The Studio yearbook of decorative art (1914)

FRENCH ARCHITECTURE AND DE-
CORATION. By E. A. Taylor
THE part which France has played in modern design has,
perhaps, been one of less prominence than that of other
nations. For years the artists have been living on the down
plucked from the birds of tradition, and blaming the people
for demanding their indiscretions. That a revolt from such
a violation of the past would happen was only too evident. That it
should be slow to take place in a country with certain extremely
modern characteristics was perhaps not surprising, when one
considers the contrasting inordinately primitive ones, the basis of
which still forms a great part in the technical education of the
designer. By close adherence to it the artist has been relegated to
a place apart, in which he has forgotten that he should be a fellow
worker with his brothers and not a producer of exercises in the past
for original compositions to-day. Like the proverbial jackdaw, who
put peacock’s feathers in his own tail, he fails to recognise the
similar fallacy of modern Louis Seize flats and Empire furnishings.
The results of the remedy sought at the beginning of the modern
movement were perhaps too justly condemnable. The artists,
ignoring the relation of all great and lasting art to life, seemed to
evince by their work that the secret of success lay in discovering
originality, and at the outset started along that certain way of missing
it. New-fangled shapes, irrelevant of construction and application
of naturalistic forms foreign to the article decorated, and in the
majority of instances covering up bad proportion, produced a certain
new and fashionable article, which, like all fashion, had little in
common with art.
In the search for originality, main and necessary facts were lost
sight of, and perhaps not the least important the fact that not
everything original will, on the account of that quality alone, be
lastingly significant; the only vital originality in art being that
which will occur unsought while we are enthusiastically at work,
and to be of any importance will, like the design, bear a special
relationship to that on which we toil. By the overlooking of
subtleties that count, much of the decorative art at the beginning
of the movement showed that the annihilation of tradition only led
to disorder ; the opposite of one of the most forcible aims in design.
Within recent years, however, a return has been made in the right
direction by the readjustment of tradition to the ideal progress of
the material world. But to enumerate for an instant the in-
fluences one feels chiefly at work, one cannot fairly ignore those of
Austria, and with Austria those which were evolved some twenty
years ago in Glasgow, in which that able architect and his wife,
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