DOI issue:
No. 59 (January, 1902)
DOI article:The first international "Studio" exhibition, [1]
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22772#0225
First International “ Studio ” Exhibition
test of that new spirit which is challenging the old
distinction between “ manufacturer ” and “artist.”
No one who knows anything of the production of
wares in which the “applied arts,” so called, are
employed, can ignore the changes of feeling that
are now taking place on both sides—among artists
in their growing eagerness to work in materials as
well as on paper; and no less among those who
deal commercially in beautiful wares, and are waking
slowly to a sense of the limitations of machinery
and its unfitness for the finer kinds of decorative
work. The exhibition held in Octobe , under the
auspices of The Studio, at the Holland Fine Art
Gallery, Grafton Street, W., was the first of what
may become an annual as well as an international
series, which will afford an index, supplementary to
others, of particular tendencies on the part of
worker or patron.
For we have got beyond the stage at which
“ hand-work ” was the one idea of the aesthetic
revivalist; the phrase “ hand-made throughout ”
was the supreme recommendation, and the word
“ hand-painted ” was significant of our loss of all
values in words even; so that “ manufactured,”
which naturally meant hand-made, came finally to
mean not hand-made, but made by machinery.
Design at that time was nothing; labour was all.
And so the sedentary designer in the background
went on spinning his abstruse patterns or copying
his literal bunches of flowers; and when brought
at last to the point of designing useful furniture,
his ignorance of practical affairs made his work, for
the most part, needlessly costly, so that only the
wealthy could furnish on the “ specially designed
and hand-made ” plan.
Happily, there has arisen among us in this
generation that reconciler of imagination with
labour, the artist-craftsman,—a less clumsy name
is far to find,—the artist working out his own
thought in the actual material; breathing a new
spirit into decoration and
making it again what it
once was and ever should
be—the crowning touch
of a complete and singly-
conceived work; the final
blossoming of the right
stuff under the right crafts-
man’s hand. In the place
of a blind reaction against
all machinery, we have
learnt a wise acceptance
of it as a servant of art,
enabling the master by a
gain of leisure and a saving
of strength to guard all the
more jealously the right
place of handicraft—
chiefly and supremely in
decoration. The ideal of
machine-finish—of hard
mechanical accuracy—has
gone, let us hope, forever.
We do not demand of our
arts and crafts that they
shall be, like the cold
beauty satirised by Ten-
nyson—
“Faultily faultless, icily
regular, splendidly null.”
We demand above all else
that they shall be human.
Better the natural error of
the tool, the ever-so-slight
1 75
LEADED GLASS PANEL
BY W. AIRMAN
test of that new spirit which is challenging the old
distinction between “ manufacturer ” and “artist.”
No one who knows anything of the production of
wares in which the “applied arts,” so called, are
employed, can ignore the changes of feeling that
are now taking place on both sides—among artists
in their growing eagerness to work in materials as
well as on paper; and no less among those who
deal commercially in beautiful wares, and are waking
slowly to a sense of the limitations of machinery
and its unfitness for the finer kinds of decorative
work. The exhibition held in Octobe , under the
auspices of The Studio, at the Holland Fine Art
Gallery, Grafton Street, W., was the first of what
may become an annual as well as an international
series, which will afford an index, supplementary to
others, of particular tendencies on the part of
worker or patron.
For we have got beyond the stage at which
“ hand-work ” was the one idea of the aesthetic
revivalist; the phrase “ hand-made throughout ”
was the supreme recommendation, and the word
“ hand-painted ” was significant of our loss of all
values in words even; so that “ manufactured,”
which naturally meant hand-made, came finally to
mean not hand-made, but made by machinery.
Design at that time was nothing; labour was all.
And so the sedentary designer in the background
went on spinning his abstruse patterns or copying
his literal bunches of flowers; and when brought
at last to the point of designing useful furniture,
his ignorance of practical affairs made his work, for
the most part, needlessly costly, so that only the
wealthy could furnish on the “ specially designed
and hand-made ” plan.
Happily, there has arisen among us in this
generation that reconciler of imagination with
labour, the artist-craftsman,—a less clumsy name
is far to find,—the artist working out his own
thought in the actual material; breathing a new
spirit into decoration and
making it again what it
once was and ever should
be—the crowning touch
of a complete and singly-
conceived work; the final
blossoming of the right
stuff under the right crafts-
man’s hand. In the place
of a blind reaction against
all machinery, we have
learnt a wise acceptance
of it as a servant of art,
enabling the master by a
gain of leisure and a saving
of strength to guard all the
more jealously the right
place of handicraft—
chiefly and supremely in
decoration. The ideal of
machine-finish—of hard
mechanical accuracy—has
gone, let us hope, forever.
We do not demand of our
arts and crafts that they
shall be, like the cold
beauty satirised by Ten-
nyson—
“Faultily faultless, icily
regular, splendidly null.”
We demand above all else
that they shall be human.
Better the natural error of
the tool, the ever-so-slight
1 75
LEADED GLASS PANEL
BY W. AIRMAN