FRANK PICK

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Michael T. Saler’s The Avant-Garde in Interwar England is an account of the English version of modernism that carried forward the social ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement, focussing on Frank Pick (above), the boss of London Underground, who commissioned the modernist stations of the Piccadilly, Northern and Metropolitan Lines and a raft of avant garde posters for the Underground.

Osterley Station, 1935

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Pick played a leading role in the Design and Industries Association (DIA) and the Council for Art and Industry (CAI) putting him at the centre of design reform.

E. McKnight Kauffer, 1924

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The CAI , which stood in a line that linked the Chamber of Horrors in the South Kensington Museum to the Design Council, was central to the art and industry debate of the 1930s, which sought to raise the standard of consumer products, ostensibly because better design would improve sales and exports. It saw the need to raise the sights of industrialists and to improve the taste of consumers. But why, if poor design was a brake on sales, was it necessary to improve consumer taste? If the consumer had poor taste, he or she would not discriminate between well-designed goods and badly-designed goods and badly-designed goods would sell just as well as good.

Saler solves this conundrum. The idea of fitness for purpose that drove the modernism of the DIA, the CAI and Pick’s Underground was, he says, more than the physical usefulness of objects: it entailed moral and spiritual fitness as well. As Pick put it, “Fitness for purpose must transcend the merely practical and serve a moral and spiritual order as well. There is moral and spiritual fitness to be satisfied. We know it sure enough when we see it.” Good design was not merely a matter of taste, understood as consumer preference, but was an objective standard with moral and spiritual significance. The ideas of good design that ran from the 1830s to the 1960s are difficult to understand from a modern prespective in which there are no aesthetic absolutes or general agreement and in which one design is thought to be as good as another. Standards of good design were ascertainable by a cultural elite who posessed taste and discrimination, which they were obliged to impart to manufacturers and the public. Good design was associated with planning and state direction and was not to be left to the vagaries of the market.

ÉMIGRÉ ART IN BRITAIN

The book Insiders Outsiders tells the extraordinary story of the contribution made by refugee artists to British culture from the 1930s onwards, most of them fleeing from persecution in Germany and many of them Jewish. The BBC, publishing, music, cinema, art and architecture all benefited from their new perspectives.

Some names were obviously foreign – Freud, Kokoschka, Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy – some, like the BBC head of drama, Martin Esslin, sounded vaguely foreign and others, like Stephen Hearst, the controller of the BBC in the 1970s, didn’t, even though he was born in Budapest.

The central European contribution to the visual arts wasn’t widely appreciated and our slowness in taking to modernism is obscured by the prominence given to innovative work in art histories, which was often disliked at the time. The art schools were in thrall to the Arts and Crafts movement until the late 1940s. It it was only after Picasso’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1960, when he was almost eighty, that he came to be widely regarded in England as anything other than a charlatan. The British took their modernism with a large dash of water. Michael Saler has written a revealing account of how the modernism of Frank Pick’s London Transport was shot though with Ruskinian ideas: Saler called it medieval modernism. And Insiders Outsiders describes the strong opposition to the German Expressionism that émigré artists brought with them and the British preference for a softer French modernism rooted in Post-Impressionism.

Bloomsbury exerted a baneful influence. Vanessa Bell adopted the Post-Impressionist style in the 1910s and painted the same way for forty years. Artistic taste in England was shaped by post-WWI anti-German sentiment, which may be one of the reasons reason why British design was stuck for so long in Arts-and-Crafts mode. There was also, of course, the shade cast by William Morris. His followers were paralysed by admiration for him and they repeated themselves for decades. The design initiative passed from England to Germany, where the state-sponsored Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund accommodated to mass production in a way that was anathema to British designers.

The story in architecture, music and the other arts is somewhat different. Lucie Rie, an Austrian Jew, gained considerable respect in the small world of studio pottery, but Greta Marks, who tried to adapt her modernist ceramics to Stoke-on-Trent, had an unhappy career in Britain. Several of the artists in this book fell into obscurity and the influence of continental émigrés was hard-won in Britian.

DESIGN REGULATION

French Silk brocade from a costume, c.1735. It may be the work of French handloom weavers who settled in England. The design is almost certainly by the famous silk-designer from Lyon, Jean Revel. (Victoria and Albert Museum)

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Pursuing that obsession of British design reformers in the 19th and 20th centuries, the inferiority of British design compared to that in continental Europe, I wondered whether it really was inferior or whether British manufacturers and their advocates simply had an inferiority complex. The idea that Britain lagged in design was a preoccupation of politicians, artists and critics, and to a much lesser extent of businessmen, and it was explored by parliamentary committees from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835 to the Gorell Committee in 1931.

Much of the debate concerned consumer goods and the application of decoration. The modern concept of design as problem solving and product engineering was hardly developed. The concern of the reformers was the decorative arts and the potential contribution of the artist to manufacturing.

The 1835 Select Committee was set up under the chairmanship of William Ewart, MP “to inquire into the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design among the People (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country”. The stimulus was the perceived inferiority of British goods in what was called the fancy trade and the inquiry concentrated on silk, printed cotton, shawls and ribbons, lace, porcelain, brass, and architectural mouldings.

The view of many of the witnesses was that British workmen produced work of good quality and that some of them had a native artistic talent but that they were uneducated in the principles of design and that, despite their best efforts, they could not be said to be designers. Employers were reluctant to go to the expense of employing trained artists because original designs were not protected by copyright law and anything new would be quickly stolen by competitors. On the continent, however, particularly in France, there was ample design education, subsidised by the state, and original designs were protected by copyright. Out of the Ewart Committee came the British schools of design, which developed into our modern art schools.

But a hundred years later, almost as if nothing had happened, the Gorell Committee was making similar complaints about the inferiority of British design and it even quoted the the Ewart Committee. In the intervening years the argument had been influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and it was now being said that a major cause of poor design in Britain was the unhealthy separation of the arts from manufacturing that had come about as a result of the industrial revolution (a singularly unconvincing explanation, I think, since France, which was supposed to have higher standards than Britain, had also had an industrial revolution). The conclusions of Gorell were tamer than those of Ewart and it recommended little more than the promotion of exhibitions of good design, the ultimate outcome of which was the Council of Industrial Design.

If continental design was in truth superior to British, could it have been because on the continent there was a long history of state intervention in industry and of regulation of manufacturing standards? In France in particular (though also to a degree in Prussia and Saxony) there had been royal direction of luxury industries, and in France under the system of Jean-Baptiste Colbert there had been regulation of trades and professions, inspection of quality, materials and finishes. The details of Colbert’s regulations are staggering to the modern liberal sensibility. The following passage is a short extract from the fifty-six regulations for cloth and serge manufacture in Beauvais, drawn up in 1667 under Colbert’s influence:

“Wool for the warp to be dried in a specified fashion. Weaver to weave into the top of each piece of cloth the initial of the first name and the whole surname of the person to whom the cloth belongs. Weavers not to use damp and dry wool in the same woof, under penalty of a 6 livres fine. If a weaver makes a poor selvage, 5 sous fine. If a weaver leaves a piece of cloth dirty and mussy, 2 sous fine. Weavers must make over all small spots where the work was sloppy. One sou fine. Weavers to pay one sou fine for each shuttle hole. If a weaver makes the distance between the threads of the warp unequal, 6 deniers fine ; or, in bad cases, 2 sous. If the warp is not tight, 2 sous 6 deniers fine if a piece unevenly woven, 5 sous fine.”

Did this kind of quality control bring about French superiority in design? There are three reasons to doubt it.

First, economic historians tend to think that it was damaging to industry and that that Colbertism prevented competition, discouraged innovation and kept prices high. If that was the case it may not have encouraged good design.

Second, by the 1830s, at the time of the Ewart Committee, Colbertism had been dead forty years, having been swept away in its entirety by the French Revolution, and although there had been some return to regulation, the regulation that existed was nothing like what it had been under the ancien régime. The alleged superiority of French design in the early 19th century was therefore very unlikely to have been a product of any contemporary regulation and, if it existed, it must have been a consequence either of habits and structures surviving from an earlier time, or of something else. The explanations most often put to Ewart were the existence of a system of design education in France and the legal protection of intellectual property.

Third, Colbert’s system regulated workmanship and although it may have ensured that goods were made to a high standard, that was not the same thing as good design. Both design and workmanship are needed in superior articles of manufacture but it is possible for well-made things to be badly designed and vice-versa (even if we allow that that observation does raise questions about what we might mean by “well made” and “well or badly designed”).

One of Ewart’s witnesses was Claude Guillotte, a French loom maker who had been instrumental in bringing the Jacquard loom to England. He was extremely well informed about silk weaving and the skills and abilities of silk workers. He agreed that French design was better than English and he attributed it to the fact that there were artists working in the French industry, particularly at that point in the Jacquard process, the so-called mise en carte or mapping, where the design was transferred to squared paper, in which the columns represented the warp of the fabric and the rows represented the weft, after which the map was translated into holes on a card that controlled the loom. As a result of this process, less skilled workers were able to make richly-figured silk of a kind that they would have previously been incapable of. According to Guillotte, the English were the equals of the French in the making of plain silks, and both countries were comparable in the manufacturing quality of their figured silks, but the French designs were better because in France the metteur en carte was an artist, whereas in England he was not.

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, 1924.

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 WW store in Kärntner Strasse.

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.”

DECORATIVE ARTS IN THE 20s AND 30s

The 1926 Yearbook of Decorative Art published by The Studio magazine was frank about British design conservatism: ‘On the Continent and in the United States the enterprise was greater than in this country and the results more hectic. We Britons have always been somewhat slow in the uptake in the matter of design; but our conservatism in the long run has done us little harm.’ Remember that the 1925 Paris Exhibition is seen as the launch pad of Art Deco and then see that many if not most of the designs featured by The Studio are still in Arts-and-Crafts mode.

Architectural examples were predominently vernacular in inspiration, with a trace of neo-Georgian in the examples from Welwyn Garden City. But although interiors were  traditional, they were stripped down and free from clutter, as in work by the Deutsche Werkstätten. Gordon Russell’s simple and useful furniture was made by the best cabinet makers available. Heal’s furniture anticipated Utility, with which Russell, of course was associated.

British ceramics emphasised craft methods: hand-painted pottery from Pilkington, Wedgwood and Poole, work by the up-and-coming studio potters, William Staite Murray and Bernard Leach, figures by Stanley Thorogood, Wilfrid Norton, Harold Stabler and Stella Crofts.  Handicraft was also emphasised in Continental ceramics but the Deco element was evident in pieces designed by Claude Lévy and Madeleine Sougez for Atelier Primavera (top), who had exhibited at the 1925 Paris Expo.

Figurative ceramics were more evident in the illustrations from the Continent, despite the fact they were at the height of their popularity in Britain.

By 1933, there had been a major change. The rchitecture and interiors featured in the Yearbook were now mainly modernist, including British examples by A.V.Pilchowski and Stanley Hall and Eastern & Robertson. Fewer ceramics were shown but they included mass-produced factory wares like those designed by M. Friedlaender.

 

DESIGNERS IN BRITAIN, 1949

Ernest Race. Steel-framed rocking chair.

I found a copy of Designers in Britain 1949, the biennial review of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), on eBay recently, from which these pictures come.

Top: George Williams and Misha Black. Reversible and adjustable rail-car seat.
Bottom: Norbert Dutton, Ronald Ingles and Douglas Scott. Green Line Bus for London Transport Passenger Board.

The SIA played a critical role in the development of the industrial design profession in Britain and the review shows how rapidly things had changed during the war. The selection contrasts with that for the Exhibition of Art in Industry at the Royal Academy in 1935, where there was considerably more emphasis on decoration and appearance and less on problem solving.

Edric Neel, Raglan Squire, Rodney Thomas and A.M.Gear.

Milner Gray, one of the founders of the SIA in 1930 and a member of the council in 1949, told the Royal Society of Arts in that year that the pressures of war had hastened these changes and moved industrial design towards being a technical operation and away from design for selling, which had been the principal motive in the pre-war decade. In fields like aircraft production and the packaging of battle stores, the integration of design with production had become literally a matter of life or death.

Enid Marx. Furnishing fabrics for the Board of Trade.

In the review there is still a lot of marketing design (Milner Gray had worked in packaging design) and graphic design predominates, but there are interesting examples of interior design, fabrics, ceramics, clothing, transportation and the design of industrial equipment as well.

3 Tom Eckersley. 5, 6 Abram Games. 7 Edward Wright

4, 5 Anthony Gilbert. 6 Paul Hogarth. 7 Ann Buckmaster. 8 James Boswell

School furniture. 3 D.L.Medd. 4, 5 R.D.Russell. 6, 7 James Leonard.

“THE THINGS WE SEE”

In the late 1940s and early 50s, during the era of post-war reconstruction, Penguin Books published an attractive, well-illustrated, large-format series called The Things We See, setting out the principles of good design in an attempt to raise visual literacy. There were volumes on Houses, Furniture, Pottery and Glass, Public Transport, Gardens and Ships. The introductory volume was called Indoors and Out, by Alan Jarvis, Director of Information at the Council of Industrial Design (CoID).

The Things we See was descended from the South Kensington museum’s Chamber of Horrors through the Arts and Crafts movement and the art-and-industry debates of the 1930s. Alan Jarvis’s volume, although illustrated with contemporary designs like a factory-built house and an Underground station on the Piccadilly line, expresses ideas about design, taste and industry familiar since Ruskin’s day. He said that the degradation and shabbiness of the built environment resulted from public indifference to the way things look and from liking the wrong things. This had a tinge of immorality about it. When someone said to Henry Cole that people’s tastes varied, he replied, “I think to act on the principle of ‘every one to his taste’ would be as mischievous as ‘every one to his morals’.” The sentiment persisted.

Jarvis said that modern housing is wrong because the Englishman has modelled it on the castle instead of designing at an appropriate scale. He disdained the suburb and the Tudorbethan house (as all design reformers did), but by the late 1940s anti-suburb snobbery had clothed itself in democratic ideals: “Just as manorial rights, feudal economics and a rigid system of social castes are inappropriate to a modern industrial democracy,” said Jarvis, “so are the architectural forms which we still copy.” It was a precept of the good-design movement that one material should not imitate another and that previous styles should never be copied, but the Georgian Revival had played into Jarvis’s thinking and he held up the Georgian house as a model of elegance and restraint.

He compared good and bad taste in design with good and bad taste in food and drew interesting parallels between, on one hand, a modern bedroom and a wholemeal loaf, and, on the other, a bad-taste bedroom and a plate of sticky iced cakes.

There are Arts-and-Crafts attitudes throughout. Industry bred a new type of man detached from the land and confined to the factory. Modern transport systems spoiled the town and the countryside. Mass production debased the quality of goods and suppressed individuality. There is only a grudging acceptance that mass production brought cheaper commodities and no recognition of the value of predictability and reliability.

Jarvis held out Frederic Gibberd’s modest and democratic factory-built steel house (above) as the hope for future design. It had harmonious proportions and no ornamentation other than the integral patterns of brick, roof tiles and fluted panels. It was simple and practical and did not refer to the past or have any connotations or extraneous meaning.

He viewed decoration and ornament with suspicion. He acknowledged the human urge to decorate and admitted that it had to be indulged if we were not to go down the route of “crude or second-hand satisfactions, with a synthetic taste in visual things, like a taste for soups and custard made of powder.” There was the predictable worry about vulgarity and a reminder of Adolf Loos in Jarvis’s horror of tattooing.

At the same time as this Penguin series came out, Barbara Jones, in The Unsophisticated Arts and the exhibition Black Eyes and Lemonade, was recording and celebrating vulgar and popular art including tattooing, fairground painting, confectionery and funerary art, at the start of an anti-design movement that accepted demotic taste and even democratic bad taste.

MARGARET BULLEY (2)

I described Margaret Bulley’s aesthetic theories as “gushing”, full of ideas of “spirit” and “vital energy”. R. R. Tatlock, editor of The Burlington Magazine, who published several of her reports on artistic taste, said that –

“From one angle she is an aesthetician, from another a collector, from a third a teacher. It might be truest of all to call her a missionary, for it is in the pertinacious and fervent spirit of the spreader of a gospel that she works and writes. It is not easy to make out just of what her gospel consists, and I believe it would be impossible to account for it in so many words; but what is abundantly clear to those who so much as glance at her book is that art is for her a fact that inspires and compels the soul and puzzles and torments the brain: it is the nucleus round which Miss Bulley and similarly constituted electrons giddily spin; it is the indefinable Presence before whom they prostrate themselves and present offerings of books.” (1926)

Bulley’s books were occasionally mentioned in the philosophical journals, which remarked on the incoherence of her ideas. Philosophy, reviewing Art and Understanding, liked the illustrations in it but thought that “however pleasing the reproductions from ancient and modern masters, they cannot wholly atone for the conspicuous absence of any real knowledge of aesthetics exhibited by the first and theoretical half of the volume.” (1939) And a review of Art and Everyman in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1954) regretted that “Unfortunately, the terms in which the author expresses her esthetic views are unduly opaque.” Although she wrote repeatedly on aesthetics, her ideas were really just an undigested mish-mash of outmoded ideas about taste.

Tatlock went on to describe her research methods in Art and Counterfeit, in which her industry, thoroughness and persistence made up for the weakness of her driving ideas:

“The best part of Miss Bulley’s days through many a year have been occupied in labouring to infect audiences of school-children and of adults with the love of art. But in various directions her zeal has over-flowed from that mission and has driven her to carry out long series of “tests ” with the object of settling what proportion of persons in a given category are able, without being prompted by others, to distinguish between a good and a bad work of art. Three papers, embodying Miss Bulley’s results of this kind, were published in these pages (October, 1919; October, 1923; and October, 1925), and these and others are included in the book. To help her in her teaching, Miss Bulley has made an enormous collection of photographs of every species of work of art. These she has arranged in pairs – one of each kind, good and bad, “of clean beasts and those that are not clean” – without the names of their creators being divulged; and many a reputation has been blasted through the functioning of that relentless instrument. But she has not only collected photographs; with equal zeal she has accumulated innumerable specimens of art criticism. These she has now arranged in groups and has most ingeniously attempted to illustrate by means of certain of her photographs. The result is a unique book – a Noah’s- ark of a book-whose subject may be described as comparative art and whose interest is at once literary and artistic.”

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.”