The Aesthetic Movement by Robin Spencer (review)

370 Books Juxtaposed, and starkly contrasting, is another essay ‘High Victorian Design’ dealing with the sty!e associated with the successful new bourgeoisie. The Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a triumph of logical construction, not dependent on any tradition, had its contents described by some viewers as ‘examples of the hideous and the debased . . . , of a bastardization of taste without parallel in tlie whole recorded history of aesthetics’. The potentialities of the Crystal Palace were bypassed in favor of stylistic manifestations which would satisfy the particular needs and circumstances of tlie bourgeoisie. Their lack of time and refinement were soothed with obvious heavy decoration that enhanced the effect of their newfound wealth. Matthew Digby Wyatt is identified as representative of all that was good and bad of this epoch. Wyatt was a typical Victorian architect, inasmuch as his theories did not find expression in his practice. It was a group of Scottish and English architects that possessed tlie capacity for harmony between theory and practice and the vision to explore the ways leading away from the historic traditions. Mackmurdo, Voysey, Mackintosh and Walton were the pioneers. They were all unique individuals but Mackintosh is singled out by Pevsner as the one gifted with genius, the one recalled by contemporaries as ‘with light in his eyes’. Mackintosh, like most of his colleagues, was very aware of the new trend toward functionalism. Most of his work is a mixture of tlie practical and tlie purely decorative but a mixture still within the tradition of art and artistic endeavor. As a more revolutionary representative of tlie new age in 20thcentury themes, Pevsner introduces an individual who is not an artist in the traditional sense but a creator of a whole new vocabulary for a new industry : transportation. Frank Pick, as Managing Director of the London Transport system, is credited with creating a ‘civilizing agent, an efficacious center of visual education in England’. Thus the socialaesthetics of Morris were practiced by a bureaucrat. ‘Orderliness, unpretentious harmony had been achieved’ based on Pick’s philosophy of ‘fitness for purpose and simplicity’as the key to good design. Pevsner illustrates this trend with further examples. Gordon Russell, who made ‘the best’ furniture, initially by hand. then by machine, distributed it on a national scale. While the ‘Machine’ aesthetic colored the efforts of most designers, it was for the D.I.A. (Design and Industries Association), founded in 1915, to make the machine’s role official. Their manifesto called for a body to encourage ‘a more intelligent demand amongst the public for what is best and soundest in design’ and to ‘insistthatmachine work may bemade more beautiful by appropriate handling’. These were the foundations from which a new style was created in tlie early 20th century. In tlie last essay, Pevsner warns of an alarming phenomenon of today : return to historicism. Functionalism is watered down. Exteriors are less expressive of functions contained and more arbitrary . Today’s turning back is towards styles like Art Nouveau and the Amsterdam School. The underlying cause, Pevsner speculates, is a revolt against rationalism, a revolt against formal rigidity that manifests itself in odd and strange exterior effects. It is here perhaps that Pevsner misses the mark, for lie fails to realize that what he is witnessing is not so much a revolution but the end of an epoch of individual designers creating individual buildings. Clearly he is not ready to talk about tlie real revolution . The revolution is in tlie awareness of overall patterns in tlie concepts of Urban design and in the true integration of urban systems. One wishes that Pevsner would paint with generous strokes a picture of insight that would help us understand our epoch better. But historians deal with tlie past and with that Pevsner is supreme. The Aesthetic Movement. Robin Spencer. Studio Vista and E. P. Dutton, London and New York, 1972. 159 pp., illus. E1.80. Reviewed by: Arnold Berleant:? Tlie Aesthetic Movement, which developed in England from about 1870 to 1885, has its place between the more pronounced movements of the Pre-Raphaelites of tlie 1850’s and the Art Nouveau of tlie 1890’s. Despite the lack of tlie individual...