ART AND INDUSTRY

WE are here to further the advancement of art in its application to industry. Are we quite sure that we do not mean the advancement of industry by the application of art?

For the last two or three centuries we appear to have been applying all the power of organisation, the ingenuity, and the mechanical invention of man to the advancement of industry in the interests of competitive commerce; not with the advancement of art as the object, but rather that of profit-making, with the economic result that we cannot find work enough for our compulsorily idle hands to do; while in the din of the vast workshop of machine production, and the fierce battle of the world-market, art can hardly find a place for the sole of her foot.

Mechanical invention in the interests of trade has dominated us. Mechanical invention has outstripped the invention of the artist. Mechanical smoothness has taken the place of artistic thought and finish. And why? Because to our great deities of commercial enterprise and successful trade, the amount of the output is more regarded than the artistic quality of the material and work.

The very spirit and meaning of the word “artistic” implies something harmonious; something in relation to its surroundings; something arising out of the joy of life, and expressing the delight of the artist in his work, however arduous; something personal, the expression of one mind, or of many—congruous—expressly and lovingly addressed to particular persons, and adapted to particular places and things. Not a mere system of guess-work, beginning with the designer who makes a guess at the sort of thing that may possibly “take,” rather than what he personally likes and has a feeling for. The designer, again, being dependent on the manufacturer, guessing what the market or the trade will take; or he again depends on the conjectures of the trade as to what an unknown quantity in the public can be induced to take. The public, again, surrounded with every species of conundrum in the name of art, is driven to guess in its turn not as to what it really likes, or what is good and fitted to its purpose, but what is the correct thing to buy, or what other people buy, or are likely to buy. So the whole structure of applied art, under our present system, speaking generally, is built upon the shifting sands of insincerity and speculation.

Let us inquire what natural affinity there is between art and industry. Properly considered, obviously, they should be inseparable; but the spirit that rules industry now is wrapped up in the one object of the salesman—to sell.

The spirit of industry is merely to produce. The spirit of the artist is not merely to produce, but to express—to both produce and to express something which is a joy to him in the making, and may be a joy to the user and beholder. In the search after perfection of method of expression, in the struggle to express his thought, to make his work, whatever it be—the lines of a design, a simple, repeating pattern, a moulding, a sculptured ornament, a figure, a group, a picture, a building—to make his work live, to answer to his thought, and so to touch the thoughts of others, the artist will frequently undo or destroy his own work—will cast aside the labour that has cost him perhaps hours of toil and thought, and try again, until his work answers more nearly to the ideal in his mind.

Considerations of the market are forced upon him, it is true, too often; but these have no necessary connection with art, and in so far as he ceases to be true to his ideal, and is seriously influenced, or driven, by circumstances to work consciously and exclusively for money, as an artist he must deteriorate.

Now, the man of commerce—the controller of industry—seeks only to make a saleable article. He is influenced in his industrial production simply by this object. He takes the opinions of salesmen, of the trade, not of artists, as a rule, and so far as any artistic standard or aim enters into the produce of his manufactory, it is strictly checked by the average of what his rivals are doing, and by the discovery of what the big public can be persuaded to buy.

Slowly, perhaps, some personal force or centre of artistic sincerity creates a new impulse and new desires in a jaded public, sated with every craze and whim under the name of art; slowly the wave of fashion rises, swiftly it rolls. It affects the salesman first. His arts fail him. He cannot palm off these coarse and inharmonious colours, these hideous patterns, or this clumsy furniture, charm he ever so wisely. He sells at a “great sacrifice,” and returns to the industrial king, the manufacturer, who either evolves something “new and original” out of his inner consciousness on the premises for next season, or he seeks out the artist. He makes a compact with him. The man of ideas meets the man of industry and profits. The result is of course a compromise. The artist must turn out taking novelties in design for the market. That is, the market of guess-work. The market must be the first consideration; it is imperative to sell one’s season’s goods.

Commerce, like the old woman in the nursery tale, stands at the stile (of an overstocked market) with her obdurate pig (over-production) that refuses to move until the stick (of new demand) has been persuaded to bring its influence to bear, and one by one all the characters of the commercial drama act and re-act upon each other by the very necessities of their existence, middleman and public, capitalist and labourer. We shall find their prototypes in our nursery tale, up to the ox (personifying John Bull) driven to action from the fear of the butcher—the Nemesis of foreign competition.

The little allegory from the nursery fits the situation exactly. It has been revealed unto babes.

So the whole mill of industrial commercial production is fed and set in motion, and grinds on year after year. The wheels of its machinery, like those of fortune herself, lifting some into prosperity, upon the condition of the ruin of others, and the working order of the whole depending on the existence of the vast majority of our brothers and sisters in the condition of not being more than one week’s remove from destitution.

This is the social and industrial structure we have raised, in which we live and move and have our being. Art and industry, like figures carved in stone, may adorn its portal, and our hopes and fears, our regrets for the past, our thoughts for the future, play like cloud shadows upon its grim façade, which will yet master our efforts at humanising and beautifying, until its tenants some day insist on improvements, perhaps even involving a change of plan and structure.

Meanwhile our fluctuating harlequin of fashion and trade comes and goes. This year we are going to be “artistic”—everything is to be “artistic”—art colours, art furniture, art in the attic, art in the coalhole. Next year, away with your degraded colours! Let us be grandly barbaric in mauve and magenta! Is this the delightful spontaneous caprice of unstable humanity, seeking novelty in the simplicity of its heart? Or is it wholly unconnected with the inscrutable movements and exigencies of those commercial and industrial potentates whereof I have spoken?

Anyway, art and industry remain a somewhat ill-assorted couple, and furnish an additional modern instance to those who rudely ask, “Is marriage a failure?”

Of course, to the artist accustomed to believe in personal work—to value the individual touch and characteristic method—the whole idea of the application of steam-power, and the mechanical reproduction of any form of art wholesale, is an entire mistake; or, at least, it can only be countenanced under certain conditions and in certain well-defined directions under controlling taste, such, for instance, as the domain of the printer, whether of books, cottons, wall-papers, and the like, or in the work of the loom. I have constantly been struck, in passing through one of our industrial exhibitions—those huge trophies of the world’s trade, that we have raised from time to time, and which are counted among the triumphs of the century—I have often been struck with the marvellous mechanical invention, and the extent and range of the application of steam machinery. One is impressed with a vivid idea of the lightning speed with which the competitive race is run, and the scale on which the world’s market is stocked. But if one inquires how this mechanical march has affected the progress of art, the answer generally appears in some such shape as this. We may, perhaps, see some wonderful piece of ingenuity and mechanism—a carpet loom, for instance, such as I saw at the American Exhibition in London. The machine itself appeared to be a marvel of adaptation; but it would seem as if all the invention had been exhausted upon the means of production, and when one came to the product itself—the carpet in the loom—the result as an artistic matter, a matter of design and colour, was simply deplorable. So that one generally turns from these triumphs of the century with a conviction that we have lost sight of the end in our search for mechanical perfection in the means.

The world, having increased so much under the sway of our industrial kings (we will grant them that), having congregated in vast centres for the convenience of commerce and industry, necessarily has large and immediate wants. Millions of interdependent human beings demand to be fed and clothed, warmed and sheltered, with swift and efficient means of communication and carriage from place to place. Wholesale industrial production does it, with the aid of steam and electricity; and does it so thoroughly (as regards quantity and the purchasing power of the community) as to overshoot the mark and glut the market, which means that a number of citizens are obliged to go without the comforts and necessities they have assisted in producing, seeing that the system of production is not economically organised in the interest of the community, but rather for the profit of individuals.

The world does not stop in its demands at food and clothes and shelter, however. Man does not live by bread alone. He needs mental bread, spiritual exaltation, amusement, excitement, and would clothe his thoughts in artistic and architectural garments. Here, however, wholesale industrial machine production is distinctly at fault, even if in the quality of its food stuffs and bare necessities it has been blameless. In making art a commodity, or in the endeavour to make it so, its distinctive virtue and value has been left out of account. In associating it with purely mechanical and subdivided toil, in handing it over to the blind fingers of insensate machinery, or in setting before it a purely commercial object, both its spiritual and sensuous delight vanishes, and the refining and educating influence of both its practice and its ultimate appeal is lost. The human interest being reduced to a minimum, or made to depend solely on impulse of the pictorial sketcher or designer in no sort of relation to the man, or the process by which his work is to be reproduced, is apt to lose itself in the desire for mere novelty or trick, to become the art of the newspaper, which rests its claims to attention on its impartial, partial, or partisan record of passing events and news—nothing if not new. Thus, both the beauty and the dignity of art are endangered, while the reduction of handicraft to mechanism takes their personal interest and individuality away.

The idea of producing art wholesale by steam-power is certainly an extraordinary one. It is very much like printing a misquoted line from a poet, repeating it page after page, and calling the result a book.

As I have already said, our mechanical invention, directed to the cheapening of the processes of industrial production, and the acceleration in speed of that production, has outstripped our artistic invention. In our efforts to increase the means of production we have lost sight of the end. In purely artistic production the old methods, the old tools, mostly remain, as they have done for centuries, unaffected by mechanical invention, for the simple reason that nothing can supersede the hand. The tools of the sculptor, the carver, the painter, are but extra fingers supplementary to the original four and the indispensable thumb, to which the artist continually recurs, and with which his work is begun and ended. That personal touch and impress of character we value so highly in what we call the Fine Arts, with the disappearance of the handicraftsman and the severance of designer and workman, has practically ceased to exist; except in those instances of individual revival and pursuit of a craft on its original lines, which, among the cultured and the leisured, or on the part of painters or sculptors as a diversion, have increased so much of late years.

The modern conditions of manufacture appear to have destroyed the old traditions of the handicrafts. Our commerce has vulgarised and confused the public taste. Yet where any form of art is concerned—anything in the nature of a pattern or design in the material of surface decoration in any form, appealing to the eye, in the goods produced—manufacture is absolutely dependent on design of some sort. It may be begged, borrowed, paid for, or stolen, but still the design must be there to start with. Yet design, so far as it is under the influence of the existing conditions, has become tamer and tamer, and more and more meaningless and superficial; and it is obvious that the ill effects of a bad design are increased a thousandfold, or exactly in proportion to the increase in the mechanical power and speed of its production by the resources of machinery.

When the power of reproduction is so enormous, it becomes, obviously, more than ever necessary to reproduce nothing in design but what is sound and good in its own way. If not, far better confine ourselves to the manufacture of plain materials: good cloth, well woven and dyed, without pattern; serviceable furniture, without carving or painting, unless it can be sincere and thoughtful; useful pottery, as good in contour as the wheel and the skill of the thrower can make it, unspoiled by the ravings of the china painter distracted by centuries of false taste, or confused by dictionaries of ornament, or the impressionism of the modern Japanese or Parisian.

There are, of course, certain great industries which are absolutely dependent on the surface designer and pattern maker, such as cotton-printing, carpet-weaving, paper-staining, for instance—manufactures which would not exist at all without a constant supply of designs. There is no doubt that this is fully recognised by the manufacturers or their managers; and the utmost pains, consistent with a due regard for the possibilities of profit, are taken by the leading firms to secure at least competent working drawings, if not tasteful designs. It may be conceded, too, that, as regards design, these industries have been the first to show the influence of those ideas which have produced a kind of revolution among designers of late years, with the result that a movement which appears to be purely English in origin has made its mark in these directions, and has largely counteracted the stream of tendency which at one time set so strongly towards Paris as the head centre of taste in all matters of art, the disastrous effects of which still affect us in many ways.

The real secret of Continental influence in design upon us is no doubt to be found in the fact that the severance of the arts and handicrafts has never been anything like so complete in other European countries as in industrial England. Our great industrial rival America shows the same want of originating power in artistic design, the same tendency in a more marked degree to avail herself of Parisian modes in art. However degraded the taste of the designer, or debased in type the design, the Frenchman or the Italian designer remained thoroughly in touch with the craftsman, and understood the technical conditions of the work thoroughly, so that his working drawings would be perfectly adapted to the method of manufacture. We have here, at any rate, one reason why our manufacturers have given preference to French designs, and have been so much in the habit of crossing the water for new supplies. Yet we must recognise that so closely connected are now all countries, commercial and industrial, that the slightest change in one will surely affect the other. If foreign artists and workmen are in demand, our own suffer, or if our native talent is preferred, then our Continental brothers are worse off. This, of course, is the result of competition. Level up all round with technical education. Competition would come in again. You would get a technically educated proletariat, but no more secure of a livelihood than they are at present. Supposing England temporarily regained her commercial ascendency, the suffering would only be transferred from one country to another; and can we morally justify it to ourselves that people of one nationality have more right to live than those of another? These are awkward questions. But to return.

The term “artist” in this country has come to mean the pictorial artist only. Our art education has been dominated by the ideas and methods of the pictorial artist, and nearly everything has been sacrificed to the naturalistic, imitative, pictorial principles of representation, which, of whatever value they may be to the painter of easel pictures, or the popular illustration of newspapers, have but remote bearing on applied design. Fortune, fame, and favour have been open to the painter of pictures almost exclusively, and our art school training has been sedulously directed to the manufacture of painters as distinct from designers and craftsmen.

It is remarkable that during this century the artistic and industrial characteristics of which I have been endeavouring to describe, we should have been under the shadow of a Royal Academy of Arts—a chartered and privileged body, presumably established to foster the arts of the country, but which, while it nominally includes architecture, sculpture, and engraving, and recognises their existence to a certain limited extent, as an institution really exists for the painter, and as far as the weight of its influence goes, almost exclusively encourages one form of art production, that of easel and marketable pictures—not only indirectly by the training of its schools, but by the far wider and more popular influence of its annual exhibitions, and those it controls throughout the country; but so far as the applied arts and decorative designs are concerned, or are dependent upon academic recognition, they might scarcely exist at all.

Not that I think academies or academic influences are at all desirable or beneficial in their effects upon art or artists. Academic influence tends to crystallise both men and ideas. An academy, of course, can never originate, it can only recognise; and is apt to be exceedingly slow at that. Every new, vigorous, and characteristic movement in art has grown up outside, and in opposition to its teaching and influence; and as each independent school becomes prominent and influential, its leaders, unable as a rule to resist the substantial worldly advantages which academic distinction and titles bestow, become absorbed, and help to increase the weight of academic power, and become part of that crystallising influence against which every original mind has to struggle. It is not surprising; I merely note the fact that it is so. I have no personal feeling in the matter. The Academy includes many distinguished artists—men whose acquaintanceship I am proud to claim, but I fail to see that being Academicians makes them better artists; it does not prevent me feeling that the Academy exists for painters rather than painting, as to which I venture to think it has only succeeded practically in encouraging one form of that art, and that not the highest. It offers prestige and position to individual artists who have already won a position, and produces a keen competition among the candidates for its honour, but once inside its charmed circle a man seems, as a rule, inclined to rest on his laurels, or to eat the lotus. At the same time I desire freely to acknowledge at least the verbal recognition that has been extended to the arts and crafts of design, and the claim of those who work in them to the title of artists, to which my accomplished friend Sir Frederick Leighton gave expression in his eloquent address at the opening of the Art Congress at Liverpool.

It may seem I have been saying hard things of the Royal Academy. Well, here is a splendid opportunity of proving the reality of its new grand enthusiasm for the arts and crafts. Why not lend the noble galleries at Burlington House to the Society I represent, in the Exhibition of Arts and Crafts? I throw out this as a suggestion.

There is another institution which was established for the express purpose of dealing with the arts of design—I mean the National Art Training Schools of the country in connection with the Science and Art Department at South Kensington; with which I may say I have a kind of connection as one of the examiners in design.

The primary and excellent object of these schools was to afford a general artistic training to a craftsman, to the end that he might cultivate his artistic capacities in draughtsmanship and design, and apply them to the improvement of his own particular craft, under the stimulus of prizes for proficiency in various studies by means of a national competition every year.

But here, again, owing to the domination of the pictorial ideas and pictorial aims and methods in art, and their paramount influence in teaching, it has been found that students who develop pictorial skill and draughtsmanship, so far from endeavouring, or being able, to carry such skill back into their own craft or industry, aspire—as indeed under the circumstances is not surprising—to be painters of easel pictures, and follow the popular art with all its possibilities of personal distinction and fortune.

I say it is not surprising, for, even if the kind of training obtainable in these schools was in all cases, as it is in some, of such a nature that it could be made of real practical value in its bearing on particular handicrafts and industries, what strong inducements are there for a student working in any industry to remain in that industry, applying his school acquirements to it, when he has no prospect of gaining either personal credit or distinction for his work as an individual, or even substantial reward beyond a certain point within the margin of profit in that trade, a limit which, in proportion as the number of skilled workers increased, would necessarily tend to diminish by the competition among themselves?

I think this shows that existing economic conditions are dead against the aim of the schools. There are, of course, many schools of high proficiency as such, and as examples of good working models, under the South Kensington system. I am not, however, personally able to feel much more enthusiasm for schools of art, as such, however efficient according to the official standards, than I am for academies, because I believe that the only training worth having in the arts must be in the workshop, as of old; since I hold that the true root and basis of all art lies in the handicrafts, and that artistic impulse and invention weakens as it loses its close connection and intimate relationship with them.

The weakness, too, of art schools is that, though an energetic master with ideas may, by dint of untiring zeal, build up his school to a certain high standard of proficiency, with the immediate object of passing as many students in the various grades as he can, under the system of payment by results, the students are apt under such a system to depend upon the qualities of their teacher—the distinction of the school as such collapses without him, and the personal individual element, owing to the student being rather subordinated to particular courses and methods of study, and the cultivation generally of a particular style, is not worth, or does not seem to leave, such permanent or desirable results as might be expected.

Of course it is true that the great increase in the ranks of picture painters of late years has had the usual effect under competition of lowering prices and diminishing sales; and also of making the struggle for distinction harder, since the standard of mediocrity is raised. In fact, the market is overstocked, and though, unlike the labourer who supports him, the painter can generally employ himself, his work remains unsold. With his purely pictorial training, he, as a rule, has no idea of applying his art in any way to any form of industry. There are plenty of clever sketchers from nature, who, when they come to making a design for any special purpose or for execution in some particular material, are quite at sea; and even if they were ever so able, I am afraid that the market for art and industry combined is as yet but limited.

The craftsman himself, as we have seen, has been wellnigh extinguished by the development of that machine industry, which, while it has isolated the pictorial artists as a class, has also brought them to their present state. So that there are abundant reasons why art, as applied to industry, should not be in a flourishing and vigorous condition.

It is not surprising, bearing these thoughts in mind, that design has come to be regarded as a sort of Cinderella of art; her fine sisters, bedecked in paint and public favour, go to the ball and leave her to mind the hearth or the workshop. But she is not without her fairy godmother—Inventive Adaptation—who comes to her aid; and though it is hoped she will never lose her domestic qualities and substantial household virtues, she may yet win her share of applause, and, wearing the shoe of good luck, be recognised as the true bride of the prince Imagination.

At the preliminary meeting for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Art, I took occasion to say that, “We must turn our artists into craftsmen, and our craftsmen into artists,” That is the problem before us in this matter of art and industry.

I do not pretend to have found a cut-and-dried solution, but there is one first necessary step to be taken, it seems to me, as a matter of common honesty, if we are really sincere in our desire to unite art and industry, and it is this: that the workman should have the credit of the work of his own head and hands, whether designer or craftsman. We must no longer be content with the vague, however convenient, designation of authorship, or rather proprietorship—So-and-So & Co.—now commonly affixed to works of art or industry in our exhibitions; but we should require the actual names of the contrivers and craftsmen whose actual labour, thought, and experience produced what we see.

Make a man responsible, and give him the credit of his own skill in his work: his self-respect at once increases, and he is stimulated to do his best; he will take pride and pleasure in his work; it becomes personal and therefore interesting.

I am associated with a movement in London—in which I have had the advantage of the co-operation and sympathy of many able and distinguished men in the arts—the immediate outcome of which has been an Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts with the object of ascertaining to some degree not only our artistic condition in the applied arts, and the amount of genuine public interest in them, as distinct from picture-painting, but also of giving the names of the responsible designers and executants of the works exhibited, as far as possible. We do not pretend, in the face of various difficulties inseparable from an initial movement, that our exhibition was all that we should have liked to make it, but the success which has attended it has been quite beyond our expectations, and the amount of public interest and support we have received and the general recognition of the justness of the principle have been most encouraging—so much so that we held a second exhibition on the same lines in the autumn of 1889.

There is no reason why the movement should not be taken up independently and locally in other towns, on the same principles, managed by local committees, and supported by local sympathisers. Such exhibitions might afford valuable tests of the state of the arts and crafts generally, and, in particular, of the condition of design in the special industries of the district; while the association of the name of the actual designer and workman with their work would tend to bring out in emulation individual skill and invention under the stimulus of public recognition.

Another suggestion—in which I have been anticipated—I venture to make is that in every manufacturing town a permanent collection should be formed of the best procurable examples of design and artistic workmanship in different materials, especially with reference to the particular industries of the place or district. Designs and working drawings, together with the finished product, might be arranged side by side, and so constantly to be seen and studied and compared by designers and workmen. Such collections might comprise both old and new work; and specimens might be acquired from time to time from the annual or occasional arts and crafts exhibitions, such as those suggested.

The formation of guilds of artists and craftsmen for the study and discussion and illustration of the arts and crafts, and all questions concerning their interests, and those of workers in them, would also be found a very useful and interesting way of keeping designers and craftsmen in touch with one another, and preserving that unity and solidarity in art which is so essential to its vitality.

This idea has already been adopted in Liverpool, and the “Liverpool Art Workers’ Guild” also held an exhibition of applied art a year or two ago, which I understand was very successful, though I had not the pleasure of seeing it.

These, then, are some of the immediately practical ways of working towards a healthier condition of things in the arts.

Discussion and counsel must come before action. Hereafter we may be able to meet and gauge our progress. In the meantime I think it is most important to recognise certain facts—to know exactly how and where we stand in this matter of art and industry; which, moreover, cannot be separated from the great economic question of which, indeed, it is but a part.

Do not let us deceive ourselves, or expect to gather the grapes of artistic or industrial prosperity from economic thorns, or æsthetic figs from commercial thistles.

It is idle to expect artistic sense and refinement to spring from dull and sordid surroundings, or a keen sense of beauty amid the conditions of monotonous and mechanical toil. Unless your artist and craftsman has personal freedom, leisure and cultivation, and continued access to the beauty of both art and nature, you will get neither vigorous design nor good craftsmanship.

Let us look the Sphinx fairly in the face, and take the length of her claws and wings before we offer our solution of the riddle. It may be that the problem will solve itself in the course of time, as part of that great and constant movement of evolution in which we ourselves and our lives and interests are involved; which no man can do much either to impede or to accelerate, though the action of the least of us counts in the total sum—since it is the slow but sure result of causes at work through the long progress of centuries, bound up with the laws of nature, and the course of human destiny itself.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh