2.1 113-144
Few would consider today's London Underground one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but that is how it was appraised by a Danish architect in 1935. 1 He was not alone in his admiration for a transport system that was widely seen as efficient in its operation, progressive in its treatment of employees, and--perhaps most notable of all--boldly modernist in its corporate appearance, from the architecture of its buildings to the design of its wastebins. During the interwar period the London Underground was praised for its patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers, as well as for introducing modern art to a wide public. "The art galleries of the People," wrote the art critic for the London Sunday Times, "are not in Bond Street, but are to be found in every [Underground] station." 2 And when the renovated Piccadilly Circus station was reopened in 1928, one reporter declared that it had been "utterly transformed by modern architecture and modern art into a scene that would make the perfect setting for the finale of an opera." (. 1 and 2) 3
"Opera" is an apposite term. During the interwar period the London Underground was consciously designed to be a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a union of the arts that would consolidate a public divided by industrialism and materialism, and provide a new source of spirituality in an increasingly secular age. Frank Pick, the executive officer of the Underground who initiated and directed the Underground's design and publicity, certainly admired Wagner. Even more than Wagner, however, Pick admired the two nineteenth-century English proponents of the integration of art and life, John Ruskin and William Morris. Selected elements of Ruskin and Morris's social and aesthetic ideals inspired Pick to transform the Underground into a work of public art. Indeed, the Underground of the interwar period should be considered as the culminating project of the nineteenth-century English arts and crafts movement, a union of the arts designed for the pleasure and the use of the common individual. Pick intended the transport system to match Morris's description of art as "a joy to the maker and the user," and this was an apt description for the Underground during the interwar period. 4
Pick's achievement poses far-reaching questions for what has come to be one of the most widely accepted paradigms in discussing modernism and the avant-garde, Peter Bürger's distinction between a formalist and autotelic "modernism" and a socially engaged "avant-garde" that opposed it during the early twentieth century. For Bürger, the distinctive feature of the avant-garde was its critical practice in which "art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in changed form." 5 Implicit within this argument is the notion that the avant-garde, in its aim to change bourgeois society and culture, must exist in tense opposition to the prevailing cultural milieu, and will express this opposition in provocative, if not overtly shocking, ways--Bürger cites the infamous Fountain by R. Mutt created by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 as a representative avant-garde "work." The efforts of Pick and his numerous associates discussed in this essay corresponded to similar attempts by contemporaneous avant-garde movements on the Continent such as the Berlin Dadaists, French Surrealists, Russian Constructivists, and Italian Futurists to challenge autotelic conceptions of art. 6 The most successful embodiment of the interwar avant-garde's aim to reintegrate art with everyday life (including "mass culture") was not Duchamp's ironic and provocative reinscription of a ready-made urinal into an "artwork," but in fact the "Earthly Paradise" of the London Underground during the 1920s and 1930s. What a transport system might contribute to current debates about modernism and the avant-garde is one subject of this essay.
The second aim of this essay is to explore modernism's relationship with the past. Certainly there were modernists who broke with the past in their quest to create new cultural forms that would capture the seemingly unique experience of modernity. But there were also those who perceived connections between the present and the past, such as Walter Benjamin, or who sought to reinvigorate earlier traditions as a way to negotiate the present, such as Ezra Pound. 7 Such "usable pasts" tended to be mythopoeic constructions of organic communities either far removed temporally (classical Greece and Rome) or spatially, situated in the "non-West" (Africa, Asia, etc.) Pick's indebtedness to Ruskin and Morris points to modernism's link to a past often considered antithetical to it: medievalism. The story of the artistic Underground also illuminates this connection.
Indeed, it draws our attention to the continuing--and surprising--influence of Ruskin and Morris on social and aesthetic questions during the early twentieth century. It is usually thought that the arts and crafts movement faded into a feeble antiquarianism after Morris's death in 1896. Morris's craft revival was intended to restore a common art "by the people and for the people," but the elegant handicrafts he and his followers created were simply too expensive for most consumers. In addition to the decline of the movement, Ruskin and Morris's aesthetic theories, which stressed the moral and social utility of art, seemed to be replaced in the early decades of this century by the modernist aesthetic of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. This aesthetic stressed art's autonomy; according to Fry and Bell, art was concerned with its own formal properties rather than with its representative content. A work of art was to be judged solely on its "Significant Form," which elicited "aesthetic emotions" from sensitive viewers. 8 This aesthetic formalism became the dominant way of understanding cultural modernism through the 1960s. 9 While the definition of cultural modernism has become more complex in recent years, it is still frequently defined as autonomous and self-reflexive, concerned with its own formal properties at the expense of any wider social meaning. 10
This definition of cultural modernism as formalist has led us to obscure the influence that Ruskin and Morris have had on the reception of modern art during the interwar period. The example of Pick and the Underground reveals that their aesthetic ideals continued to circulate in twentieth-century England, and not just as an Underground movement. Pick was a prominent member of a wide network of businessmen, artists, critics, educators, journalists and government officials who attempted to adapt nineteenth-century romantic medievalism to the industrial and social realities of the early twentieth century. I have called these individuals "medieval modernists," following the Minister of Health, Arthur Greenwood, when he expressed his admiration for the modern design of the new Underground Headquarters to a reporter in 1931: "The nineteenth century was adaptable economically but not spiritually. Now we are catching up and [I am] trying to be a medieval modern." 11
By the 1930s the arts and crafts' dream of effacing the distinction between "fine art" and "craft" (or "industrial art") had been attained, at least discursively--although comparatively few artists were actually hired by industries during the interwar period. But the hopes of Pick and his fellow medieval modernists to eradicate this semantic distinction, as well as to integrate modern art with modern life, collapsed rapidly after 1939. 12 However, if the London Underground proved not to be a "Joy For Ever," for a brief period it was the most successful manifestation of an avant-garde attempt to unite art and life, elite and mass culture, high modernism and romantic medievalism.
Frank Pick and most of his fellow medieval modernists were born in the last third of the nineteenth century. Many were weaned on the writings of romantic medievalists, particularly those of Ruskin and Morris. The two men were among the most prominent of the Victorian thinkers who extolled the Middle Ages as a period of organic and spiritual unity, in which art had been integrated into everyday life. Damning the terminological distinction between the so-called fine arts and the crafts that had been established in the Renaissance, they urged a return to the medieval conception of art as simply skill or craft, the creation by the common person of an artifact rightly made for its purpose. 13 This definition of art had been revived early in the nineteenth century by the romantic medievalist and neo-Gothic architect A. W. N. Pugin, who wrote in 1836 that "the great test of architectural beauty is the fitness of the design to the purpose for which it was intended." 14 Ruskin and Morris both accepted and expounded upon this concept in their lectures and published writings. While the two hoped to restore the socially and spiritually integrated world that had supposedly existed in the Middle Ages, they did not believe such a community was possible under industrial capitalism, which alienated individuals from each other and from the products of their labor. As they grew older, Ruskin and Morris became increasingly disillusioned about the prospects for genuine social and aesthetic change within their own lifetimes, but their youthful ideal of reintegrating art and life continued to be pursued by others.
In the late nineteenth century there were two attempts to integrate art with everyday life: the first by the followers of Ruskin and Morris, and the second by the government. While Ruskin and Morris came to believe that industrial capitalism could not be reformed, a number of their followers in the arts and crafts movement felt that industrial society could be aestheticized and the competitive and destructive aspects of capitalism mitigated through the introduction of artists into contemporary industries. J. R. Sedding, Halsey Ricardo, Walter Crane, and W. R. Lethaby, for example, continued to believe in the social, aesthetic, and economic improvement of society through the integration of art and industry. At the 1888 conference of the Art Workers' Guild, Sedding went well beyond calling for a Morris chair in every home, to calling for a William Morris in every factory: "Fancy what a year of grace it were for England, if our industries were placed under the guidance of 'one vast Morris'! Fancy a Morris installed in every factory. . . . The battle of the industries were [sic] half won!" 15
The government attempted to integrate art with industry in the nineteenth century primarily to improve the quality of British goods for export markets. But there was a fundamental difference between the aims of the government and the aims of the arts and crafts movement. Members of the latter wanted to break down the hierarchical distinction that elevated the fine artist over the designer for the moral reason that such a distinction was class-based rather than natural, and for the very practical reason that few "fine artists" would design for industry if being designated a designer meant a diminution of their status. The government, in contrast, reinforced the distinction between fine artists and designers by directing its industrial-art instruction and facilities toward the training of artisans rather than artists. Both the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum had originally been established to train artisans to "apply" art to industry: in effect, to slap curlicues, angel's wings, or other stock forms onto industrial products. Industries tended to be unimpressed by designers trained in this fashion, and found it less expensive to copy popular patterns from the Continent themselves. Most industrialists, in fact, remained indifferent to the whole issue of industrial design, complacently assuming that assured sales within the Empire would maintain their profits.
At the turn of the century, many of Ruskin and Morris's followers warned against such complacency, and contested the government's ineffective program by attaining influential positions at the Royal College of Art, London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, provincial arts schools, and important governmental positions, notably within the Boards of Trade and Education. They cautioned against the economic threat posed by Germany, which had embarked on an ambitious industrial design-campaign inspired, ironically, by the English arts and crafts movement. In 1907, for example, its German admirers established the Deutsche Werkbund to coordinate the efforts of artists, industrialists, educators, and the government in improving industrial product design. In England, however, little had been done in those areas; one English design reformer recalled in frustration that "We changed not only the face but the direction of German industry. And in all those pre-war years those of us who were interested could make very much less impression on British industry." 16
Two factors, however, led to a rapid reconceptualization of the scope and function of art and the artist in England during the interwar years. The first was Roger Fry and Clive Bell's redefinition of art as design in the years immediately before the war; the second was the increased attention devoted to the issue of art and industry triggered by the war itself. Both Fry and Bell's new aesthetic of "Significant Form" that emerged between 1910 and 1914 and the renewed focus on the economic issue of art and industry promoted the idea that the conventional separation between art and craft, fine art and objects of everyday use, could be overcome through the replacement of the term "art" with "design." This reconceptualization was widely supported by artists, educators, government officials, critics, and design reformers during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1934, the art critic Anthony Bertram could state that "the recent extension of the word 'design' is one of the most interesting and significant indications of the whole trend of good modern thought. It is fast becoming one of the most inclusive words in the vocabulary." 17
Fry vigorously promoted this redefinition of art as "design" through the two postimpressionist exhibitions he had organized in London in 1910 and 1912, as well as through a series of lectures and essays. These, together with his friend Clive Bell's influential Art , argued that design was the element common to all aesthetic artifacts, be they painting or pots. The two men abolished the hierarchical distinction between a work of art and a work of craft; art and design, in their aesthetic, became synonymous.
While Fry and Bell agreed with Morris's contention that the distinction between art and craft was false, neither agreed with Morris's belief that all genuine art was also useful--indeed, Fry and Bell were reacting against this conception of art, which they associated with the moral and utilitarian aesthetic of the Victorians. 18 Both men were uninterested in looking at machine products as potential works of art. Nevertheless, their redefinition of art as design contributed to the effacement of the distinction between fine art and industrial art in the interwar period. The 1910 postimpressionist exhibition had been a succès de scandale, but as is often the case with avant-garde movements, the succeeding exhibition in 1912 was a succès d'estime. As a result, "fine artists" who eked out an existence painting and sculpting became more willing to identify themselves as designers, as this term no longer implied a derogation of their artistic status. Painters and sculptors could conceivably be integrated into most English industries with a minimum of specialized training, as these industries were craft-based rather than highly technical in nature: the design of furniture, pottery, hosiery, jewelry, and textiles did not require extensive training, and offered artists much-needed income during the economic crises of the interwar period.
This redefinition of art as design, and the artist as designer, was rapidly assimilated into public discussions about art. In 1932 The Listener marveled that
We have artists of the stature of Henry Moore, Vanessa Bell, and John Nash turning quite naturally from painting a picture or carving a statue to designing a lampstand or a wall-paper or a book cover. And we have Mr. Roger Fry's word for it . . . that these are but representative of a great number of sensitive and gifted artists. 19
Fry and Bell's new aesthetic vocabulary appealed to those who were searching for a way to comprehend the often bewildering expressions of modernism. It provided educators, for example, with a new lexicon to explain art forms that were radically different from the Victorian's narrative art. Their effectiveness in explaining the new art in the new terms that emphasized form and design over content can be seen in the shift in attitudes toward modern art and children's art. In 1910 modern art was often derisively compared to the scribbles of children, 20 whereas by the 1930s children's art was often being praised for its likeness to modern art. Reflecting on this transition, a member of the Local Education Authority in Kent noted in 1935 that "the emphasis is changing in the teaching of art in schools from representational technique to an attempt to get children to sum up the essential character of an object. . . . A good deal of attention is paid to colour, composition, and design." 21
The second factor contributing to the interwar redefinition of art as design was the new economic significance accorded to industrial art during and after the First World War. If "design" was given a more inclusive meaning as a result of Fry and Bell's new aesthetic, it was elevated to an issue of national importance due to the economic pressures engendered by the war. The drain on overseas investments and loss of export revenues caused by the conflict meant that exports would have to play an even greater role than usual in the postwar recovery. "Industrial art" and "design" thus became associated with patriotism: improving English design was seen as a way to combat Germany on the economic front, as well as to reclaim the English origins of the industrial design movement from the pilfering Hun. During the war, the Board of Trade set up the British Institute for Industrial Art to encourage the improvement of industrial design. This was welcomed by the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sir Cecil Smith, who noted that "the very terminology of to-day which discriminates between 'Fine Art'. . . and 'Decorative' or 'Industrial' art, is an unfortunate misnomer of purely modern origin." 22 The Board of Education, too, considered the integration of art and industry a national priority. Its president appointed William Rothenstein, a painter and vocal advocate of Ruskin and Morris's social aesthetic, to head the Royal College of Art in 1920, with the aim of training artists to be industrial designers. Rothenstein hired the painter Paul Nash to teach in the RCA's Design School, and his policy of integrating fine- and industrial-art training was supported by the Board of Education through the early 1930s. 23 And in 1919 the Ministry of Reconstruction published a pamphlet, "Art and Industry," that appeared to make the views of Ruskin and Morris into national policy: "Art is generally understood to be a thing apart. It is 'applied' or 'fine' (two of the most ignorant and misleading terms ever invented) according as it is useful or not. We must work for the restoration of the broader meaning of art--one and indivisible in its association with life and work." 24
During and after the First World War, therefore, art and artists were assigned an important social role, challenging the romantic image of the artist as outsider. Arguing for the social function of the modern artist as a designer for industry, Paul Nash noted that "the economic problem of the artist today is distinctly precarious, [but] it may be possible to regard the artist in a new light, that of a member of the community." 25 Nash frequently described himself as a "designer" rather than as a painter or "fine artist," and argued vigorously for the integration of art and life in Room and Book . In a 1933 letter to the Times, he predicted that the term "fine artist" would soon disappear entirely: "the professional artist of the future would be a professional designer." 26 And while Wyndham Lewis differed from most medieval modernists in his elitist and antidemocratic views, he too argued for the unity and social function of the arts. In this he seems to have been influenced by Pick's associate W. R. Lethaby, a fervent disciple of Ruskin and Morris, as well as one of the earliest proponents in England of modern architecture and industrial design. 27 In The Caliph's Design Lewis asked, "Why does not the Architect . . . --why does not this strange absentee, this shadow, this Ghost of the great Trinity, Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture--for which I have substituted Design . . . why does he not cheer us up by Building a New Arena?" 28 Thus while Fry and Bell had used "design" to disassociate the function, form, and content of art from everyday life, many artists used the term to reaffirm art's social function, undermining aesthetic formalism with its own terms.
Art teachers, no less than artists, supported the redefinition of art. Many were lower-middle-class women who were poorly paid, undervalued, and overworked; the integration of the arts offered their profession an enhanced social status. They would contribute to the aestheticization of everyday life and to the creation of well-designed commodities through educating the public. It was crucial, they felt, to counter the disparaging comments that many critics had initially leveled against the new art. The postimpressionist artists had been attacked in 1910 for rejecting the polished technique of the Academy, but educators saw the apparent lack of technique in a positive light: the new art could be produced by ordinary individuals as it had been in the Middle Ages, rather than restricted to academically trained "fine artists." It was precisely the seemingly spontaneous and informal qualities of the new art that encouraged educators to promote postimpressionism as the new mass art for the new mass age. In 1928 H. J. R. Murray, an Inspector of Schools, underscored this egalitarian shift in attitude toward art education: "It has become orthodox to believe that drawing is a natural form of expression or language and as such is the heritage of every child. In other words drawing is not an accomplishment to be permitted to a talented few, but an integral and necessary part of any complete system of education." 29
Art was no longer understood to be either a minor subject, rapidly forgotten after primary school, or one associated with middle-class dilettantism. Art was now depicted as a discipline crucial to the moral, spiritual, and economic welfare of the nation. Through art education, teachers would elevate their charges' sensibilities, thereby forming discriminating consumers who would in turn demand well-designed articles from recalcitrant manufacturers. At the 1928 International Congress for Art Education, teachers stressed that the public must receive such training in order to render the modern world of commerce and industry humane: "Many of the amenities of life have been lost during the transition from hand to machine production and can only be regained by the control of industry by an aesthetically educated public opinion." 30 The public need not consist of passive consumers of goods manipulatively retailed by the "Culture Industry," as certain Frankfurt School theorists maintained at this time. Instead, the public would have a significant voice in the creation of culture through the power of purchase: consumption could be equated with production.
Government committees, charged with investigating how Britain's industrial art could be improved, and frustrated with the reluctance both of industries to hire trained designers and local authorities to provide effective training in industrial design, accepted the educators' arguments. As one government committee concluded, "education in appreciation of industrial aesthetics must be carried on before there is to be any perceptible upward trend in the quality of British industrial design." 31 In 1937 the Board of Education revised their Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in Elementary Schools by combining the two separate chapters on "Drawing" and "Handwork" of the 1927 edition into a single chapter on "Art and Craft." The new handbook stated that "Art and Handicraft are not two separate sections of the curriculum which imply different outlooks: they should properly be regarded as part and parcel of one important branch of teaching." 32
The interwar redefinition of art as "design" was furthered by the intercession of numerous groups of art enthusiasts and design reformers who arose to educate the public about art's social relevance. Among these groups were the British Institute for Industrial Art, the Contemporary Art Association, the Allied Artists Association, the Imperial Arts League, the Arts League of Service, the Society of Industrial Artists, the British Institute for Adult Education, and the most influential, the Design and Industries Association (DIA), formed in 1915. Modeled on the Deutsche Werkbund, the DIA consisted of prominent artists, businessmen, critics, and educators dedicated to instructing the public about the economic and moral utility of art. Through the writings and activities of many of its members, the DIA consciously set out to make the romantic-medieval ideals of Ruskin and Morris applicable to modern industry and art. While its membership was small, many of the DIA's aims and beliefs were frequently reiterated by medieval modernists in education, journalism, government, industry, and the artworld. Not all members of the DIA appreciated modern art, but there were many, like Frank Pick or the art critic Herbert Read, who interpreted visual modernism as the new "living art" that expressed the spirit of the modern age, the very art that Morris had eagerly anticipated in his writings but did not live to see. As Read argued in 1934, "Morris, for his day, was as extreme as any modern artist . . . . Morris to-day would be by the side of Le Corbusier in architecture, Picasso in painting, and probably Stalin in politics. The spirit of the man was fundamentally revolutionary." 33
While DIA members thought of themselves as the genuine heirs of Ruskin and Morris, they rejected their forerunners' pessimism about industrialization. Disillusion with commerce and industry had led Ruskin to reactionary social views, and Morris to revolutionary ones, but DIA members, many of whom came from industrial towns in the north, learned to stop worrying and love the machine. The increasing collectivization of society and the apparent mastery of men over technics in the early decades of the twentieth century suggested that an organic and spiritual community might be established along meliorist rather than revolutionary lines. The machine was, in their view, just the latest version of an artisanal tool, and if artists could master it, then Morris's Earthly Paradise could be attained. Like many of the DIA's views, this redefinition of the machine was shared by those who were not formally members of the organization: for example, in his introduction to an edition of Morris's writings, G. D. H. Cole noted that Morris had been "blind, for the most part, to the pleasure which a man can take in a machine that he helps to do its intricate work well . . . . There is no fixed line between the spheres of handicraft and machinework." 34
The compatibility between handicraft and machinework, formalism and functionalism was furthered through the revival of the nineteenth-century romantic-medieval definition of art as expressing "Fitness for Purpose." The DIA adopted this as their motto and promoted it so zealously that even the Prince of Wales invoked it as art's defining characteristic in the early 1930s. 35 Pick and others combined this romantic-medieval aesthetic with the modernist aesthetic of Significant Form, thereby enabling them to acknowledge the formal properties of the new art while still grounding postimpressionist art within Victorian social and utilitarian parameters.
"Fitness for Purpose" thus had the advantage of situating the new and bewildering artistic styles within a very English context, in contrast to the apparently "French" aestheticism of Fry and his friends. One founding member of the DIA criticized the Bloomsbury aesthetic as elitist in both content and expression:
A proper function of criticism should be to foster our national arts and not to frighten people off with high-pitched definitions and far-fetched metaphors mixed with a flood of (as Morris said) "sham technical twaddle." It is a pity to make a mystery of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things may be made well or made ill. A work of ar is a well-made thing, that is all. 36
Whereas Fry and Bell tended to describe art in abstract aesthetic terms, referring to a work's "plastic rhythms" and "contrapuntal formal harmonies," the DIA and their followers discussed art in more practical terms, pointing to the fact that the geometrical forms of cubism were especially suited to the requirements of machine production, or that the simple, flat images and strong primary colors of a Matisse were especially fit for the purposes of advertising posters, which needed to create an instant impression on commuters. "Fitness for Purpose" provided a normative and practical measure by which the new art could be evaluated, and this was part of the slogan's wide appeal. Harry Peach, a DIA member and close friend of Pick's, thought the slogan should be mentioned as often as possible in DIA publicity "as the public could understand [it], and we are all asking for some test on which to judge things by." 37
"Fitness for Purpose" was also reassuring to those who feared that modern art represented a radical subjectivism and self-indulgence that threatened the Protestant work ethic, and would lead to a breakdown of communal standards and to cultural anarchy. 38 In a generally favorable review of the avant-garde group Unit One, the architect Goodhart-Rendel articulated a common sentiment when he cautioned that "The artist that keeps his art only as a partner in his self-expression condemns it to the infertility of a harlot. The expression of his precious self should never be his object, it should be the least conscious part of his labour in some definite task." 39 But "Fitness for Purpose" contained the new art within the earlier Victorian rhetoric of duty, service, and responsibility. By linking modern art with Fitness for Purpose and industrial production, visual modernism was made to appear less anarchic, subjective, and alienating, and more comprehensible, moral, and socially beneficial. Medieval modernists maintained that once artists were integrated into industry and obeyed the mandate of "Fitness for Purpose," they would be working for the benefit of the community as artists had done in the Middle Ages, rather than jeopardizing the commonweal by brashly celebrating their own egoism.
In addition to adapting the aesthetic of Significant Form to the aesthetic of Fitness for Purpose, the DIA attempted to reconcile other fundamental tenets of the arts and crafts tradition with the modern industrial world. This took some imaginative reworking of Ruskin and Morris's writings, but DIA members and their fellow medieval modernists had proven themselves equal to the challenge by redefining machines as the modern equivalent of artisanal tools. Still, some concepts proved harder to adapt than others. For example, the DIA took Ruskin's famous emphasis on "Joy in Labor," which he believed pertained to the experience of medieval artisans but not to modern factory workers, and transformed it to "Joy in Service." Industrial workers could take pride in the service they provided to the community, and such pride would be sufficient compensation for having to work within a system of subdivided labor. 40
DIA members and other medieval modernists also argued that mass-produced commodities need not be thought of as inferior to individually crafted works of art, as Ruskin and Morris had believed they were. While the German critic Walter Benjamin argued that the aura of art was lost in the age of mechanical reproduction, many of his English contemporaries believed that industrial products could be imbued with the spirit of the industrial artist. As Frank Pick stated, "We think of ourselves as vessels of the spirit of God, so things, we may say, are receptacles of the spirit of man. When they are full of the spirit, things have souls--God's gift to us, man's gift to them." 41
The new art's spiritual effects were emphasized as often as its economic benefits. In its emphasis on abstract qualities such as form, balance, composition, and harmonic "rhythms" over the mimetic representation of the everyday, postimpressionism seemed to express the eternal forms underlying the transient surface appearances of life. Like medieval paintings and stained-glass windows, the new art called the viewers' attention to the integrated and immutable order of the universe, which appeared to have been lost sight of in the fragmented, skeptical, and secular world of the early twentieth century. One writer argued in 1921 that
However strange and repellent this newer art may appear to those of us brought up in the safe paths of tradition I cannot help welcoming the new vision as an indication of the younger generation's demand for a more ordered and permanent aspect of life. The study of modern art has brought to me the comforting hope that the coming generation will understand the meaning of life and reality and will therefore be wiser than the generations which brought Europe to the catastrophe of 1914. 42
Many of the medieval modernists asserted that the platonic "forms" and invisible "rhythms" expressed by nonrepresentational art were also being revealed by contemporary explorations in science. Abstract art seemed to radiate the invisible cosmic forces that had been discovered by the new physics at the turn of the century, and to represent the mysterious Fourth Dimension posited by late-nineteenth-century non-Euclidian geometry. 43 Indeed, the so-called nonrepresentational art of the postimpressionists could thus be seen as mimetic: if, as Ruskin had said, all genuine art must be true to Nature, this modern art was precisely true to the Nature revealed by modern science. Herbert Read spoke for many when he asserted that "Art is a natural activity. Its rules are the proportions and rhythms inherent in our universe." 44
The Earthly Paradise of the medieval modernists could embrace commerce and industry within its ambit, as both would be spiritualized by the transcendental agency of art. Pick, for example, believed that commerce overshadowed religion as the principal bond among people in the modern world, but that commerce need not be incompatible with spiritual principles: "I seek behind commerce, art and I know that behind art there must be good custom. Morality, we call it." 45 With modern artists integrated into industry, English industrial products would be transformed from the cheap and shoddy to the cheap and lovely, the new "common art" for the commercial and democratic age. Indeed, Pick and other medieval modernists believed that by integrating modern artists into industry, England would not only evolve into an Earthly Paradise, but an Earthly Paradise that happened to dominate the world's export markets through the sale of its "soulful" commodities. Morris's utopian Dream of John Ball could mesh with the economic Dream of John Bull.
Medieval modernists also stressed those qualities of the new art that would appeal to a country whose iconoclastic Protestant heritage had long disparaged the visual in favor of the verbal. In England, visual modernism was frequently characterized as a puritan art, its pure, simple, and austere designs connoting the eternal realm of the Heavenly Kingdom. Protestant readers of Clive Bell's Art could take reassurance from his assertion that if art is a religion, "it is a religion without a priesthood." 46 Many of those who were instrumental in promoting the new art, such as Frank Pick, Charles Holden, Roger Fry, and Samuel Courtauld, came from nonconformist backgrounds, with a substantial number raised in Quaker households. This convergence of puritanism and postimpressionism did not pass unnoticed; the artist C. R. W. Nevinson, for example, observed that "in England, where the seventh commandment is most reverenced, many of the greatest lovers of this dehumanized art were either Quakers or Methodists by birth, and they were always suspicious of the flesh or any sensuous appeal." 47
Region and class, no less than religion, contributed to the interwar struggle to define the new art in primarily formalist or social terms. Many medieval modernists were raised in the North, and their attempt to modify the aesthetic of "Significant Form" was related to long-established cultural tensions between North and South. 48 Northern civic pride reflected both a celebration of local avant-gardism in industry and a reaction against the centralizing pull of London. 49 It is therefore not surprising that Northerners would embrace those cultural forms that challenged the staid orthodoxy and social exclusivity of London's Royal Academy, while simultaneously denying that art was autonomous. At the opening of a 1911 modern art exhibit in Manchester, Robert Ross of the Contemporary Art Society reminded his provincial audience that modern art was "either very partially recognized or wholly unrecognized by officialism, particularly London officialism. There is some reason for us to make our debut in Manchester. For what Manchester thinks to-day about a good many things besides art England is apt to think to-morrow, or at least the day after to-morrow." 50
Perhaps the high-water mark of the integration of the arts during the interwar period occurred in 1935, when an exhibition of "Art in Industry" was held at the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy had been the last bastion of the "fine arts." Their refusal in the nineteenth century to display craftwork had led to the formation of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. The 1935 exhibition marked the belated victory of the arts and crafts project to recognize art's social function, and was celebrated as such. A contemporary noted that "A common interest in good work breaks down all unreal distinctions, and the authorities of the Royal Academy . . . have, in organizing this Exhibition, broken down all the artificial barriers that have hitherto separated the Fine Arts from the Industrial Arts." 51 The challenge to the hierarchical distinctions among the arts was at times taken to extremes: one critic opined that "the contemplation of cutlery has never given me a sense of immortality. Nevertheless, I maintain that the difference between a well-designed fork and Botticelli's Primavera is one of degree and not kind." 52 Less extreme definitions of art as simply a well-made artifact fit for its purpose were common, however, as were appreciative references to Ruskin and Morris. The architect W. R. Lethaby stated in 1919 that Ruskin's thought "saturates this generation through and through" 53 and Anthony Bertram observed in 1938 that "it was Morris who took art out of the academies and brought it again into everyday life. . . . [but] it has taken nearly half a century for these ideas to percolate into the ideology of our times." 54
But although the traditional definition of art had been successfully challenged in public discourse during the interwar period, the actual integration of art and industry had yet to be realized. In his report on the state of industrial art in England in 1936, Nikolaus Pevsner had to admit that "things are extremely bad. When I say that 90 per cent of British industrial art is devoid of any aesthetic merit, I am not exaggerating." 55 Most industries remained uninterested in design, most local authorities remained uncertain as to how to reform their art schools, the Royal College of Art remained a producer primarily of art teachers rather than trained designers, the Board of Education remained unable to enforce its programmatic recommendations, and the public remained much discussed but little consulted as to its habits of consumption.
This discrepancy between ideals and reality can in part be explained by the decentralized nature of English industrial art education, which impeded comprehensive reform programs, and the continued complacency of most industries toward the issue of industrial art. In addition, the attempt to integrate art with industry was stymied by the conflicting motives of the design reformers themselves: utopian aspirations often clashed with economic goals. Design reformers argued that England's economic future depended on satisfactory industrial design, but many were less concerned about elevating export res than with diffusing art throughout the country so as to create the New Jerusalem. As chairman of the government's Council of Art and Industry (CAI) during the 1930s, Frank Pick was quick to argue that "the industrial future of the United Kingdom must to a large and increasing extent be bound up with the development of design." 56 But like most interwar design reformers he wanted to see that the "right" types of design were available to the public--designs not only fit for purpose, but that also embodied the transcendental aura of the artist and tapped into national traditions. Moral judgments, rather than market research, governed the evaluation of design. Pick had the CAI concentrate on "typical" English industries like sporting goods, pottery, furniture, silverwork, and clothing as a way to "escape, if we can, from what I would call the Continental influences which now seek to pervade certain branches of industry. I do not think we can hope to be successful unless we build up a tradition for ourselves and make our English design of international reputation." 57
This top-down approach contrasted markedly with the more consumer-oriented design profession in America, which used market research methods to determine what the public wanted. 58 Gordon Russell, a prominent designer of the period, expressed the English industrial artist's opposition to this tactic:
An American super-stylist stated some time ago that he was surprised to find in England that people talked of aesthetics in connection with industrial design: aesthetics, he said, had nothing to do with it, the only test was a beautiful sales curve shooting upwards. I know there are some knaves and morons in industry, but such nonsense presupposes that there is no one else. . . . The problem is a social one, as William Morris saw. Good design is one aspect of a good pattern of life and unless the foundations are sound the superstructure will not last. 59
While there were a few English industrialists who shared this moral reformist attitude, many others may have been reluctant to hire industrial artists precisely because the English design movement seemed overly idealistic, even quixotic.
The moral conception of design meant that designers in interwar England were trained as "artists" rather than as technicians familiar with the specialized requirements of designing for particular industries. The industrial artist of the 1920s and 1930s was a special type of employee, in the world of commerce but not of it, one who was meant to "civilize" commerce and to spiritualize industrial commodities. While individual designers like Lewis Day or B. J. Fletcher did not think this exalted role was incompatible with a solid vocational training, many others did: the job could be fulfilled only through the gifts of an artist, rather than through the narrow training of a technician.  This tension was nicely captured in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love , in a conversation between the art teacher Gudrun Brangwen and Loerke, a German sculptor and occasional industrial artist:
"And do you think then," said Gudrun, "that
art should serve industry?"
"Art should interpret industry, as art once
interpreted religion," he said. 60
The cultural imperative prevailed, impelled by the fact that those who had been raised in the arts and crafts tradition obtained positions of power within the government, education, and industry. In addition, industrial art derived its conceptual foundations from nearly a century's worth of experience with the traditional "craft-based" industries, for which artists could create designs without extensive technical training. British industrial investment continued to be focused on these staple industries during the interwar years, rather than on the new light-metal industries being developed at the time. 61 Thus discussions on improving the training of designers tended to focus on how artists could learn the technical requirements of such traditional industries as textiles, pottery, furniture, clothing, and jewelry. As late as 1936 Pick himself believed that the CAI did not need to investigate engineering industries, because he felt that they did not depend on design for sales in the way that more traditional craft-based industries did. 62 In the interwar period, industrial design as it was practiced in America simply was not a conceptual possibility in England.
The London Underground, however, was a concrete realization of the integration of art and industry so widely touted in print but so often flouted in life. Pick attempted to turn it into an arts and crafts project, a microcosmic example of what he hoped to do with all of London.
But while Pick had a moment of success in actualizing this dream, neither his more grandiose goal of reshaping London into an orderly and harmonious community nor the discursive union of the arts that he helped to shape lasted beyond the interwar period. By 1945 a clear separation between "fine art" and "industrial design" was reestablished within public rhetoric, and was institutionalized through the creation of the Arts Council on the one hand, and the Council of Industrial Design on the other. Indeed, Pick was not just a central re in the establishment of the medieval modernist conception of art; he also played a major role in its sudden collapse. It is to a more specific account of his efforts in both of these directions that we shall now turn.
Recent literature has depicted Pick as an idealistic yet shrewd businessman who promoted modern art primarily as an advertising strategy to increase the Underground's profits. 63 It is true that Pick was concerned with maintaining corporate revenues. But like his hero John Ruskin, he adhered to the puritan conception of business as a spiritual calling that emphasized service over profit. He consistently maintained this view, from his earliest writings as a youth in the 1890s, to his speeches as the vice-chairman of the London Public Transportation Board (LPTB) in the 1930s. As he told a gathering in 1929, "the financial results of an undertaking, while of marked importance I cannot deny, certainly in a transport undertaking which performs a public service, do not represent the main purpose of the undertaking." 64 That main purpose? As he repeatedly maintained, "We are in being to perform service and service and service." 65 Pick intended the Underground to improve people's lives. He used posters to inform commuters of cultural and educational events of which they might otherwise be unaware, turned Underground stations into mini-museums of modern design, and was delighted with statistics that showed attendance at museums and zoos increased whenever Underground stations opened within their vicinity. 66
Pick's emphasis on service stemmed from both his Protestant upbringing and lower-middle-class background. The son of a tradesman, he was born in 1878, raised a Congregationalist, and spent his formative years in York, which he felt could be grasped as a civic community in a way that London could not. He would pursue his lifelong quest for "social solidarity" with York in mind, just as he would defend commerce and industry as "noble" pursuits with his father in mind (provided that such pursuits elevated minds as well as profits). 67 As he was to explain in 1916, "The great advantage of business is not the pursuit of profit. The great advantage of business is the pursuit of art." 68
As a youth he avidly read Ruskin and Morris, and remained for most of his life a romantic who believed that the new art expressed the underlying spirit of the modern world. By diffusing modern art among the populace he hoped to recreate a spiritual and organic community such as that which had supposedly existed during the Middle Ages. When he became a leader of one of the largest corporations of the country he tried to realize his vision of an Earthly Paradise: the Underground would be a model of aesthetic integration and communal service, a catalyst for a more harmonious London of the future. He stated in 1926, "We have to establish a new social synthesis. We have to make the conflicting interests of the people serve some commonweal. We cannot neglect one great aid to this, which is a city laid out and constructed to embody this end." 69
When he moved to London in 1906 to work for the Underground, by luck he was assigned to work directly with the new general manager, Albert Stanley, later Lord Ashfield. Ashfield, who recognized Pick's managerial abilities, was only too happy to exploit his employee's workaholic personality. Pick rapidly became Ashfield's second-in-command, overseeing the day-to-day management of the system while Ashfield concentrated on the wider worlds of politics and finance. Both men were mavericks, and Pick was given wide latitude in his decisions; as far as Ashfield was concerned, as long as Pick ensured that the system ran smoothly, he could do what he liked with the Underground's appearance. 70
Pick began to shape the image of the Underground without any overall social plan. He decided that the Underground ought to have a corporate identity as a way to sell it to the public, but also as a way to identify the system in the public's mind as an integrated entity, a microcosm of the organic unity he sought in society. In 1913 he hired the arts and crafts typographer Edward Johnston to design a special typeface for the Underground that would give a distinctive visual identity to the system, combining tradition with modernity. At this time Pick also began to commission artists to design posters, many in the latest modernist styles. He believed that abstract art was "fit for the purpose" of advertising, since, as mentioned above, it conveyed concepts more rapidly than traditional narrative art. In addition, modern art jolted jaded city dwellers out of their conventional habits of seeing, forcing them to view the world afresh with the innocent eye so valued by the romantics. 71
The Underground posters were instrumental in introducing the public to modern art, and accounts in the press praised Pick for turning the system into "the people's picture-gallery." 72 His audacious experiment proved so successful in generating favorable publicity that it was emulated by other several other institutional undertakings and corporations such as Shell-Mex, the Cunard Liners, the General Post Office, and the Empire Marketing Board (Pick himself was commissioned to chair the Poster Subcommittee). The Underground posters helped introduce the latest artistic styles to the provinces as well as to those residing in London (. 3 and 4). In 1926 Pick suggested that the Victoria and Albert Museum circulate reproductions of the posters to provincial art schools, where contemporary art was nearly invisible, and two years later officials at the museum noted the venture's success: "The poster movement . . . is so progressive, and the demand for this kind of work in provincial Schools is so great, that a gift of drawings of this nature is greatly appreciated by us." 73
In the 1920s, Pick was encouraged to think of the Underground as a catalyst for social integration by his colleagues at the Design and Industries Association. Among the DIA members who most influenced Pick was W. R. Lethaby. In a series of lectures published as Form in Civilisation in 1922, Lethaby called for a new architectural style that would capture the spirit of the modern age and make London more visually cohesive. Pick had been thinking along similar lines about the need for an environmental catalyst that would promote social integration. In 1923 the Underground received permission to extend southward, and Pick decided that the design of the new stations would meet Lethaby's call for a contemporary school of architecture. 74 As the new stations were being built in 1926, Pick promised an audience that "a new style of architectural decoration will arise" and that it would herald "modern London--modern, not garbled classic or renaissance." 75
The architect Pick chose to design the new style, Charles Holden, was also a DIA member, also from Yorkshire, also a nonconformist, also an admirer of Ruskin and Morris, and who also saw modern art as embodying the new collective spirit. Holden designed the stations in the International style that had been visible on the continent in the 1920s but was virtually unknown in England. He also commissioned modern sculptures by Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, and others for the Underground headquarters he designed in 1929. He insisted that the sculptors carve directly onto the stone of the building, rather than use plaster casts, as direct carvings had been the practice in the Middle Ages. Like other of his colleagues, Holden overtly compared modernism and medievalism; for example he defended Epstein's controversial sculpture Day because it was "alive and vigorous like much medieval sculpture and that is what I most value." 76
Just as they defined modernism in terms of medievalism, Pick and Holden consciously adapted the International style to native traditions. For example, Holden's functional architecture contained touches of ornamentation, unlike many of the starker buildings on the continent, as both he and Pick believed that this was part of the English tradition. At least one reviewer felt Holden had been successful; anticipating that some might claim that a station by Holden "is un-English," the reviewer countered, "True, its constituent elements are as international as concrete and cantilevers, but the spirit in which they are assembled is wholly English." 77 Several of Holden's functionalist buildings have been likened to English cathedrals; perhaps the most obvious example is the Uxbridge station of 1938, which has a stained-glass window above the booking hall ( 5). 78 Holden also designed many of the buildings' fixtures, thereby fulfilling the arts and crafts ideal of the architect as master craftsman who created an integrated work of art.
In addition to unifying the Underground's surface appearance, Pick also tried to secure optimal working conditions for its employees. 79 The Underground was widely praised for its services and its art; nevertheless, Pick's ambitions were not satisfied. 80 He wanted to use the Underground to influence the growth and form of London, for in his eyes the transport system determined the shape of the city. 81 With the creation of the London Passenger Transportation Board in 1933, Pick believed he had at hand the instrument that would shape the London of the future: the Board brought together ninety-two different transport undertakings within a single nongovernmental authority, under public inspection. Ashfield was chairman of the seven-member board, with Pick as vice-chairman and chief executive officer. They were charged with expanding the entire transport system, and given £40,OOO,OOO to do it. Pick also was made chairman of the government's Council on Art and Industry, established in 1934 to promote the integration of the two areas.
It is at this juncture that Pick was derailed. He found that he did not have as much autonomy as a member of the Transportation Board as he had at the Underground. He had to compromise with the other members of the board, which was itself checked by other public agencies. In addition, Pick's dreams of reshaping London would have required a central planning agency to coordinate myriad public and private interests; such a national agency did not exist in the 1930s. Finally, the transport system itself was facing financial difficulties, as well as increased competition for traffic from automobiles.
It was also at this time that Pick became disenchanted with modern art. Initially he had welcomed it as a spiritual force that would help integrate the body public, but over time visual modernism seemed to him increasingly anarchic and individualistic. He had hoped that the artist would subordinate self-expression to the greater good of society by becoming a servant to industry and following the constraints embodied in the Eleventh Commandment of "Fitness for Purpose." The 1936 opening of the Surrealist Exhibition in London had appalled Pick--he thought the art immoral and degenerate. A devout nonconformist, Pick perceived surrealism as the hedonistic glorification of the self rather than as an art fit for a higher purpose. In July 1937 he wrote to a friend, "I have come to the conclusion that practically all modernistic methods are bad and that we must go back a long way and build again on the old foundations. I am certainly not going to encourage modern art anymore myself." 82 Pick used his power as chairman of the CAI to redefine the industrial designer as a trained technician who serves the dictates of industry rather than as an independent artist. He alienated many former friends, who thought his stance reactionary, just as he was ting with other members of the Transportation Board over policy. The activities of the CAI were curtailed with the outbreak of war in 1939, and Pick, disillusioned and deeply depressed, resigned from the Transportation Board in 1940. He died in 1941, shortly after giving a talk entitled "Re-Energizing Religion." 83 From first to last, Pick's abiding concern had been to create a spiritual community.
The redefinition of industrial design that Pick had helped to establish in the late 1930s was continued by others during and immediately following the war. In the early years of the war the Board of Trade realized that Americans had established a technologically sophisticated industrial design profession in the mid-1920s, and that America would be Britain's prime economic competitor following the war. The government's committees on industrial design reported that the arts and crafts' ideal of the artist as designer would have to be abandoned in the postwar world. The Weir Committee of 1943, for example, stated "in our view there has been too much emphasis on the words 'art' and 'artists'." 84 As a result of such criticism, the government established the Council of Industrial Design in 1944. Its chairman stated that "the industrial designer is not expressing an intensely personal point of view like the artist. He is one of a team. He is concerned with the problems of producing in quantities goods for use, not individual works of art." 85 Robin Darwin, a member of the council, became Principal of the Royal College of Art in 1949, and turned it away from its interwar emphasis on the union of the arts toward a more technologically oriented training for the demands of the new light-metal industries. Born in 1910, Darwin was no medieval modernist. He wrote in 1950, "William Morris's ideas were all confused with the 'dignity of labour' and so on . . . I think this whole attitude is muddle and bunk." 86
The separation of fine art and industrial design was further cemented by the creation of the Arts Council in 1945, an outgrowth of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), established during the war. CEMA had promoted the union of the arts in its exhibitions. When members of CEMA began to draft the Arts Council's charter, they found they could be exempted from taxation under a nineteenth-century act that applied to those societies that dealt with "the Fine Arts exclusively." 87 The secretary of CEMA, Mary Glasgow, worked with the Department of Treasury in arriving at a definition of "Fine Art" that included industrial art, because, as she put it, "it might often be difficult to draw a line between fine and applied art, a pot and a picture." 88 But treasury officials and the chairman of CEMA, John Maynard Keynes, worked out a definition of "Fine Art" that excluded industrial art. Keynes, like his Bloomsbury friend Fry, did not believe that art could have a utilitarian function. In a 1945 letter to the secretary of CEMA he wrote, "Indeed, it is only to a modern ear that any doubt could possibly arise. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries . . . the distinction between the Fine Arts and the Applied Arts was familiar. In short, the expression 'Fine Arts' is by way of distinction from the technical arts." 89
With the foundings of the Council of Industrial Design for the supervision of utilitarian "industrial design" and the Arts Council for the supervision of transcendental "fine art," design and art were cleft once again: the former to be used, the latter to be contemplated. This distinction, although challenged within recent years by the pluralist and antihierarchical thrust of postmodern theories, nevertheless remains a common view today. Indeed, a controversy erupted over the definition of art in January 1989, when the Royal Academy mounted an exhibition of the work of Malcolm McClaren, who designed the image of the Sex Pistols. McClaren's work, according to one critic, did not qualify as "art," but rather as "design"--and therefore ought not to be displayed at the RA: "I would class Mr. McClaren as a designer, who creates style, rather than as an artist." But Frederick Gore, age seventy-five, disagreed: "I am personally dead against any distinction between fine art and all the activities which are its fundamental background and basis. Directly you divorce art from life and think of art as a separate commodity you have met disaster." 90 Gore reached adulthood in the 1930s, and in 1989 he continued to speak medieval modernese.
The example of Pick and the Underground shows that the culminating achievement of the arts and crafts movement was not the floral scarves sold at Liberty's, but the London Underground. The story of Pick and the Underground also reveals that visual modernism was commonly understood in terms of the romantic medievalism of Ruskin and Morris. Modernism has been defined in numerous ways, but often as rejecting the past, as seeking to "Make It New." But as we have seen, the English avant-garde tended to be retro-garde. Contemporaries certainly recognized this: in 1933 J. E. Barton told listeners of his six-part series on modern art broadcast by the BBC, "Our modern architects, sculptors, painters and designers generally, are often described as'breaking away from tradition.' It would be far more accurate to say that they are trying to get back to tradition." 91 Similar ideas can be found among modernists on the Continent. Walter Gropius, for example, intended the Bauhaus to emulate the medieval workshop traditions in which architecture was seen as the master art uniting all others ("Bauhaus" is derived from Bauhütten, the medieval craft lodges for artisans working on the cathedrals). 92 But the attempt to associate modernism with the past may have been most pronounced in England, where the more things change the more they are made to appear to remain the same.
Finally, what does the example of Pick and his medieval modern cohorts contribute to contemporary debates about the relationship between modernism and the avant-garde? The question arises because of the seeming similarities between this story and Bürger's "historically concrete" 93 Theory of the Avant-Garde. In his influential analysis, Bürger distinguishes the "historical avant-garde" from modernism, which he sees as the culminating stage of art's progressive development toward autonomy, a development he links with the increasing influence of the "bourgeoisie." For Bürger, late nineteenth-century aestheticism, in which a work's content as well as its form no longer referred to the praxis of life, was the necessary outcome of a series of events that had rendered art increasingly autotelic. By the early twentieth century, the congruence of the bourgeois definition of art as autonomous with art's formal break with mimesis meant that the bourgeois had succeeded in institutionalizing art as autonomous and universal, their emphasis on the sensuous aspects of art over the practical a reflection of their own relative "free[dom] from the pressures of the need for survival" (TAG, 46). The "historical avant-garde," such as the Dadaists or Surrealists, arose to critique the bourgeois institution of art, their dissonant works designed to expose it as contingent and class-based. The avant-garde also sought to reintegrate art and life in order "to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art." (TAG, 49) But although the historical avant-garde succeeded in unmasking the institutionalized character of art in bourgeois society, they were unsuccessful in destroying the institution of art--instead, their "anti-art" activities were themselves absorbed by this institution and constituted as art. In several important respects, Bürger's formulation of the rise and fall of the historical avant-garde appears to match the English medieval modernists' own rise and fall: from their critiques of aesthetic formalism to the failure of their more utopian dreams and the return of a formalist definition of "fine art" by 1945.
On closer inspection, however, Bürger's theory of an historical avant-garde is rather ahistorical, relying more on suppositions about art and culture derived from Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School than on detailed historical investigation, and ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. What, for example, are we to make of his teleological conception of art within bourgeois society as a gradual "unfolding" (TAG, 17) toward complete autonomy, blooming finally as aestheticism and the "institution of art"? First, as Bürger at times concedes, there was no unilateral trend toward autonomy in the nineteenth century: George Leonard, for example, has traced an important lineage of artists, extending from the early romantics such as Wordsworth through John Cage, that regarded art and everyday life as inseparable. 94 Furthermore, aestheticism itself was hardly the middle-class ideal of art, at least if we accept the accounts of contemporaries at the turn of the century. And the relationship between aestheticism and autonomy is more vexed than Bürger allows: some aesthetes who seemed to deny art's social function, such as Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde, actually held more complex positions that allowed for art's association with the praxis of everyday life; 95 others, such as Mallarmé and Yeats, associated their aesthetic endeavors with a sacred and occult realm that had direct consequences for conduct in the profane world.
The dubious utility of Bürger's notion of a bourgeois "institution of art," codifying and promoting aesthetic autonomy, becomes even more pronounced when we examine the provenance of those who advocated aesthetic "formalism" and those who insisted on a more socially engaged art. Not only did both tend to be from the middle classes; we often find both positions being advocated at different times by the same person. Fry, for example, was a prominent advocate of art's autonomy, yet he remained ambivalent about the Quaker tradition of service in which he was raised, and the arts and crafts tradition to which he formerly belonged. He had been a member of the arts and crafts' society the Art Workers' Guild (he resigned in 1910), and in 1913 he formed his own crafts workshop, modelled after the botegas of the Italian Renaissance, the Omega Workshops Limited. He tried to present the Omega as an "autonomous" workshop that created aesthetic artifacts that just happened to be useful; "purposive without purpose" would have served as an ideal motto. Fry claimed that the Omega was formed primarily to give modern artists part-time employment, and that the functionality of the craft objects was secondary to more formalist concerns: "The Omega Workshops Limited is a group of artists who are working with the object of allowing free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life." 96 This attitude might explain why many Omega products soon fell apart.
Nevertheless, Fry was also concerned with the social function of modern art, despite his claims to the contrary; he wanted to increase the public's appreciation of art and to beautify their surroundings. Writing his mother about the formation of Omega, he stated that "my problem is now to harness [art] to practical purposes. There's no doubt that it is a difficult thing to do and perhaps that is why almost all manufacturers give it up and go to the patient hack instead of the artist for their designs." 97 Even after dissolving the Omega in 1920 for financial reasons, Fry continued to be ambivalent about the aesthetic formalism he and Bell had championed. In 1926 he welcomed Pick's use of modern artists, and noted "perhaps we could save ourselves a good deal of painful and unnecessary emotion if we were less exacting in our ideals, if we recognized that the real and pressing needs of society are not even in what are called works of art concerned with the higher spiritual adventures." 98 Other examples of artists who shifted between an "autonomous" and an "engaged" conception of art during this period can be cited. Rather than distinguishing an autonomous modernism from an engaged avant-garde, modernism should be viewed as containing both tendencies, just as it encompasses other binaries such as primitivism/futurism, subjectivity/objectivity, classicism/romanticism, and nationalism/ cosmopolitanism.
Finally, if we are to accept the "avant-garde" as a legitimate term for one strand of modernism, we must still examine the extent to which it is, or ought to be, an "oppositional" practice. Bürger presents the avant-garde as inherently oppositional, creating provocative, dissonant works in order to shock its audience into reflecting critically about art's status and purpose (TAG, 56). Indeed, he is uneasy about the avant-garde project, as he fears that an art integrated with life "will lose the capacity to criticize it, along with its distance." (TAG, 50) Like the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Bürger suggests that a genuinely critical art must retain a certain distance from everyday life, or else be co-opted by a monolithic "culture industry" (TAG, 50,54). But there have been many compelling critiques of the Culture Industry thesis, that have questioned the imputed existence and aims of such an "Industry" as well as the accompanying assumption that it retails unambiguous cultural messages that will be passively received and accepted by its audience. 99
It is clear that Bürger's "historically concrete" theory of the radically oppositional character of the avant-garde, and his pessimism regarding the tenability of their aims, are both predicated on normative assumptions rather than historical investigations. The extent of avant-garde opposition to contemporary social practices will vary, not only according to individual res, particular movements, and historical circumstances, but also according to national traditions. In England the association of the visual arts with everyday life and practical purposes extends back through the nineteenth century, reflecting the country's utilitarian biases, Protestant heritage, and the relatively close association between intellectuals and the traditional ruling elite. 100 Thus throughout the nineteenth century the government justified public expenditures on museums and art education on grounds of utility: art would be the handmaiden of industry. 101 Art critics like Ruskin, on the other hand, attempted to legitimate the visual arts on moral and spiritual grounds, in an attempt to overcome the nation's entrenched heritage of iconoclasm. Finally, the state's minimal patronage of the arts through World War II gave wide scope to local governments and individual patrons to promote the arts, and many of these patrons--like Frank Pick--envisaged themselves as working within widely shared cultural norms and traditions, even if their immediate appraisals of the meaning of modern art differed.
If we define the historical avant-garde as encompassing those who attempted to integrate modern art and life, we must concede that the English avant-garde of the interwar period tended to be no less Establishment than oppositional. This Establishment aspect helps explain its effectiveness in introducing modern visual art to the public: as we have seen, the English avant-garde did not only consist of artists, but also of government officials, businessmen, educators, and members of the media. They may not have instituted an Earthly Paradise, but through the fervor of reformers reared on Ruskin and Morris the visual arts attained a prominent place in English culture. For centuries the English had congratulated themselves on being preeminently a literary culture, openly ceding pride of place in the visual arts to the Continent. Carlyle's "The Hero as Man of Letters" expresses this wider cultural bias; Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as "the best which has been thought and said in this world" pointedly left out the best that has been seen and arranged. Medieval modernists helped restore visual art to a prominence that it may not have had in England since the Reformation.
The example of English medieval modernism demonstrates that the historical avant-garde cannot be defined in opposition to "modernism," and that it need not be understood as inherently opposed to capitalism, commodification, or the dominant culture. Indeed, the paradigmatic avant-garde work of the early twentieth century was not the Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, but the London Underground of Frank Pick.
Michael Saler teaches modern European intellectual history at the University of California, Davis. He is working on a book on English medieval modernism.
1. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City , discussed in Noel Carrington, Industrial Design in Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976), 129.
2. Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933), 249.
3. Kathleen Woodward, "Art Descends Into the London Subway," The New York Times Magazine, 13 October 1929, 12.
4. Quoted in Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 108.
5. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984), 49; hereafter abbreviated TAG. For adoptions of Bürger's paradigm, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) and Russell A. Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1989).
6. I admire and concur with D. L. LeMahieu's discussion of interwar English culture, but I disagree with his contention regarding the English avant-garde: "Whatever their political affiliations, Left or Right, the avant-garde in England retained the moral distance, social detachment, and aesthetic superiority characteristic of traditional elite culture." (D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 207) This does hold true for certain artists and critics at some points in their careers--Herbert Read, for example, switched repeatedly from seeing art as detached and "formalist" to seeing it as a well-made artifact fit for its purpose in common life. On the whole, however, visual modernism in England during the interwar period tended to be interpreted within a utilitarian and moral framework.
7. See Robert Alter, Necessary Angels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Herbert N. Schneidau, Awakening Giants (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
8. While Fry and Bell differed in aspects of their aesthetic formulations, they both agreed that art was autonomous. Fry denied that art had any connection with morality, and Bell's definition of "significant form" exemplifies the formalist conception of art as autonomous:
The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. [Clive Bell, Art (1914; reprint, New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), 27]
9. Neil Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 41-42.
10. It is true that Morris's simple, geometrical designs did influence modern design and architecture, but generally Ruskin and Morris's Victorian social aesthetic is seen as eclipsed by modernism's formalist aesthetic. Borzello, for example, argues that while William Morris influenced many fields, "of all the fields he influenced, fine art remained untouched" (Frances Borzello, Civilizing Caliban [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987], 7). Similarly, Fishman argues that Ruskin had little influence on art criticism during the interwar period. See Solomon Fishman, The Interpretation of Art (Berkeley: California University Press, 1963), 15. The connection between the arts and crafts movement and modern industrial design and architecture has been traced by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Pioneers of Modern Design (London: Penguin Books, 1975). Romantic medievalism has had a significant impact on modern literature as well as modern art in this period, notably in the works of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce. Joyce's nostalgia for the Middle Ages and use of scholastic aesthetics has been explored by Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). The strong continuities between romantic and modernist American poetry (including the works of Eliot and Pound) have been noted by Albert Gelpi: "Modernists, for all their loud inveighing against Romanticism, longed for and adopted positions that are unmistakably, though sometimes covertly, Romantic." (Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 5) Charles Harrison, in English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (London: Allan Tate, 1981) and S. K. Tillyard have both discussed the influence of the arts and crafts movement on Fry. Harrison notes some of the affinities between Fry's ideas and those of Ruskin and Morris, but argues that Fry and Bell's "aesthetic" conception of art separated them from Ruskin and Morris's sociological conception. Tillyard argues that the "discourse" of the arts and crafts movement shaped Fry's initial explanation of post-impressionism, as well as the public's reception of the 1910 exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists." She then contends that Fry and Bell developed a more specific "language" and "aesthetic" for postimpressionism between 1910 and 1914 that no longer referred to the arts and crafts aesthetic, and that this new formalist discourse went unchallenged following the First World War. (S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, 1900-1920 [London: Routledge, 1988], 199-216, 248-50) Thus, while arguing for continuities through 1910, she also sees the years 1910-12 as marking a decisive break with the past that was firmly established by 1918. I believe that this strictly formalist aesthetic was strongly challenged throughout the interwar period, and that the reception and assimilation of modern art through the late 1930s owed as much to the romantic medievalism of Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris as it did to the formalism of Fry and Bell.
11. "A Generation With Drive," London Observer, 7 May 1931.
12. One exception to this general trend was the Independent Group, which challenged the distinction between life and art in its discussions and exhibitions held between 1952-56. See Lynne Cook, "The Independent Group" in Modern Art and Popular Culture, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (New York: Harry Abrams, 1990), 192-216; and The Independent Group, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 1990), 135.
13. See Paul Oscar Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts," in Renaissance Thought and the Arts, ed. Kristeller (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 163-229; and Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
14. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts (1836; reprint, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973), 1.
15. J. R. Sedding, quoted in Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement, 165.
16. Noel Rooke, "The Craftsman and Education for Industry," in The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Four Lectures (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1935), 57.
17. Anthony Bertram, "Review of BBC Broadcasts," Architectural Review (September 1934): 97, quoted in Robin Kinross, "Herbert Read's Art and Industry: A History," Journal of Design History 1 : 35-50.
18. For classic discussions of this aesthetic, see Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), and M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
19. The Listener (1 June 1932): 780.
20. To cite one of many examples: after visiting the first postimpressionist exhibition, the poet Wilfrid Blunt wrote, "The drawing is on the level of that of an untaught child of seven or eight years old . . . the method that of a schoolboy who wipes his fingers on a slate after spitting on them . . . Apart from the frames, the whole collection should not be worth £5, and then only for the pleasure of making a bonfire of them." (Wilfrid Blunt, quoted in Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops [London: Secker & Warburg, 1983], 2)
21. Minutes of Council 87, 5 February 1935, PRO, BT 57/A.2/570.
22. Cecil Smith, proposals for a museum and institute of modern industrial art, 29 April 1914, PRO, ED 24/601.
23. Despite criticisms by some industrialists that the RCA ought to separate training in industrial design from training in the fine arts, the president of the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy, defended Rothenstein's arts and crafts' policy in 1928: "It seems to me evident that training in Design or Industrial Art cannot be divorced from training in the Fine Arts . . . " (Lord Eustace Percy, PRO, ED 24/607).
24. Ministry of Reconstruction, "Reconstruction Problems 17: 'Art and Industry,'" March 1919, file DIA/130, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
25. Paul Nash, "The Artist and the Community," The Listener (20 January 1932): 100-101.
26. Paul Nash, quoted in Fiona MacCarthy, British Design Since 1880 (London: Lund Humphries, 1982), 43.
27. Godfrey Rubens, W. R. Lethaby (London: The Architectural Press, 1986), 256. Lewis said Lethaby's Architecture was "as sound a book as possible; if everybody were of Lethaby's opinion we should find that the aspect of this lifeless scene had changed for the better." (Wyndham Lewis, quoted in W. R. Lethaby, 1857-1931, ed. Sylvia Backemeyer and Theresa Gronberg [London: Lund Humphries, 1984], 30)
28. Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph's Design (London: The Egoist Ltd., 1919), 6. Lewis described this work in a letter to John Quinn:
Roughly, it is a consideration of how an abstract design of direction and masses can be applied to a street or a city. It is an appeal to a better type of artist to take more interest in and more part in the general life of the world, if only in the interest of his own shop, and to attempt to change the form content of civilized life. The artist labouring in his studio, the absolute schism between him and life, is displayed: and I consider how this is affecting painting and is likely to affect its further progress. [The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1965), 110-11]
He maintained this artisanal view of the "fine artist" in a letter to The New Republic in 1940:
As to being "more like a businessman than an artist" thank god for that! Art is a trade--nota gentlemanly pastime, nor a week-end amusement for dud draughtsmen or ineffectual painters. . . . The artist must, if he is to survive, come to terms with the people at large . . . for in nogreat capital are there more than a few dozen people, with the means necessary to set up asprivate patrons, who even pretend to care forpictures." [Ibid., 271-72]
29. H. J. R. Murray, Notes on the International Congress for Art Education (London: HMSO, 1929), 12, in PRO, ED 121/59.
30. Ibid., 32.
31. Crowe Committee Report, 22 July 1930, PRO, BT 60/24/3.
32. Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in Elementary Schools, quoted in memorandum by the Board of Education on Council 277's report, "Education for the Consumer," 2 February 1938, PRO, BT 57/30/A.570/6.
33. Herbert Read, in William Morris, 1834-1934: Some Appreciations, ed. George Roebuck (Walthamstow: Walthamstow Antiquarian Society, 1934), 28-29.
34. G. D. H. Cole, ed., William Morris (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1946), xx.
35. "The simplest thing, if it fills its purpose, is the right thing and the beautiful thing." (Prince of Wales, forward to The Conquest of Ugliness, ed. John de la Valette [London: Methuen & Co., 1935], vii)
36. W. R. Lethaby, "Art and Workmanship," 3-4, March 1915, file DIA/122, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
37. Harry Peach to Cecil Brewer, 31 December 1915, file DIAP/10/135, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
38. A similar critique of cultural modernism was proffered by the American sociologist Daniel Bell in the 1970s. See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
39. Goodhart-Rendel, MS review for The Studio, July 1934, file G-ReH/40/2/19, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
40. A. Clutton Brock, "A Modern Creed of Work," file DIA/123, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
41. Frank Pick, "An Edinburgh Address on Design and Industry," July 1917, file DIA/123, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
42. E. Hartley Wilson, letter to The Art Teachers' Guild Record (December 1921): 10. This idealistic interpretation of modern art was one advanced by many modern artists themselves at this time; see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
43. L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
44. Herbert Read, MS copy "Art and Crisis," 1944, H. Read Collection, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
45. Frank Pick, "Art and Commerce," February 1916, file B2, p. 16, London Transport Museum.
46. Bell, Art, 182.
47. C. R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (London: Methuen, 1937), 169.
48. A remarkable number of the most influential patrons and proselytizers of modern art came from Yorkshire, which was also notable for being the birthplace of several of England's finest modern artists, with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Edward Wadsworth among them. These patrons from Yorkshire included Frank Pick, William Rothenstein, Herbert Read, Michael Sadler, Charles Holme, Raymond Unwin, Charles Rutherston, Percy Jowett, A. R. Orage, Holbrook Jackson, the art publishing firm of Lund Humphries, and the publisher/gallery firm Zwemmers. Prior to the World War I, Leeds was arguably the modern art capital of England. The Leeds Arts Club (founded by Orage and Jackson), Leeds University (under the vice-chancellorship of Sadler), and the Leeds Art Museum (during the curatorship of Frank Rutter, later the art critic for the Sunday Times) were influential in bringing modern art and modern artists to the North of England, where impressionable students like Read and Moore were exposed to the new artistic currents.
49. Frank Musgrove, The North of England (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 17.
50. Robert Ross, "New Manchester Exhibition Opened," Manchester Daily Guardian, 8 December 1911.
51. Gordon M. Forsythe, "British Art in British Pottery," in The Conquest of Ugliness, ed. de la Valette, 134.
52. Wilfred Salter, "The Practical Use of Art," The Studio (May 1941): 173-76.
53. W. R. Lethaby, Form in Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 184.
54. Anthony Bertram, Design (1938; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943), v.
55. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 12.
56. Frank Pick, "Art and Industry," Manchester Guardian Commercial, 6 September 1935, Council No. 125: Press References, PRO, BT 57/29/A.570/3.
57. Frank Pick, quoted in report of the first meeting of the CAI, 30 January 1934, PRO, BT 57/1/A.11.
58. The American designer Norman Bel Geddes observed in the early 1940s that "We approach all problems from the consumer's point of view--wishes, needs and tastes--we determine them and then design to them." (Geddes, quoted in Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century [London: Allen & Unwin, 1986], 31) Nikolaus Pevsner observed that in England in the 1930s there was very little market research on design, in contrast to America (Pevsner, Enquiry into Industrial Art, 5).
59. Gordon Russell, Designer's Trade (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), 141-42.
60. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1921; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 424. I am grateful to Alex Zwerdling for alerting me to Loerke.
61. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (New York: Routledge, 1989), 222.
62. Board of Education memo regarding a conversation with Pick, 10 January 1936, PRO, ED 136/9. During World War II the government realized that they were far behind many other nations in industrial design for light-metal industry products, and struggled to find ways to catch up. E. M. Dickey of the Board of Education admitted in 1943 that design for products of "non-traditional" industries had not been seriously considered for most of the 1930s:
The design for appearance of engineering products from machine tools and locomotives to typewriters and sewing machines was not specifically dealt with in Frank Pick's "Design and the Designer". We thought this was partly because the topic was hardly in the air at the time the Arts & Industry Council issued that report and partly because Mr. Pick's own scheme for good design in everything to do with London Transport was so satisfactory that he did not need to take the then newly streamlined USA locomotives etc. very seriously. [Dickey to Miss Goodfellow, 18 November 1943, PRO, ED 46/154]
63. Nikolaus Pevsner and Christian Barman, who knew and worked with Pick, wrote appreciative reminiscences in which they acknowledged Pick's moral and spiritual aims. See Nikolaus Pevsner, "Frank Pick," in Studies in Art, Architecture, and Design, vol. 2 (New York: Walker and Company, 1968) and Christian Barman, The Man Who Built London Transport: A Biography of Frank Pick (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1979). Possibly in reaction to these works, Adrian Forty has argued that Pick's foremost concern was with enhancing the corporate image of the Underground for commercial purposes. See Adrian Forty, "Lorenzo of the Underground," The London Journal 5 (May 1979): 113-19; and idem, Objects of Desire (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986).
64. Frank Pick, "The Administration of Transport Undertakings--Organization," Journal of the Institute of Transport (April 1929): 2-12.
65. Frank Pick, "An Address at LPTB First Annual Conference," November 1936, file A34, p. 31, London Transport Museum.
66. Frank Pick, "The Volume and Scope of London Traffic," 12 December 1923, file A11, p. 18, London Transport Museum.
67. In many of his writings Pick defended commerce as a "liberal art," in an attempt to raise its status. As far as he was concerned, the world of commerce was comparable to the world of gentility: "Industry is an alternative mode of association to the public school." (Frank Pick, "Education and Training in the Transportation Service," 1929, file A21, p. 18, London Transport Museum) In this Pick may have drawn inspiration from Ruskin, who had told a Manchester audience that "I believe tradesman may be, ought to be--often are, more gentlemen than idle and useless people." ("A Joy Forever," The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 5 [New York: The Kelmscott Society, n.d.], 75)
68. Frank Pick, "Art in Household Things," 1916, file B6, p. 3, London Transport Museum.
69. Frank Pick, "Growth and Form in Cities," January 1926, file B15, p. 26, London Transport Museum.
70. Charles Holden, the architect who worked closely with Pick in the interwar period, recalled how expeditious Pick could be. Holden presented Pick with the plans for the new Underground headquarters: "A telephone call, a meeting with him the same afternoon, a board meeting later the same afternoon and then a message 'Right, carry on'. Quick work: but Pick was like that, he knew there was always time to correct a false move." (Charles Holden, "Frank Pick," file HoC/1/23, p. 3, Royal Institute of British Architects, London)
71. As Pick stated in 1927, "To visit a picture show and to come out again into the streets ought to mean that for the moment at least the eye sees things anew. So it is with the poster." (Frank Pick, "Underground Posters," 1927, file B6/Box 4/Copy A, p. 3, London Transport Museum)
72. Rutter, Art in My Time, 249.
73. Martin Hardie to A. L. Barber, 27 July 1928, Underground File, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
74. Frank Pick, "The Art of the Street," 9 March 1923, file B13, p. 9, London Transport Museum.
75. Frank Pick, "Design in Relation to London of the Future," notes for DIA dinner, 1926, file B16, London Transport Museum.
76. Charles Holden to Christian Barman, 19 August 1953, file HoC/5/1, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.
77. Bairi Dennison, "Architecture at the Royal Academy: ii," Architect's Journal (11 May 1932).
78. Holden's Underground Headquarters at St. James' Street has a cruciform shape like that of the medieval cathedrals, although Holden stated that he gave the building this design because he had to accommodate traffic from two separate streets, and thus the design was the most fit for its purpose. Lawrence Menear describes both the Cockfosters Station and the Uxbridge Station as resembling cathedrals; see London's Underground Stations (1983; reprint, London: Baton Transport, 1985), 82-85.
79. Wages and benefits were relatively high, and employees were rewarded for useful suggestions to improve the system. See Frank Pick, "Progress," November 1926, file A15, London Transport Museum; and idem, "Education and Training in the Transport Service," July 1929, file A21, London Transport Museum. In the latter, Pick noted that the use of automated devices within the system did eliminate some jobs of a tedious or menial nature (automated doors on the Tubes, for example, led to the elimination of human door-openers). While regretting having to let some workers go, Pick believed that the use of machines for unskilled labor would ultimately create more challenging jobs, worthy of an individual's time: "A man should be employed as a man to use the whole of his faculties and abilities in his work, and not as a mere unit of power, capable of doing some particular piece of manual labor."
80. Among those influenced by the Underground's example were Jack Beddington of Shell-Mex, Stephen Tallents of the Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office, Colin Anderson of the Orient Line, Jack Pritchard of Isokon, and Raymond McGrath of the BBC.
81. Pick's visions became more grandiose in the 1930s, when the LPTB was formed; he felt he now had the power he needed to make London, in Lethaby's phrase, "neat and tidy." Statements such as the following were common: "These patterns of transport constitute the indispensable framework upon which London must be built." (Frank Pick, "The Organisation of Transport," Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts [3 January 1936]: 214)
82. Frank Pick to B. J. Fletcher, 6 July 1937, file MS.l.1-1986, 86.RR.36, Victoria and Albert Museum.
83. Frank Pick, "Re-Energizing Religion," The Congregational Quarterly 22 (January 1942): 17-28.
84. Appendix to paper no. 49: Report of the Sub-Committee on Industrial Design and Art in Industry (Weir Report), 23 September 1943, PRO, ED 136/8.
85. "Editorial," Art and Industry 274 (April 1949): 121.
86. Robin Darwin, quoted in Christopher Frayling, The Royal College of Art (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1987), 135.
87. Eric W. White, The Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Davis Poynter, 1975), 58.
88. Mary Glasgow to E. Hale, 16 October 1945, PRO, ED 136/196A.
89. John Maynard Keynes to Mary Glasgow, 31 December 1945, PRO, ED136/196A.
90. "Punk Art Plan Divides the Royal Academy," The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 1989, 4.
91. J. E. Barton, Modern Art (London: BBC, 1933), 21.
92. Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 178.
93. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Foreward: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde," in Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, x.
94. See George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994).
95. Jerome Hamilton Buckeley, The Victorian Temper (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 180-82. Richard Ellmann discusses Wilde's "post-aestheticism" in which Wilde links art to life, quoting the following from Wilde's 1884 lecture "The Value of Art in Modern Life": "I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful." (Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987], 246) This was not simply a Wildean paradox; it was a remark often made by followers of the arts and crafts tradition. Eric Gill wrote in 1921, "Man's quality is chiefly exhibited in his works and that the physical form of things is not determined by caprice but by their nature and purpose: That if you take care of Truth and Goodness, Beauty will take care of itself." (Eric Gill, Art-Nonsense and Other Essays [London: Cassell & Co., 1929], 65)
96. Roger Fry, "The Omega Workshops," Box III 47.LL, p. 4, Victoria and Albert Museum.
97. Letters of Roger Fry, vol. 2, ed. Denys Sutton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), 371. Fry insisted that the works be anonymous, like those created in the botega or during the Middle Ages. Interestingly, Peter Bürger argues that the attack on the individuality of the artist is an "avant-garde" characteristic (TAG, 51).
98. Roger Fry, Art and Commerce (London: The Hogarth Press, 1926), 23.
99. See Dick Hebdige, Subculture (London: Methuen & Co., 1979) and Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin.
100. For an interpretation of the inclusive nature of the English "Establishment," see Noel Annan, "The Intellectual Aristocracy" in Studies in Social History, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), 241-87.
101. See Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1977).
.