufacturer depends on the craftsman and it’s not possible to create anything of value without a thorough knowledge of materials. But he also believed, unlike many members, that in contemporary society it was no longer possible for the designer to be a maker. In Capey’s absence, John Farleigh took the chair of the Society, but although he was also a moderniser he wasn’t prepared to confront the traditionalists. It’s interesting to speculate what Capey, who was much more engaged with commerce than Farleigh was, would have done if he’d remained in England.

The Road to Uppsala, 1937

Containers in epoxy resin, exhibited in 1935.

As a result of his experience in desiging packaging for Yardley, Capey became interested in new materials and in the Royal Society of Arts’ 1935 exhibition, British Art in Industry, he showed containers made in the newly-invented epoxy resin. He showed them again at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1938, when it had finally been decided to include designs for industry, the boldest contributions to the exhibition that year. He was an early Royal Designer for Industry.

Stoneware jar and cover, made by Doulton c. 1935 (Victoria & Albert Museum).

Although most of his work was in the USA after 1940, he remained a UK resident and maintained his association with the RCA until 1953 as an external examiner. He made many visits to Sweden, whose design culture he had a high regard for. But his own contribution appears to have fallen off after the war, and at the end of his career he was designing some truly awful things for Yardley.

“A collector’s piece by Reco Capey, well known English designer.”
An advert in ‘The Philadephia Inquirer’, 14 December 1953.

The best source of information about the RCA in this period is Hilary Cunliffe-Charlesworth’s unpublished PhD The Royal College of Art: It’s Influence on Education, Art and Design 1900-1950. The information about Katherine Bertram is from Isabella Stone, who maintains a website about her and kindly answered my questions. Christine Dove, of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, did some very helpful background research. I tried to find out if Yardley had an archive but they do not answer questions about the company.

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.

SPOON BASH

That’s what Steve Wager calls his occasional classes in making a silver spoon, which is pretty accurate because, when I went to one last weekend, we did spend five hours hitting a silver ingot with a hammer. There’s a way of doing it, of course, and it was interesting to me because I’ve never worked in metal before, except occasionally to cut a brass profile to shape clay, but all materials have their own way of behaving and all have to be treated with respect. Silver hardens as it’s worked and has to be softened in heat – not too much, not too little. Steve’s rule was “until salmon pink”, and if too much you ruin the silver.

By lunch – which Steve serves to his students – our little ingots were still little ingots with hammer marks, but Steve assured us we’d have a spoon by the time we left. Sort of. There was still a lot of filing and polishing to do when we got home. Obviously not a professional job, but I’ll take pleasure in serving jam from one of my jam pots with my silver jam spoon. For information about Steve’s classes you can contact him here.

STEVE WAGER, SILVERSMITH

Steve Wager, whom I’ve known for several years as a fellow trustee of the Society of Designer Craftsmen, runs classes in his south London workshop for people who’d like to know something about the craft of the silversmith. Just for fun I went to one of his spoon bashes at the weekend, where he taught us how to take a small silver ingot and to beat it into something vaguely resembling a spoon. It was a change from clay, a very different material.

He’s been in the trade for forty years, serving a traditional apprenticeship with Asprey and then working for them for many years before setting up independently. The large piece he’s holding is a loving cup in silver and silver gilt with inlaid jewels, which he talked to us about between our sessions with the planishing hammer and which I persauded him to take out of its box and to show us. It has a maritime theme, with a Neptune and a mermaid. (Price on application to S. E. Wager.)

Steve, with his great skill and experience, has a low opinion of jewellers and silversmiths who can do no more than assemble prefabricated components – he dismisses their work as “modern craft”. On the wall is his very formal admission certificate from the Worshipful Society of Goldsmiths in 1983, acknowledging that he has been apprenticed to a master in the ancient mystery.

VALENCIA (2)

La Lonja, the elegant and spacious medieval Silk Exchange in Valencia is one of the city’s most popular attractions and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and justly so. The stonecarvers of La Lonja were given only the vaguest brief by the master mason – Ruskin would have approved of the way they were allowed to devise their own work. There are striking spiral-grooved pillars in the main hall and decorated door arches, one with a carving of the Virgin (above) with the motto Ave Maria Purissima.

But there are details at odds with the nobility of the building. Around Mary The Most Pure are men drunk and incapable, people pissing in bowls, a devil inflating a sheep’s arse, a dragon biting a woman’s tits, and bums, bums and bums galore.

SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP

In 1964 The Tate Gallery had an exhibition devoted to Hans Arp. It’s taken them almost sixty years to catch up with his more interesting wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the latest exhibition recovering the reputations of neglected women artists. (I wrote earlier about the recent MAK exhibition Women Artists of the Wiener Werkstätte.)

Sophie Taeuber-Arp is revealed here as embodying perhaps more than anyone else the idea of the Unity of the Arts, moving easily between painting, architecture, interior design, sculpture, tapestry, rug-making, jewellery, costume and puppetry. She also trained as a dancer with Laban and there is a dancer’s sense of movement and fun in her abstract compositions. She was never a painter descending to decoration or a craft worker trying to elevate her status – she believed absolutely that all art was of significance.

https://fb.watch/8vIweK8LsB/

WOMEN OF THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE

*Charlotte Billwiller, Mathilde Flögl, Susi Singer, Marianne Leisching*
*and Maria Likarz, artists of the Weiner Werkstätte.*

The Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK) has a large exhibition devoted to the women artists of the Wiener Werkstätte (WW), the company of artists, designers and craft workers who defined Viennese modernism in the first decades of the 20th century. Women played a prominent role, increasingly after the First World War. The work shown is varied, innovative, clever and faultlessly executed.

*Mathilde Flögl, Invitation to the artists’ costume party, 19*24.

The Wiener Werkstätte started as a metal workshop founded by Joseph Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, professors at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, and Fritz Waerndorfer, their business manager. It expanded to include textiles, fashion, pottery, graphics, architecture, furniture and toys, selling to the Viennese bourgeoisie though their upmarket stores in the Neustiftgasse and Kärntner Strasse, particularly to the cultured and assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of the kind recently depicted in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. (I wrote about their New York store here.)

***Dress made from WW fabric designed by Hilda Jesser, 1921/2.***

*Hilda Jesser, Poster for the WW, 1919.*

The artists of the Werkstätte were influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement but rapidly went beyond it and were less doctrinaire than Morris & Co. They valued art but they were unfazed by machinery. They esteemed handwork but they didn’t think it was essential for designers to make everything themselves. And they didn’t share the social concerns of the Arts and Crafts movement. Unlike Morris, who wanted to create a democratic art and hated pandering to what he called “the swinish luxury of the rich,” the Gesamptkunstwerk to which the WW aspired – designing a project from house to teaspoons to the highest specification – presupposed a wealthy clientele.

*The Austrian pavilion at the 1925 Paris Expo, designed by Josef Hoffmann.*

*Women of the Wiener Werkstätte setting up the Austrian Pavilion in Paris, 1925.*

The curators have found 178 women who designed for the WW. They made a major contribution to exhibits in the Austrian pavilion in the 1925 Paris Expo and are pictured above setting it up. Hoffmann’s design is well-known but most of the women have been overlooked. In their day the Werkstätte was mocked because it employed so many of them and dismissed as “Weiner Wieberkunstgewerbe“, Viennese Feminine Crafts.

*Vally Wieselthier, ‘Flora’, 1928, glazed ceramic.*

Their diverse talents are illustrated by the graphics, textiles and ceramics designed by Hilda Jesser that I’ve shown. She also designed lace, embroidery, wallpaper, jewellery and leather goods.

*Vally Wieselthier, Fireplace, c.1925, glazed ceramic.*

This is a just small selection from this superb exhibition. There is a publication with illustrations and biographies of the artists.

*Maria Likarz, Postcards of fashionable hats, 1912.*

*Hilda Jesser, Jardiniere, 1921, glazed ceramic.*

WIENER WERKSTÄTTE IN NEW YORK

Valli Wieselthier’s hope (mentioned here) that people would get as much pleasure from one of her “silly little glazed pots” in a modest apartment as they would from a precious sculpture in a sumptuous drawing room gives a slightly misleading impression of the Wiener Werkstätte, with which she was associated for many years.

I’ve been looking at Christian Witt-Dörring and Janis Staggs’ well-illustrated account of the Weiner Werkstätte 1902-1932 and reading Janis Staggs’ description of their New York showroom. Many of their Viennese customers were the higher bourgeoisie and the New York branch sought a similar clientele.

It was backed and directed by Joseph Urban, an Austrian émigré architect who had had a successful career designing sets for Hollywood and the Metropolitan Opera. Ziegfeld hired him for set designs on his Follies. The New York store was a cross between a stage set and an art gallery. Customers had to wait until the end of the season to take away their purchases and Urban sometimes refused to sell items he particularly liked. At the centre of the window display on Fifth Avenue was Victor Lurje’s life-size gilt sculpture of a male nude, for which Urban was reputedly offered thousands of dollars, which he turned down.

The picture (above) shows the store’s reception room. The chairs were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The flanking tables held silverware by Josef Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche. The large painting (top) was by Klimt (now in the Neue Galerie, NY).

The Palais Stoclet, the Werkstätte’s most famous work, was similarly sumptuous, every detail designed by Hoffman at horrendous cost, which almost bankrupted the company. Hoffmann however later became interested in modern, convenient working-class housing, and there are several rather anonymous blocks in Vienna that he designed – perhaps containing some of Wieselthier’s “silly little glazed pots.”

THE BIRMINGHAM GUILD

SELFRIGES LIFT

Selfridge’s lift, 1928, designed and made by the Birmingham Guild. Now in the Museum of London.

The latest edition of the Journal of the Decorative Arts Society has an article by Tony Peart about the Birmingham Guild, which I knew nothing about. The Guild were successful architectural metalworkers, founded in 1890 and modeled on C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, but unlike Ashbee’s company they prospered. Ashbee’s firm was wound up in 1907 after a trade recession which also did for William de Morgan in the same year, but the Birmingham Guild survived.

Ashbee complained of unfair competition between the factory and the craftsman and thought the crafts should be subsidised because of the benefits they brought to society. (Similar pleas were made in the 1940s by the furniture-maker Harry Norris and the potter Bernard Leach.) Graham Wallas (one of the founders of the LSE) calculated, à propos Morris & Co., that if society were to be run on arts-and-crafts principles, the cost of labour would exceed the value of outputs. The Birmingham Guild, however, found a way of combining art and business, as indeed, did Morris & Co. Employing skilled artisans from the Birmingham metal industries, they show that, even at the end of the 19th century, quality hand-production had been far from obliterated by the advancement of mass production, as the arts-and-crafts narrative asserted.

The company’s success was built on a good product, strong artistic input, originality, active marketing – and presumably sound accounting. During the First World War they turned to aircraft production, forming a relationship with De Havilland that they were able to revive during the Second World War. Their business was stable enough to be unaffected by the 1929 crash. They managed to combine profitability with idealism: one of their founders, Arthur Dix, said in 1895 that, “The Guild does not minimise the importance of this commercial aspect of its industry, but seeks only to make as much profit as is necessary to cover the expenses of its work, and to provide its designers and craftsmen with a sufficient remuneration.” They steadily innovated, introducing enameled inlays to lettering, which gave them a profitable new line. Enameling was one of their specialisms and they recruited the Japanese master enameler Shozo Kato in the 1920s, who somehow managed to keep his technique secret from everyone else in the company.

The Birmingham Guild successfully combined art and industry but stood slightly apart from others seeking to raise design standards, such as The Design and Industries Association, a proto-modernist breakaway from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society that tended to disapprove of ornamentation. It was only after the Second World War that the company’s decorative style lost favour with architects, despite a partnership with the Crittall window company and a history of corporate contracts. Problems finding skilled labour in Birmingham after the war and the greater appeal of the motor industry exacerbated their problems and contributed to the company’s decline

WILLIAM STAITE MURRAY

staite-murray

I have been reading Julian Stair’s thesis on critical writing about English studio pottery, 1910 – 1940, which foregrounds Roger Fry’s formative influence in the first three decades of the 20th century, something that was not mentioned in 20th-century accounts of studio pottery and which is only now being realised, largely due to Stair’s research. In the early years of the studio pottery movement there was a wary rivalry between William Staite Murray, who was the star of studio pottery in the 1920s, and Bernard Leach, who until 1920 worked in Japan. What I didn’t realise, and what Stair explains, is there was a change of gear in the 1930s when Leach’s reputation rose and studio pottery turned from exhibition pieces towards utility, inspired by a late resurgence of the Arts and Crafts philosophy that Leach followed. In the 1930s, Stair discovered, reviews of Staite Murry’s exhibitions became more critical and eventually petered out completely.

Although Staite Murray is still recognised as a major pioneer, auction values of his pots (above) are not as high as might be thought. In MAAK’s latest online sale, expected prices range between £250 and £800, while recent work by living potters is expected to raise much more, for example, Daniel Reynolds: £800 – £1200, Sarah Scampton: £1,200 – £1,500, Tanya Gomez: £800 – £1,100, Sarah Flynn: £1,200 – £1,800, and Edmund de Waal: £2,500 – £3,500