Page 44 - Studio International - September 1972

Multiples supplement

Post Berlin

preoccupations

On the aeroplane leaving Berlin last April,
after the Berlin Art Fair of Multiplied Art
(it's even more of a mouthful in German), I
picked up a copy of the London Times for
29 April 1972 and began to read an article on
Shelley—The poet of the future (an extract
from Christopher Small's since published book
Ariel like a Harpy— Gollancz). The theme of
the article, so suited to my misgivings over the
multiple movement, as exemplified at Berlin,
was 'the menace as well as the promise of the
scientific or machine age (of which) no one,
except Blake, was more aware than Shelley'.
Not enough attention has been paid to the
horrified reaction to the machine which marked
the Romantics, as well as the poet-prophets,
and was inherited by generations of British
artists and writers. Nowhere was it to loom
more influential than in the powerful persons
of John Ruskin and William Morris at a time
when British genius for three-dimensional
design had already manifested itself in men of
science, the engineers, the progenitors of
technology. One only has to record the
enormous influence of British art in the second
half of the nineteenth century—from the
Pre-Raphaelites onwards—and the decisive
contribution William Morris and the architects
and the designers of the Aesthetic Movement to
European Art Nouveau, and later the Bauhaus,
to recognize how much the sentimental dislike
of the machine, the over-spiritual idealism of
autography, delayed more searching poetic
experiments in this country.
The Blakian revulsion to the machine was
prophetic in its implications, justified by
experience; he lived through the Industrial
Revolution and Peterloo, and even saw his own
craft of engraving almost destroyed. He feared
the machine since he foresaw the misery it
would bring to the vast majority of his
fellow-men.
This apocalyptic vision, with its industrial-age
imagery, was partially illustrated in the
exhibition organized by Elisabeth Johnston at
the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1968, on
Art and the Industrial Revolution. Sir Arthur
Elton, whose collection formed the backbone of
that exhibition, pointed out in a sensitive essay
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