Page 92 - Studio International - April 1968

Laurence v\. B i\1acDougall
Houslllan,
binding

for Press books, it scattered such epithets \\·anted to design the book as a whole, text and
' 'dainty' and 'delightful' with a generous presentation hannoniously integrated.
hand but lllade no comment 011 whether the designs :-\ splendid notion: but it delllands perfect t111derstamli11g
Jllakc reading easier or more ditticult, or indeed between artist and writer: and humility on the part
atfcct our appreciation c,f the poems themselves in of the artist, at any rate once the title-page has been
any \\·ay. passed. His sole aim from then on should be to
Since the middle of the century there had been enhance and complement the text. When this under­
sporadic attempts to improve the appearance of books; standing and humility arc lacking, the result is either
a bel that books pro first negative or downright discordant.
centu in myth. A fe"· artists of the day achieved the necessary hannony
direc of with the text. Jessie King was one of the1J1-after
fo the happy few, collectors' itellls on the day Beardsley, perhaps the finest black-and-white artist of
and ever Indirectly their influence the period. Her illustration for Pel leas et Melisande
some to echoes the spirit of Ylaeterlinck's text as faithfully as
offset gener o tast call with did Debussy's music.
half-tone printing and other tmvards the Charles Robinson's decorations for children's books,
end of the century. again, achieve the true marriage of design with text.
Until its cover is opened a book may _justifiably be But MacDougall's drawing shO\rn here is pure
regarded as an object of ar Laurence Houslllan's self-indulgence, decoration for its own sake.
beautiful cover design for his own Green Arras is
pleasing as furniture and at the same time effective as an nack lo the old dilemma
encouragement to open the cover and read farther. Fine art is art for art's sake: applied art is art for Jessie hing
But inside the cover, the words must dominate. something else's sake. \Vhatever it may have claimed
It is they, after all, which are the book's reason for to be, much, perhaps most, of the so-called applied
the book beautiful was only too often the book art of the nineties was nothing of the kind. It was
It hampers our reading with applied art for fine art's sake.
the obstinate stiffn ess of its handmade paper: it distracts Turning the pages of those early Studios, we find the
us with sumptuous decoration which breaks words and old dilemma forcing itself on our notice as tiresomely
sentences arbitrarily to make pretty as ever. Indeed, more clearly and lllore insistently
patterns on the page: it bothers us with leaves and than ever, now that it is no longer overshadowed by
Rowers instead of normal punctuation, with ornaments that old 'fine versus applied' confrontation.
and devices scattered generously but thoughtlessly By Routing the fine art of the academies and bringing
through the t William Morris's l{elmscott art into daily life, the artist-craftsmen of the nineties
Chaucer is a beautiful object: but how many people thought they had slain the monstrous bugbear of
would choose to read their Chaucer in this edition? the useful versus the beautiful; but no, the old dilemllla
Millais illustrated Trollope and Rossetti is dead, long live the new dilemma. It is there,
illustrated Tennyson, back in the sixties, they simply mocking us from almost every page of The Studio in \\l 1xr TI l[
supplied the artwork and left it to the publisher the nineties. Here it is, alas, now in I 968, as LU\\[, ,.:v\'·.
to say how it should be u Morris and Ricketts mischievously alive as ever. Charles llobinson
216