The Studio yearbook of decorative art (1910)

GERMAN ARCHITECTURE AND DECORATION

success, on any considerable scale, can be achieved, and that is the
cultivation of good taste among the great purchasing public. And
then again, this is not much good, or perhaps impossible, unless the
middleman, the merchant, or salesman are taught to understand what
art means when applied to industry. It is a lamentable state of things,
as well as a hindrance to the distribution of good productions, that
customers of refined taste and that wider public upon whom the
propagandist work of the past decade has not been wholly lost,
should so rarely find among retailers any comprehension of the
qualities they demand in this or that product of industrial labour.
The retailer values only the saleableness of his wares, and does not
appreciate their artistic or technical qualities. His knowledge is
insufficient to enable him to discriminate what is technically excel-
lent, though perhaps less pleasing to the eye, from the pretentious
abominations which are thrown on the market by an unscrupulous
wholesale industry, and the equally unscrupulous middleman passes
on without stopping to think what enormous sums from the nation’s
wealth are in this way senselessly squandered. It is therefore a
matter of rejoicing and hopefulness that the Deutscher Werkbund
is here at one with the German Association for Mercantile Educa-
tion (Deutscher Verband fur das kaufmannische Unterrichtswesen).
Arrangements have been made for lectures to be delivered in a large
number of German cities—lectures which, reinforced by lantern
slides, will, in the course of two or perhaps three evenings, discuss
at length and with authority such pertinent questions as Taste and
Fashion, the Home and its Equipment, Articles of Use and Articles
de luxe, Clothing, Decoration ; and it is not proposed to make
these lectures disquisitions on art-history. Moreover, technical con-
ditions and requirements will be discussed, the value of manual work
and of the use of good material will be pointed out, and the different
characteristics of machine work and the product of hand labour will
be touched upon—in short, all those general questions will be dealt
with which a good salesman ought to be well grounded in, so that
he on his part may be able to enlighten the public touching the
merits and defects of a particular article. At Bremen and Brunswick
these lectures were successful in creating a lively interest in the
movement, and judging by this experience an exceptionally fruitful
result may be anticipated from these propagandist measures.
Of no less importance for the future development of industrial
art is the training of the rising generation. The division of labour
which is an inseparable concomitant of the wholesale system of
production of the present day, and in pursuance of which men
working as machines spend their whole time in producing one and
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