DOI issue:
No. 105 (December, 1901)
DOI article:The first international 'Studio' exhibition, [1]
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19874#0188
First International " Studio" Exhibition
test of that new spirit which is challenging the old revivalist; the phrase "hand-made throughout"
distinction between " manufacturer" and " artist." . was the supreme recommendation, and the word
No one who knows anything of the production of " hand-painted " was significant of our loss of all
wares in which the " applied arts," so called, are values in words even; so that " manufactured,"
employed, can ignore the changes of feeling that which naturally meant hand-made, came finally to
are now taking place on both sides—among artists mean not hand-made, but made by machinery,
in their growing eagerness to work in materials as Design at that time was nothing; labour was all.
well as on paper; and no less among those who And so the sedentary designer in the background
deal commercially in beautiful wares, and are waking went on spinning his abstruse patterns or copying
slowly to a sense of the limitations of machinery his literal bunches of flowers; and when brought
and its unfitness for the finer kinds of decorative at last to the point of designing useful furniture,
work. The exhibition held in Octobe -, under the his ignorance of practical affairs made his work, for
auspices of The Studio, at the Holland Fine Art the most part, needlessly costly, so that only the
Gallery, Grafton Street, W., was the first of what wealthy could furnish on the " specially designed
may become an annual as well as an international and hand-made " plan.
series, which will afford an index, supplementary to Happily, there has arisen among us in this
others, of particular tendencies on the part of generation that reconciler of imagination with
worker or patron. labour, the artist-craftsman,—a less clumsy name
For we have got beyond the stage at which is far to find,—the artist working out his own
" hand-work" was the one idea of the aesthetic thought in the actual material; breathing a new
spirit into decoration and
making it again what it
' ^^^ ^ Bett^
leaded glass panel by w. aikman the tool, the ever-so-slight
175
test of that new spirit which is challenging the old revivalist; the phrase "hand-made throughout"
distinction between " manufacturer" and " artist." . was the supreme recommendation, and the word
No one who knows anything of the production of " hand-painted " was significant of our loss of all
wares in which the " applied arts," so called, are values in words even; so that " manufactured,"
employed, can ignore the changes of feeling that which naturally meant hand-made, came finally to
are now taking place on both sides—among artists mean not hand-made, but made by machinery,
in their growing eagerness to work in materials as Design at that time was nothing; labour was all.
well as on paper; and no less among those who And so the sedentary designer in the background
deal commercially in beautiful wares, and are waking went on spinning his abstruse patterns or copying
slowly to a sense of the limitations of machinery his literal bunches of flowers; and when brought
and its unfitness for the finer kinds of decorative at last to the point of designing useful furniture,
work. The exhibition held in Octobe -, under the his ignorance of practical affairs made his work, for
auspices of The Studio, at the Holland Fine Art the most part, needlessly costly, so that only the
Gallery, Grafton Street, W., was the first of what wealthy could furnish on the " specially designed
may become an annual as well as an international and hand-made " plan.
series, which will afford an index, supplementary to Happily, there has arisen among us in this
others, of particular tendencies on the part of generation that reconciler of imagination with
worker or patron. labour, the artist-craftsman,—a less clumsy name
For we have got beyond the stage at which is far to find,—the artist working out his own
" hand-work" was the one idea of the aesthetic thought in the actual material; breathing a new
spirit into decoration and
making it again what it
' ^^^ ^ Bett^
leaded glass panel by w. aikman the tool, the ever-so-slight
175