In the course of his lecture to the D.I.A. on March 22nd in the series entitled Are We Civilised ? Herbert Read made certain points which are peculiarly relevant to the main subject of this issue. He has kindly allowed us to print them below.
Wherever we find good forms emerging from factories, a designer with aesthetic sensibility is always present and responsible. Just as architects like Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier are artists in the fullest sense of the term— not humanistic artists, of course, but abstract artists— so in the same way the designer of steel or plywood furniture, as obviously of machine-made pottery and glass, is a designer of abstract forms, and according to his sensibility and genius, designs greater or lesser works of art.
All the machine age needs is a fuller recognition of the abstract artist. Now the modern movement in art has produced abstract artists in great numbers. Some of these have already turned their energies towards industrial design, but the majority of them are still producing pictures (abstract designs on canvas) which they offer for sale in rivalry with the traditional products of humanistic art. So long as it is difficult to satisfy one’s need for abstract art in machine-made objects, there will be a certain market for such abstract designs, and naturally, when the artist is of the stature of a Picasso or a Braque, such designs will be concentrated epitomes of this kind of art. I am not suggesting that the painting of abstract pictures will or should entirely cease. What I want to suggest is that in the products of industry, the abstract artist has an infinitely wider scope, and that industry has a real need for his talents.
There is rather a pathetic side-show in the contemporary scene. Certain artists, conscious of their powers, but perhaps unconscious of their proper functions, have begun to create imaginary machines. I refer to the works of artists like Giacometti, Calder, and Gabo. Constructed of rods and billiard balls and different coloured wires, such machines, which do not produce anything, whose wheels merely turn in the void of the imagination, are yet portents of the future.
Briefly, what is necessary for the solution of our problems is a recognition of the abstract nature of many types of art, and a recognition of the abstract artist. The abstract artist must be given a place in industry, and it must be a directional place. What I mean is, that the artist should not be required merely to produce a number of designs of paper which the factory manager will then choose from and adapt to his needs. The artist must design in the actual materials of the factory. His power must be absolute in all matters of design, and within the limits of functional efficiency (which the artist, as an integral part of the factory, will understand) the factory must adapt itself to the artist, not the artist to the factory. Naturally such a reorganisation could not come about in the present industrial system. Though the present- day industrialist is aware of the commercial value of good design, though a council for industrial design has been constituted by the Board of Trade, though we are to have a grand exhibition of British Industrial Art at the Royal Academy next winter, nothing is likely to happen because, now as a hundred years ago when Mr. Ewart’s committee was appointed for the same purpose, industry is run for the most part by people who have no understanding of the meaning of art and no inclination to resign any of their powers to the artist. They will continue to defend their inferior designs against superior designs from abroad by higher and higher tariffs, and so long as the industrialist can rely on this protection, we shall have to be satisfied with clumsy cutlery, crude textiles, ugly furniture and uglier houses. Only the rich will be able to afford the decency and simplicity of foreign products, which come from countries where the artist is held in more respect. One comes to the regrettable conclusion that the whole problem is bound up with politics—regrettable because the artist really has no time for politics.
What the artist really asks for, and what I believe is necessary for our general salvation, is a policy based on aesthetic values. We need the recognition of art as a biological function, and a constructive planning of our modes of living which takes full cognisance of this function. In every practical activity the artist is necessary, to give form to material. An artist must plan the distribution of cities within a region, an artist must plan the city, an artist must plan the houses and halls and factories that make up the city, an artist must plan the interiors of such buildings—the shapes of rooms and the distribution of light and colour—an artist must plan the furniture of those rooms, down to the smallest detail, the knives and forks, the cups and saucers and door-handles. And at every stage we need the abstract artist—the artist who can give us harmonic proportions when harmony is desirable, or intuitive proportions when the subtler elements of beauty are desirable.
What political system offers us any such possibility ? That is for you to decide. There was a time when Soviet Russia seemed to promise this ideal state, but now they have dismissed Le Corbusier and are reverting to a hideous nationalism in architecture and design. There was a time when Germany promised this ideal state, but now the most practical experiment in this direction, the Bauhaus founded by Gropius in 1919, has been suppressed by the Nazis, the best architects and abstract artists driven out of the country, and everywhere a reversion has set in towards traditional and nationalistic forms. Nowhere in the whole world, so far as I can see, is there any recognition of the realities of the problem, nowhere any political system or doctrine that offers any hope for the primacy of aesthetic values. Everywhere reason and sensibility are sacrificed to crude nationalistic prejudices, class ideologies and commercial rivalry. I see hope in one fact only—the inevitable progress of the machine. The machine triumphs everywhere, and its triumph threatens the whole structure of the society which has made that triumph possible. When that structure falls, as fall it must—when consumption is adjusted to production, when our medieval money system has disappeared and we enjoy the age of plenty that the machine has made possible, then we shall have leisure to replan our lives with the detachment and disinterestedness essential to any aesthetic activity; then the artist will become, if not the philosopher-king, at least the true captain of industry.
