Part 1

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART

_ONLY ONE HUNDRED AND TEN COPIES OF THIS FINE PAPER EDITION HAVE BEEN PRINTED._

_THIS IS No._ 49 ....

THE CLAIMS

OF

DECORATIVE ART

BY

WALTER CRANE

LONDON LAWRENCE AND BULLEN 16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN MDCCCXCII

PREFACE

Of the papers included in this volume some of the shorter ones had their origin in fireside discussions in the studios of brother artists; others have been addressed to larger and various audiences; but all have been written under the influence of that new-old view of art, which has revived during the last quarter of our century, which regards it not only in relation to use and material, and seeks for its vital root in the handicrafts, but also in its connection with common life and social conditions.

Believing that art, looked at rather from the creative side of design, is as essentially a mental and emotional language as poetry and music, while it seeks expression through a variety of processes and materials, and under natural limitations, which limitations, in so far as they are frankly acknowledged, give to art in all its forms a peculiar beauty and charm: believing further that an art which appeals to the eye must be influenced for good or ill by external and social environment, just as a tree takes its character from certain qualities of soil and climate, it follows that I think it is hardly possible to attach too much importance to these external and social conditions, affecting as they do both art and its producer.

While maintaining the first importance of the arts and crafts of design as contributing to the formation of a fine sense of beauty--a sense which grows by what it feeds on, I have dwelt upon the necessity of harmonious relation in all the arts, and a return to their primal unity in architecture. In this fraternal unity none is before or after the other, none is greater or less than the other.

If I may have succeeded in making out a case for the arts now called Decorative and Applied (though “there is but one art”); if I have made good their claim to consideration in an age given largely to place pictorial and graphic power first; if even any of the following papers induce my readers to follow the clue for themselves, and especially to think out further the relation of art to labour and to social life, whether they reach the same conclusions or not, my book will serve its purpose.

Some few of the papers have been printed in various journals, and I have to thank the editor of the _Art Journal_ for permission to reprint “The Claims of Decorative Art.”

WALTER CRANE.

EDGEWATER, ILLINOIS, _January 1892_.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART 1

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART 7

FIGURATIVE ART 20

SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 31

PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 35

ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN 39

ART AND LABOUR 50

ART AND HANDICRAFT 62

THE PROSPECTS OF ART UNDER SOCIALISM 74

ON THE TEACHING OF ART 83

DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL 90

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE APPLIED ARTS, AND THEIR RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 106

ART AND COMMERCIALISM 123

ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 140

IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART 157

ART AND INDUSTRY 172

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART

An archbishop at an Academy dinner, doubtless with an amiable desire to administer consolation to those less favoured ones whose works did not adorn the walls around him, is reported to have said, in effect: “Never mind. It is not given to every one to be a Raphael, a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo (the exhibition being, by implication, of course full of them); but let them not therefore despair, let them turn their attention to Decorative Art, for there was a large field in which they might yet distinguish themselves.”

Now, although I do not suppose that even an archbishop could be found now to say anything of this kind, so rapidly have we advanced, yet it struck me at the time as the expression of a very curious view of art. It was not the unfortunate selection of names, all of which stood for artists pre-eminently decorative; it was not the placid assumption that the Academy represented both the best judgment upon, and the best work in, art which the country produced; it was not this so much as the assumption that what is called decorative art belonged distinctly to a lower category, that its demands upon the mind, both of the artist and the spectator, were much less, and, in short, the whole thing was of lower aim, and required less skill and power to produce than what is called pictorial art. If, however, we are justified in drawing any conclusions from the history and practice of art, they seem to invert this view altogether.

I have no wish to set the sisters one against the other, or make odious comparisons, and indeed there is no need to do so, as, in my belief, both kinds of art in their higher development join hands. Their true relative position, indeed, may be expressed by the two limbs of a pair of compasses, inseparable and mutually dependent and helpful. It is certain that painting and sculpture, as commonly understood, cannot be in a good state, cannot reach any perfection, where the multitudinous arts that surround and culminate in them--that frame them in, in short--are not also in vigorous health and life. As well expect flowers to bloom without roots and stems, light, heat, and air, as to think that beautiful pictures or statues, or the sense that produces and admires them, can exist where there is no beauty in everyday things, no sources of harmonious thought about us, or delight of the eye in pleasant colour or form in things of daily use and surrounding. I would go further, and say that where decorative or applied art is in a wholesome condition good pictorial or dramatic art will follow on as natural effect in the chain of evolution from certain ascertainable causes.

This is sufficiently obvious to actual workers in art; but “Truth,” as has been said, “never can be confirmed enough,” and I am afraid that it has by no means reached this stage with a great majority of the people, not to speak of academicians and archbishops, and that it yet needs demonstration to many that beauty, both in life and art, is not something accidental and fanciful, the luxury and pursuit of a few dreamers and misguided beings; that it is an organic thing, having its own laws, however various, its own logical causes and consequences; that it, like everything else, is a result of that continual fierce and strenuous struggle for existence throughout nature; a living thing, and therefore ever-varying in its forms, having its own ever-recurring seasons--growth, perfection, decline, and renaissance--as we follow it down the long stream of time, and mark its many habitations from age to age.

We may well treasure the broken caskets, the priceless shells and fragments of art, cast by the ruthless flood of years on the desert shores; but let us not, in our anxiety and admiration for the beauty that is of the past, forget that beauty is a living force with us, a living presence, and that, like her prototype, for those who have eyes, she rises from our northern seas every summer morning, without the trouble of going to Cyprus. But she must be fed, clothed, and housed, and for these necessities we, as decorative artists, must be held mainly responsible. We are the trustees, as it were, of the common property of beauty, and we are the administrators of it, to use a well-worn phrase, from the cottage to the palace. Whether as architects, sculptors, painters, and designers, each after our kind, by the forms, the colours, and the patterns we put out, we are insensibly forming the tastes, by association, of present and future generations. And, to return to the question touched at the outset, herein is the mark and goal of decorative art, properly speaking; that whereas other considerations may weigh largely in painting a picture, such as desire to get force or expression, though, personally, I should say they should never outweigh considerations of beauty; yet in decorative art, or, as it is not very logically called, applied art, these considerations are supreme. Decorum, balance, harmony, these are the graces who must advise us, though a whole crowd of secondary considerations clamours to be heard.

The current notion of decoration is summed up in the expression “flatness of treatment,” and to the notion that this is the whole of the law and the prophets of decorative art may be dimly traced, perhaps, the conception of it in the mind of the archbishop, and in those of many superior persons. Hence, too, the flat-ironed primulas and the genus of enfeebled flora and fauna generally, which so often, alas, do duty as decoration. As if decorative art was a voracious but dyspeptic being, and required everything in heaven and earth to be thoroughly well boiled down before it could be properly assimilated.

Flatness of treatment, of course, is well enough; it is the most single and obvious answer to one of the many problems a decorative artist has to consider. It is a part of his business, no doubt, to assert the wall, but his work does not begin and end there. But even if this was the last word of decorative art, it is by no means so simple a matter as it sounds. A world of judgment must come in, as at every step in all art properly so called. It needs our best faculties, whether we treat things in the flat or the round; but as well might one be satisfied with the definition of painting as “the imitation of solid bodies on a plane surface,” as with “flatness of treatment” as adequate characterisation of decoration.

The real test in decoration is adaptability, either to position or material. The exigencies of both often open the gates of invention; but assuredly no decoration has a right to the name which does not satisfy these conditions.

These are, after all, but the bones and the scaffolding, and though it is highly necessary to have them in their right places, the real triumphs of decoration come afterwards. And truly, the world, to the decorative artist, is all before him, where to choose. Nay, like every true artist, he has to make his own world, and people it with his thoughts. And in respect of thought decorative or monumental art, in its higher forms, is capable of expressing, by its command of figurative and emblematic resources, more than is possible to purely pictorial art. There is, in fact, nothing beyond its range, by reason of its being more suggestive than imitative; and in this direction it becomes again, as at its beginning, but in a higher sense, a language--a picture-writing.

And what language can be more definite and enduring, whether we read it from the artist’s or the historian’s, the antiquarian’s or the philosopher’s point of view? How faint an idea should we get of the nations of antiquity if all their art had perished! And it is all strictly decorative art, from the incised bones of the cave men to the frieze of the Parthenon. Therefore, say some, paint your own time, its manners and its customs, its coats and its trousers. By all means, if you see your way to it; but it would be a mistake to suppose that this was the only way of painting it. The mind has its habits and costumes as well as the body--a far more extensive wardrobe, indeed, which promises still to increase. Art does not live for the antiquary alone. He is never likely to be in want of material, even if Derby Days and Railway Stations were never put on canvas.

I know no better definition of beauty than that it is “the most varied unity, the most united variety.”

Well, certainly there is no lack in our day of variety--I mean in the sense of style and material. To the worker in art it is a truly formidable prospect, and to enter the lists he needs to be well mounted and armed, in view of the forces arrayed against him. Modern life with all its hideous luxury and squalor; its huge, ever-spreading, unwieldy, unlovely cities; the bare skeleton and bald framework of new aims and inventions breaking through the rich tattered garment of ancient life and customs. How to reconcile these things, how to assert the supremacy of Beauty, to raise her standard everywhere, how to bring sweetness out of strength, would seem to need the strength and courage of an artistic Samson. At the same time it is as well to remember that too much preparation may be as much an encumbrance as a defence, and that great effects are sometimes produced by very simple means; that giants have been floored by a well-directed stone in a sling, and the Philistines routed in consequence. I say it is as well to bear this in mind when we take our artistic life in our hand and go forth--to meet the monsters of our time clad in plate-glass, cast-iron, and fortified in desirable residences.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART

The Architecture of Art is a somewhat comprehensive title, and it might not unreasonably be expected of me, before proceeding with the structure and treatment of the subject in perspective, to give some sort of scale, sketch, ground plan, or elevation, so that the general drift of my argument may be understood. I do not propose to deal exactly with the various forms and styles of architecture as they are, and have been manifested in plastic or graphic art; or the predilections of different designers and painters for certain forms over others as accessory to their compositions, interesting as such a comparative study might be. I am taking the term architecture in its widest sense, considering it not only as an art in its effect upon other arts, but as the fundamental, comprehensive, and sustaining framework both of life and thought; the historic and living background which influences and moulds all our ideas, the set scene upon which is enacted the ever-shifting drama of art.

In comparing the art of the present day, architectural or otherwise, with the art of the past, especially of any well-defined epoch, whether mediæval or classical, we cannot fail to be struck with one great distinction underlying all superficial differences. Whereas the art of past ages seems to have germinated, to have been continually evolved in new forms, to be alive, and spontaneous, as it were, growing like a thing of nature, and expanding with man’s ideas of nature and life; in our day this sense of spontaneity, this natural growth, is scarcely felt. Conscious and laborious effort takes the place of spontaneous invention, and originality is crushed by the weight of authority, is confounded and abashed by the mass of examples. No form of architecture or art seems to spring naturally and unaffectedly out of the actual necessities and demands of daily life.

It has been said that the great exhibition of 1851 is to be held answerable for a great deal; for the vulgarising and commercialising of art, and for the final break-up of old traditions in the crafts of design; but so far as this took place, it was only the effect of causes lying far deeper in the great economic changes, affecting the conditions of the production of all works whatsoever, which had been going on during the three previous centuries. That exhibition, as succeeding ones have done, merely summed up the results of these changes, and showed their effects, for good or evil, declaring to all whom it might concern that the apotheosis of commercialism meant the degradation of art.

This will seem a hard saying to such as are accustomed to believe that the accumulation of riches and the welfare of art go hand in hand. But let us look around us. Of course the spirit of commercialism does produce startling results upon art, if not in it; and it is a wolf quite capable of seeing the advantage of sheep’s clothing. There is, for example, plenty of building and house painting. Capitalism is nothing if not practical. The national instinct based on the national shibboleth that “every man’s house is his castle,” combining with the enormous growth of cities, has produced those miles and miles of brick cages which have more or less ruined the architectural character and proportion of every large town in the kingdom. What, then, are these? These are Englishmen’s castles--on a small scale, it is true, and run together. There are not hills enough for the castles required, and what hills there are belong to somebody else. What is easier than to build them side by side? They will support each other, and economise bricks and mortar; and why trouble to make a fresh design for each castle? The little lords’ wants are much the same as the big ones’, only on a smaller scale, like his purse. He must, of course, have his outer line of defences. His portcullis, a drawbridge,--well, at any rate, iron railing and portico,--that he may speak with his enemy the tax-gatherer at the gate; his dining-room, drawing-room, bedroom, and bath-rooms, and gas and water laid on. Why should he not be happy and comfortable? and it is all so cheap too! Yet the speculative man and the man of profits--the kindly builders who multiply these miniature strongholds for the average Briton--we do not account exactly as public benefactors. Jack is rarely able to build his own house nowadays, so Jerry builds it for him; but the well-known drama of rat and cat, dog and cow with the crumpled horn, is still enacted, with perhaps some changes in the cast, and new scenery and dresses. Here are the bee-cells ready made for the future occupants of the national hive, fit for the average man,--never mind if they do not always fit him; we cannot take account of round or square bodies; if the majority are hexagonal, the rest must put up with the inconvenience and a little squeezing: great is Average! Meanwhile, how fares it with art in the house that Jerry built? Do the streets produced on these principles, and at such a terrible rate, lend themselves either to pictorial or decorative treatment? Do they suggest any ideas, even, except of the dust-man? Well, but the man of profits is ready again. The Briton can get his art cheap too--wholesale or retail. He can have cheap dadoes and coloured glass thrown in here and there. If these are not enough, he can fill his house with early (or latest) English furniture, “surmounted by something Japanese,” as the comic poet saith. Should his aspirations remain still unsatisfied, he can take the illustrated magazines to tell him about every art under the sun, and how it is done. In fact, if the literature of the subject could make artists and craftsmen, every street should be bristling with them. Every Christmas scatters oil paintings by our first masters, fresh from the printing-press, over the British Empire. A shilling or so will secure a whole gallery. Was ever anything like it in any age of art? Truly, no. Still we are not happy--we are not happy about our art. We English especially. We allow Frenchmen and Belgians to teach us painting, and our American cousins how to do nearly everything else.

Now, I am not going to say it is all the fault of the Royal Academy. That institution, as regards its chief feature, the annual Exhibition, is only another engine of the man of profits, which, frankly recognising the commercialism of the age, endeavours, by special appointment and self-election, to adapt the business of picture-painting to it, without troubling much about architecture and sculpture, and leaving the other arts to shift for themselves. It is but due to say, however, that they endeavour to counteract the influence of the new masters in the summer by the works of the old masters in the winter, on the principle, perhaps, of the mediæval system of doing penance.

In the course of evolution we are passing through a period of disintegration. Art cannot escape the tendencies and influences of its time, which, indeed, it is of its very nature to illustrate. The artist has become more and more specialised, and the unity of the arts has been broken up. He is no longer the master craftsman among his workmen and apprentices, prepared to do all things in the province of design, from the pattern on the hem of a garment to the painting of an altar-piece. He is rather the juggler in the master’s place, who with a particular sleight of hand can command a particular phase of sea or sky; or he has the trick of the flattering glass in portraiture. Perchance he seeks to draw “iron tears” down the cheeks of (not Pluto) but the philanthropic Plutus, and golden ones from his pocket by his peculiar domestic pathos; or in stage-lights strikes the contrast of wealth and misery, chilling his blood by melo-dramatic horrors; or by seeking to glorify him in his happy hunting grounds surrounded by images of his sacred animals. As to painting, perhaps it has always been more or less at the bidding of the dominant orders of its day, but more naturally so since she left her roof-tree and parted company with architecture and sculpture, and all the fair and fascinating troop controlled by a common influence and a common devotion, that throng in the splendid retinue of design.

Through the columns of the colossal architecture of time we look back down the long vista of ages and epochs, and read their spirit in the unmistakable language of art, coloured as it is by the human systems and beliefs of which it is the monument; whether as in the wall-paintings and reliefs of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and Persia, art is devoted to the glorification of military or sacerdotal despotism; or the systematised symbolism of an ancient nature worship, humanised and made beautiful by the Greek, informed by freedom and life; decaying amid the corruption of ancient Rome, or graced with a new splendour from the East, rising in the solemn magnificence of Byzantine art; and so through the vivid imagination of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the new mysticism, yet through the Church linked to the hopes as well as the fears of humanity. Then with the new thoughts and hopes of the Renaissance it rekindles its lamp at the shattered shrine of classical sculpture and learning, until choked with artifice and pedantry in succeeding centuries, it is forced back to nature and life again on the threshold of our own time. But again it is in danger from a new tyranny in that unscrupulous commercialism, which is not less dangerous because less tangible, and not less despotic because it is masked under the form of political liberty. Steam machinery, like a many-headed, many-handed dragon, rules industry literally with a rod of iron, and fain would it make art prisoner too, for its profit, but that its touch is death. Intended for the service of man and for the saving of human labour, it has under our economic system enslaved humanity instead, and become an engine for the production of profits, an express train in the race for wealth, only checked by the brake of what is called over-production. Who can tell what will be the end of the journey?