The Search For Visual Democracy

The Search for Visual Democracy
Author(s): Isabelle Anscombe

Source: The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Vol. 4 (Spring, 1987), pp. 6-15
Published by: Florida International University Board of Trustees on behalf of The
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The Search for Visual Democracy
By Isabelle Anscombe
Isabelle Anscombe is a British ince the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there has been
general acceptance among both architects and designers and
writer and journalist, living in
their clients and patrons that these arts are an expression of so-
London. She is author of Arts cial, if not openly socialist, aspirations. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, as attention gradually shifted from the upper classes as the
and Crafts in Britain and consumers of design and architecture, to the middle and then the working
classes, these disciplines were discovered to be not just a pastime and status
America (with Charlotte Gere),
symbol for the wealthy but a social program for the definition and re-creation
Omega andAfter: Bloomsbury
of the very fabric of the state.
How did notions of liberalism, classlessness, and democracy come to be asso-

and the Decorative Arts, and
ciated with architecture and design? How can a specific artistic style be mapped
A Woman's Touch: Women in onto a social or philosophical concept, and what is then the relationship be-
tween them? Is there a visual, material language that is somehow apriori more
Design from 1860 to the Present democratic than any other-a claim made, over the past century, for various
differing esthetic styles, from the "honest craftsmanship" of the Arts and Crafts
Day, as well as numerous arti-
movement to the functionalism of modernism? For the "Merrie England"
cles on design. described byA.W.N. Pugin andJohn Ruskin in the 1840s and 1860s was not so
very different in aim from revolutionary Russian constructivism, German
worker housing of the 1920s, or the British garden cities of the late 1940s.
Gothic was just one of many historical styles revived at the Great Exhibition of
1851. Its adoption as a national style-the Houses of Parliament and countless
town halls, courtrooms, and other official buildings throughout England are
built in the Gothic revival style-was due to its "unifying" aspects.
The middle classes in Britain were terrified of chaos. They honored industrial
and scientific progress while denouncing the squalor of the "dark Satanic
mills" and fearing those who worked in them. They encouraged education and
The result of "allowing free
the ending of such barbaric practices as sending women and children down
play to the delight in creation mines, yet dreaded working-class agitation and the extension of the franchise.
Their dreams of progress bordered on nightmares of evolution and laissez-
in the making of objects for
faire run wild, of the unrestrained breeding of strange Darwinian hybrids. The
need for order, to suppress and to control, while at the same time offering a
comniiiol life": pottery by Roger
solution to manifest social ills, was dire.
Fry for the Omega Workshops,
A new type of social critic-Carlyle, Newman, Arnold, Pugin, and Ruskin-
ca. 1915. Photograph, Howard emerged, who suggested unifying programs of "sweetness and light," "culture,"
or medievalism. They offered a benign paternalism, based on the idea that the
Grey. masses, "dumb creatures in rage and pain," as Carlyle called them, wanted, not
6 DAPA Spring 1987
,o;l
DAPA Spring 1987 7
self-determination, but guidance. The middle classes, reacting to the degrada-
tion, anger, and ugliness in which the workers lived, seized on the revival of the
Gothic style for a national regeneration of the moral values of society. Me-
dievalism would tether unrestrained progress.
Those young men of the succeeding generation who belonged to the Arts and
Crafts movement were inevitably drawn to consider poor art and design as
symptoms of moral decay. As William Morris explained in 1883, by which time
he was increasingly involved in the socialist movement:
... I... assert the necessity of attacking systems grown corrupt, and no longer
leading anywhither: that to my mind is the case with the present system of capi-
tal and labour: as all my lectures assert, I have personally been gradually driven
to the conclusion that art has been handcuffed by it, and will die out of civiliza-
tion if the system lasts. That of itself does to me carry with it the condemnation
of the whole system, and I admit has been the thing which has drawn my atten-
tion to the subject in general.1
The Arts and Crafts movement introduced a fresh vocabulary of design: plain,
rural honesty versus cant, harmony versus brilliance, usefulness, fitness for
purpose, and a use of structural features as focal points of decoration were all
central tenets. Fitness for purpose represented a political program aimed at
bettering the plight of the working man under industrialization, and, as the
growth of the guild movement showed, many Arts and Crafts designers moved,
like Morris, from art to social reform. The gentlemen of the Arts and Crafts
movement set out to improve the lot of the working man not only through the
amelioration of household furnishings-Morris did not want "art for the few,"
despite the high cost of Morris & Co.'s products-but also, as Ruskin had
preached, through the quality of the work he was asked to do. C.R. Ashbee's
aim in setting up the Guild of Handicraft was nothing less than "the destruction
of the commercial system, to discredit it, undermine it, overthrow it."2
But, just as Morris, aided by his mentor D.G. Rossetti, found and married his
"glorious lady fair" and set about building her an appropriate setting in the Red
House, thus condemning her to a life bounded by his iconography, so his de-
signs were also made for an idealized society that, in vision, preexisted in quite
some detail and had merely to be made to fit. Consistently inspired by Morris's
example, the Arts and Crafts ideal of fitness for purpose-have nothing in your
home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful-remained
founded upon a preconceived view of society rooted in Ruskin's love of Gothic.
The search for beauty was still paramount, and the focus remained on the art
produced rather than the rights of the men who produced it. Morris's
handblocked wallpapers and chintzes, for example, the financial mainstay of
Morris & Co., were monotonous to produce and admitted no room for any
individual Ruskinian creative input.
A major reason why the movement was unable to break away from Morris's
medievalism, and so go further stylistically, was that ambivalence towards Vic-
torian notions of Progress clouded the issue so far as design went, staving off
the acceptance of a functionalist interpretation of fitness for purpose for many
years.
1. William Morris, a letter to C.E. Maurice, Kelmscott House, 1 July 1883. Quoted inJ.W. Mackail, Life of
William Morris (London 1899, Vol. II), p. 106.
2. C.R. Ashbee, Craftsmanship in a Competitive Industry (London 1908).
8 DAPA Spring 1987
The debate that followed the Great Exhibition of 1851 said that design, like
science, must have discoverable laws, so that the job of designing a carpet or
tablecloth well was merely a matter of applying the correct principles. The
Schools of Design, set up to improve the quality of British manufactures, en-
dorsed this view, as did many of the designers involved with them, men such as
Henry Cole, OwenJones, and Christopher Dresser. OwenJones, for example,
said that "... in the best periods of art, all ornament was rather based upon an
observation of the principles which regulate the arrangement of form in nature
... and that whenever this limit was exceeded in any art, it was one of the
strongest symptoms of decline."3 Dresser, who championed conventionaliza-
tion, held that "true ornamentation is of purely mental origin, and consists of
symbolized imagination or emotion only."4 Although their designs, perhaps es-
pecially Dresser's, may have led the way forward stylistically to the functional-
.2CA, ism of the 1920s, in ethical terms they supported the status quo.
Naturalistic versus conven-
tionalized design: Plate III from
Christopher Dresser's The Art
of Decorative Design (London
1862).
Plain rural honesty, certainly,
in this oak settle designed by
Philip Webb for Morris & Co.
in the 1860s, but fitness for
purpose? Haslam & Whiteway
Ltd. in association with The
Fine Art Society, London.
Photograph, Howard Grey.
3. OwenJones, "On Leaves and Flowers from Nature" in The Grammar of Ornament (London 1856).
4. Christopher Dresser, "Ornamentation Considered as High Art," a paper read before The Society of
Arts, London, 10 February 1871.
DAPA Spring 1987 9
An electroplated teapot de-
signed by Christopher Dresser
in the 1870s and a silver teapot
designed by Marianne Brandt
half a century later: both
modern designs, but neither
counted as democratic.
The British Museum. Dresser
photograph, Howard Grey.
ry.t'.fj
10 DAPA Spring 1987
In many key respects, such as an acceptance of two-dimensional pattern or the
absence of applied, nonstructural ornament, the actual end products from the
Schools of Design differed little from those by Arts and Crafts designers. But
the principles that the Schools of Design championed were anathema to Morris
and his followers. This was because they supported the doctrine of progress,
which was also used to support the doctrine of laissez-faire and had led to un-
restrained industrialization, squalor, and working-class unrest-the very things
the adoption of Gothic had set out to defeat.
Charles Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, and many others were scathing in their attacks
upon such "a set of rules deduced from a sham science of design, that is itself
not a science but another set of rules."5 Ruskin's view of truth to nature was
diametrically opposed to any such notion of conventionalization:
In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are
not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same
in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.
All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to de-
stroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality6
Dickens was, typically, more sensitive to the opportunities that such principles
offered for dictatorship:
"You are to be in all things regulated and governed," said the gentleman, [in
Hard Times] "by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed
of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and
of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have
nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament,
what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you
cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign
birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery.... You must use,"
said the gentleman, "for all these purposes, combinations and modifications
(in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof
and demonstration. This is the new discovery This is fact. This is taste."7
So, while A.H. Mackmurdo and his colleagues saw the Arts and Crafts move-
ment as "a mighty upheaval of man's spiritual nature," they were caught in the
tangle of nineteenth-century ideology, unable to do more than produce Art
Furniture for the newly liberalized middle classes, revolutionizing the middle-
class home but not the lives of the working people who produced it. Indeed,
Ashbee was driven to the conclusion that responsibility for such a revolution
rested as much with the consumer as with the craftsman.
For the middle classes themselves, however, the movement was iconoclastic. It
introduced modern notions of respectability- gentlemen could design tables
and ladies earn money from their needlework, without losing caste, through
the benediction of Art-and offered an alternative lifestyle, the "Simple Life" of
the craft community.
5. William Morris, "The Lesser Arts," a lecture given under the title "The Decorative Arts" to the Trades
Guild of Learning, London, 12 April 1877. The Collected Works of William Morrs (London 1910-
15).
6. John Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic," in The Stones of Venice (London 1853), p. 25.
7. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London 1854), p. 9-10.
DAPA Spring 1987 11
This further confused the issue of mapping a concrete style onto democratic
aims, for now fitness for purpose became itself a program for a way of life, re-
defining the concepts of gentlemen and the value of art. For some, such as the
potter Katharine Pleydell Bouverie, the "Simple Life" offered an escape from
notions of respectability to which she could not, in any case, as a lesbian, con-
form, but men such as Edward Carpenter, Eric Gill, and Philip Mairet shared
differing religious notions of the common man-"when Adam dug and Eve
span, who was then the gentleman?" A different esthetic emerged to meet this
fresh social concept.
Roger Fry, who, not coincidentally, came from a Quaker family, explained the
view of art behind the Omega Workshops which, although urban, shared the
idea that a truly democratic art was essentially personal and manual:
If you look at a pot or a woven cloth made by a negro savage of the Congo...
you may begin by despising it for its want of finish...but... it will become ap-
parent that the negro enjoyed making his pot or cloth, that he pondered de-
lightedly over the possibilities of his craft and that his enjoyment finds expres-
sion in many ways.... The artist is the man who creates not only for need but
for joy.... The Omega Workshops Limited is a group of artists who are working
with the object of allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of
objects for common life.8
What mattered was the harmony between maker and materials, maker and the
rhythm of life, maker and the purpose for which the object was intended: art
was to do with integrity. But, ironically, through the proselytizing of Bernard
Leach, it was perhaps pottery-objects with no real purpose other than the
personal expression of beauty-that most closely mirrored this new vision of
the common man.
However, in Europe, the aftermath of the First World War forced the ideas of the
Arts and Crafts movement back into a more radical mold, regenerating their
original socialist aims: let the middle classes design for the worker! He had
died by the million in a middle-class war, now society would be rebuilt through
democratic design. There were, however, many differing interpretations of
what constituted democratic design. The argument was no longer centered on
whether art and architecture ought to be in the service of social regeneration,
but on the material and esthetic expression of such a view.
From around 1910, the new middle-class freedoms and ideas about the role of
the designer had led to the creation of workshops in which artists and students
joined with highly skilled artisans to form new relationships between master
and pupil, art and design. The Omega was one, as was Josef Hoffmann's
Kunstlerwerkstatte in Vienna, the Vkhutemas set up in post-revolutionary Mos-
cow, and, ultimately, the Bauhaus. Even salon society in Paris helped design to
become more cosmopolitan, bringing together fresh ideas and people, so that
literature, theater, fashion, the cinema all had an influence on the interchange
of ideas.
In the first flush of elation at building the "cathedral of socialism" through de-
sign, Walter Gropius declared that "The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the
complete building!...The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern
8. Roger Fry, preface to an undated Omega catalogue in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London ca.
1915).
12 DAPA Spring 1987
designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again."9 The
Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of art, integrity, function, and socialism, was
the way forward. But the now familiar debate would not go away: was this
really democratic design?
It was not long before the expressive, psychological approach of Bauhaus meis-
ters such as Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, and Paul Klee was challenged by the
writings of Theo van Doesburg, who moved to Weimar in 1921 and started his
own rival De Stijl course, by the work of the Russian constructivists, shown in
Berlin the following year, and by the publication of Le Corbusier's journal,
'Esprit Nouveau. The socialism of the 1920s, backed by dialectic, wanted
anonymous design, free from middle-class overtones of individualism.
In 1931 Gunta Stolzl, junior master of the weaving workshop, wrote:
We had a very different idea about the home in 1922-23 than we have today
Our textiles were still permitted then to be poems heavy with ideas, flowery
embellishment and individual experience!... they were the most easily under-
standable and, by virtue of their subject matter, the most ingratiating articles of
those wildly revolutionary Bauhaus products. Gradually there was a shift. We
noticed how pretentious these independent, single pieces were: cloth, curtain,
wallhanging. The richness of colour and form began to look much too auto-
cratic to us, it did not integrate, it did not subordinate itself to the home. We
made an effort to become simpler, to discipline our means and to achieve a
greater unity between material and function. This way we came to produce tex-
i tiles sold by the yard, which were clearly capable of serving the needs of the
room and the problems of the home. The slogan of this new era: prototypes
for industry!'0
Gunta Stolzl and her team had to solve the problem of reconciling their Arts
and Crafts allegiance to the notion that liberalism and integrity rested on hand-
made qualities with an acceptance of the machine. They did so by using their
expertise on the handloom to develop such prototypes as sound resistant, light
reflective, and washable textiles which, as Anni Albers wrote later, "would not
suffocate us with glamour but would retain the serviceable character useful ob-
"Poems heavy with ideas..." jects should have."" Under the leadership of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the metal-
workshop also shifted from making silverware and jewelry to the production
a hand-knotted rug made for the
of strikingly practical items for serial production by industry. Marianne Brandt's
first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 prototypes included stacking bowls, glass globe lamps, push button light
switches, adjustable reflectors for indirect lighting, and shaving mirrors, while
by Gunta Stilzl. Photograph Marcel Breur and Mies van der Rohe were producing revolutionary cantile-
vered tubular steel chairs-perhaps the first truly style-less, designer items.
courtesy of the Bauhaus-
Outside the Bauhaus, however, functionalism rested upon a love affair with the
Archiv, Berlin.
machine esthetic which appeared to be prompted as much by visual excite-
ment as by any real social program. "There's no doubt," wrote Charlotte
Perriand of the period in which she first joined Le Corbusier's office, "it was
much less demoralizing to walk along the Champs-Elysees looking at car
9. VWlter Gropius, "Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar," 1919, translated in The Bauhaus
(MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978), p. 31.
10. Gunta Stolzl, BauhausJournal, 1931, no. 2, translated in The Bauhaus (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts, 1978), p. 465.
11. Anni Albers, "Weaving at the Bauhaus," On Designing (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Con-
necticut, 1962), p. 27.
DAPA Spring 1987 13
bodies than among the furniture makers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."'2 The
machine esthetic, while extolling progress, modernity, function, precision, and
efficiency in the service of worker housing, made a machine a habiter at once
excessively styled and somewhat dictatorial, in that, once the equipment had
been specified, the excellence of the design for living left little room for per-
sonal expression by anyone. An important addition to the designer's visual vo-
cabulary, it was nevertheless as subjective in its allegiances as Morris's me-
dievalism.
The use of abstraction for objects of everyday use in the 1920s was another at-
tempt to extend the artistic franchise by breaking down artistic, if not social,
barriers. Abstraction was the universal language, free from any rhetoric of
class-ridden ideas of good art, personality, narrative content, historical refer-
ence, or national symbols. It was anonymous, international, democratic-but,
since the architects and designers had become the new elite, expensive. In-
deed, Sonia Delaunay, who applauded the notion of reaching a wider audience
through her dress and fabric designs, only turned her attention to design when
the 1917 Revolution put an end to her allowance from Russia.
As ideas about functionalism percolated through to Britain in the early 1930s,

various designers-Susie Cooper, Frank Pick and his team at London Transport
and, during the war, Gordon Russell and the Utility Design Panel-finally amal-
gamated Arts and Crafts notions of honesty and simplicity with machine pro-
duction, but their products looked positively homespun beside contemporary
European developments.
And in America an entirely fresh design rhetoric was emerging, one which was
to dominate postwar design and subtly change the aspirations of those Euro-
pean architects and designers who fled to the USA during the war. The dream
of the future, promising tomorrow's technology here today, and using modern
production line technology to reach international markets, replaced the magic
of the past as a potent image. Democratic design was now a matter of freedom
of choice in a consumer market, of huge numbers of people endorsing the ap-
peal of a product that, in its actual function, might be fairly pointless.
Today, the design language of the 1920s has been appropriated by big business;
and design consciousness, far from being classless, has become the badge of an
elite group who, unlike the middle classes who patronized Morris & Co.,
would hardly even pay lip service to socialist aspirations. Truly democratic de-
sign, it seems, lies in a MacDonald's restaurant or a Las Vegas casino, and the ar-
chitect and designer's belief that the look of his work endorses a social pro-
gram is now as much a mirage as perhaps it ever was. w
12. Charlotte Perriand, interviewed by P Renous in La Revue de l'Ameublement, June 1963, pp. 73-84,
author's translation.
14 DAPA Spring 1987
Democratic design? The
Kandem bedside lamp de-
signed at the Bauhaus by
Marianne Brandt in 1928 and
mass produced by the Leipzig
firm, Korting and Matthieson.
Photograph courtesy of the
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
DAPA Spring 1987 15

The Search For Visual Democracy

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The Search for Visual Democracy

Author(s): Isabelle Anscombe

Florida International University Board of Trustees on behalf of The Wolfsonian-FIU is

How did notions of liberalism, classlessness, and democracy come to be asso-

6 DAPA Spring 1987

DAPA Spring 1987 7

8 DAPA Spring 1987

Naturalistic versus conven-

tionalized design: Plate III from

Christopher Dresser's The Art

of Decorative Design (London

Plain rural honesty, certainly,

in this oak settle designed by

Philip Webb for Morris & Co.

in the 1860s, but fitness for

purpose? Haslam & Whiteway

Ltd. in association with The

Fine Art Society, London.

Photograph, Howard Grey.

DAPA Spring 1987 9

signed by Christopher Dresser

in the 1870s and a silver teapot

designed by Marianne Brandt

half a century later: both

modern designs, but neither

The British Museum. Dresser

photograph, Howard Grey.

10 DAPA Spring 1987

DAPA Spring 1987 11

12 DAPA Spring 1987

In 1931 Gunta Stolzl, junior master of the weaving workshop, wrote:

DAPA Spring 1987 13

As ideas about functionalism percolated through to Britain in the early 1930s,

14 DAPA Spring 1987

Kandem bedside lamp de-

signed at the Bauhaus by

Marianne Brandt in 1928 and

mass produced by the Leipzig

firm, Korting and Matthieson.

Photograph courtesy of the

DAPA Spring 1987 15

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