Art and Industry

by Herbert Read

[Harcourt, Brace, $3.75]

Art and Industry, by Herbert Read, is a book to be thankful for and regretful about. It is stimulating in what it says about the crucial problem of art under machine methods of production. But the reader who compares his impression after reading the text with his hope after reading the jacket description, and noting the rich illustrations, may conclude that far more territory has been lost than won.

There is a tantalizing first glimpse of a new industrial art, bravely modern, true to the machine-instrument, creative and exciting. One settles down with the conviction that at last a writer is going to say what must be said, on this debated but seldom illumined subject. The hope is buoyant, if not quite fulfilled, through forty pages. Then the purpose changes. The text slips hack to concern with matters more relevant to handicraft than to mass production. One closes the book with the conviction that the crucial chapter got lost out of the text, somewhere between author s study and bindery.

What is said about modern industry is well said, the real problem is not to adapt machine production to the æsthetic standards of handicraft, but to think out new æsthetic standards for new methods of production.’ And succinctly: ’All ornament should be treated asaspect.’ There is, however, the author notes, place in machine-produced art for ’a formal quality which is beyond analysis’ : an abstract quality which is ‘not simply a question ot harmony and proportion in the geometric sense, but may be created . . . by intuitional modes of apprehension.’ Then, just as one becomes hungry for instances and analyses, the author turns his back upon the machine.

A contemporary treatise upon ‘Art and Industry,’ to be adequate and up to date, certainly may be expected to trace progress where artists have accepted the terms of mechanical mass production: where they have produced objects organically shaped by their own inventiveness, working through the machine-idiom. It is not unfair to note that the best summary of this phase of the subject is to be found in a quoted page, from Walter Gropius, founder and director of the German Bauhaus.

Herbert Head generously explains that his book is designed to propagate the ideals of Dr. Gropius. But one wonders whether he has not based his theory and his exposition upon the single quoted London lecture of that ‘Functionalist’ leader. The volume is a denial of much that could be learned during a single visit to the institution at Dessau. Professor Read is evidently ignorant also of the American advance, whether the prophetic way-breaking of Frank Lloyd Wright or the eminently practical achievement of Norman Bel Geddes and a half-dozen other gifted ‘artist-engineers.’

The book is divided into a brief Introduction (which is excellent) and four parts. Part I treats ‘The Problem in Its Historical and Theoretical Aspects,’ and affords useful background material. Part II is devoted to ‘Form ; but the author slips back into exposition of the most elementary effects of traditional materials upon form—and practically ignores such exciting new contributions as chromium, bakeiite, and structural glass. Part III covers ‘Color and Ornament, with little attention to contemporary industrial problems. And Part IV deals with ‘Art Education in the Industrial Age’ — which, again, is an excellent halfway pronouncement, bringing the reader up to the advanced truths of ten years ago.

It may be added that the book, physically considered, is an abominable argument, for modern industry. The designers have thrown to the winds traditional principles of ty pographic art, and equally miss the organic unity and brilliant expressiveness of true modernism. They have reveled instead in the superficial catcheffects that are better termed ‘modernistic.’

But at points the author does bring out that the coming of the machine necessitates a new aesthetic of art in industry; that the canons of handicraft, and particularly of ’applied art,’no longer serve; that functional perfection is not enough; that the ‘abstract artist’ must come in, not as decorator, but as integrator. This alone would make the volume required reading — however disappointing the divagations and lapses to nineteenth-century thinking. It is a book far less satisfying than Art Now, the excellent work on modern painting by which the author was introduced to American readers last year.

SHELDON CHENEY