a reminiscence of Ur of the Chaldees, but such ultimate derivations do not vitiate the claims of modernism to be modern. The broad distinction is between the reproduction of forms that are obviously of Imperial Rome or Louis Quatorze or George the Third on the one side, and unfamiliar forms which may indeed owe something to the work of these or other days but are in essence new, and to the public seem new.
It is nothing to the purpose to say that no one ought to invent a form or a new pattern or a new
combination of colors. Rightly or wrongly — and we need not bother about the morals of the case, because it is not a moral problem — new forms are being created because they shape themselves in artists’ minds and because the public like some of them when shaped.
Some people, excellent husbands and fathers, are troubled in spirit that a new aesthetic wave should be sweeping across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, disturbing the coasts even of conservative Britain, and making its repercussions felt in America. There are not lacking English artists and public men who are satisfied that Bolshevism is at the bottom of it all, and that all right thinking men should keep clear of the accursed thing and adhere righteously to triglyphs and boukrania and the rest. But this is wearing a little thin. The artists of France and Sweden and Bavaria do not,
at all events, recognize themselves as Bolsheviks in art any more than in politics. Broadly speaking, modernism is here, and we must ask what we are going to do with it? It will not be satisfactory if the world of building and manufacture is to be divided into two camps, Traditionalists and Modernists, the former spending their lives tracing measured drawings of pleasant bits, and the latter thinking it a disloyalty if a hint of the past is seen in any of their work. The sort of emotions that stir Fundamentalists will not be very helpful in art or in manufacture.
If modernism is to be any more than a welter of unrelated eclecticisms, if it is to have a coherence that will justify it as a style of today, and seem a century hence to have been an orderly movement, some body of competent persons must take charge of it. No good will come of it, if it is to be a series of unregulated explosions. Who are the possible candidates for the job? The manufacturer is only discomfortably aware that some troublesome
TABLE GLASS DESIGNED BY THE LATE SIR THOMAS GRAHAM JACKSON
THE DESIGNS OF SIR THOMAS WERE BASED, AS SOUND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN MUST BE, ON ACUTE OBSERVATION AS TO HOW VARIOUS CURVES AND LINES COME NATU
RALLY IN THE PROCESS OF GLASS BLOWING
ELECTRIC HEATER DESIGNED BY BASIL IONIDES
MR. IONIDES HAS NOT BEEN ASHAMED TO SHOW THE WORKING PART OF THE HEATER, BUT HAS ENCLOSED
IT IN AN OPEN METAL VASE
(Photograph courtesy “Country Life”)
It is nothing to the purpose to say that no one ought to invent a form or a new pattern or a new
combination of colors. Rightly or wrongly — and we need not bother about the morals of the case, because it is not a moral problem — new forms are being created because they shape themselves in artists’ minds and because the public like some of them when shaped.
Some people, excellent husbands and fathers, are troubled in spirit that a new aesthetic wave should be sweeping across Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, disturbing the coasts even of conservative Britain, and making its repercussions felt in America. There are not lacking English artists and public men who are satisfied that Bolshevism is at the bottom of it all, and that all right thinking men should keep clear of the accursed thing and adhere righteously to triglyphs and boukrania and the rest. But this is wearing a little thin. The artists of France and Sweden and Bavaria do not,
at all events, recognize themselves as Bolsheviks in art any more than in politics. Broadly speaking, modernism is here, and we must ask what we are going to do with it? It will not be satisfactory if the world of building and manufacture is to be divided into two camps, Traditionalists and Modernists, the former spending their lives tracing measured drawings of pleasant bits, and the latter thinking it a disloyalty if a hint of the past is seen in any of their work. The sort of emotions that stir Fundamentalists will not be very helpful in art or in manufacture.
If modernism is to be any more than a welter of unrelated eclecticisms, if it is to have a coherence that will justify it as a style of today, and seem a century hence to have been an orderly movement, some body of competent persons must take charge of it. No good will come of it, if it is to be a series of unregulated explosions. Who are the possible candidates for the job? The manufacturer is only discomfortably aware that some troublesome
TABLE GLASS DESIGNED BY THE LATE SIR THOMAS GRAHAM JACKSON
THE DESIGNS OF SIR THOMAS WERE BASED, AS SOUND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN MUST BE, ON ACUTE OBSERVATION AS TO HOW VARIOUS CURVES AND LINES COME NATU
RALLY IN THE PROCESS OF GLASS BLOWING
ELECTRIC HEATER DESIGNED BY BASIL IONIDES
MR. IONIDES HAS NOT BEEN ASHAMED TO SHOW THE WORKING PART OF THE HEATER, BUT HAS ENCLOSED
IT IN AN OPEN METAL VASE
(Photograph courtesy “Country Life”)