Ref: Art & Industrie, 1951 by Waldemar George
SUMMARY:
Madame Charlotte Perriand, one of the leaders of the U.A.M. Group and the French Department at the Milan Triennial Exhibition, stated during a press conference that our furniture section was largely entrusted to a decorator who is a “specialist in storage problems.” This title, this quality, and this specialty call for comment. The decorator Madame Charlotte Perriand was telling us about is none other than Monsieur Gascoin.
We do not know what Monsieur Gascoin thinks of “Art et Industrie.” As far as we are concerned, we wished to pay tribute to the activity of this pioneer, who is concerned with the total well-being of his contemporaries. His initiatives are often ingenious. They are always logical. Alas, logic is not everything!
As the organizers of the French Department at the Milan Triennial Exhibition did not see fit to invite us to visit this event, we shall refrain from reporting on it here. We will, however, address a problem whose relevance cannot be doubted: that of the decor of the average home. As proponents of extreme or supposedly extreme solutions, Madame Charlotte Perriand and her friends consider us conservatives, defenders of a classical tradition. We were indeed so for a few years. We imposed this mental discipline upon ourselves with the avowed aim of reacting against formulas that had fallen into disuse. If, in the aftermath of the Liberation, historical consciousness appeared to us as a necessity, it could not be the generator of a style.
We clearly state that our Journal rises against this state of sterile stagnation which poses a growing danger to decorative art. However imperfect they may be, achievements of a bold and experimental character are preferable to copies of the old, skillfully disguised as modern creations. But, however rational the arrangement of a home must be, decor cannot be excluded from it.
During a public meeting organized by the Decorators to explain to members of the Parisian Press the reasons preventing their active Society from setting up its annual Salon, René Herbst raised the specter of antique dealers, those direct competitors of future-oriented interior designers. This success is not due to chance. It has multiple causes.
Antique dealers have a sense of decor. “Before being cabinetmakers,” one of them told us, “we are upholsterers and decorators.” This statement provides, we believe, the key to their audience. Indeed, decor, consigned to the Gemonian stairs by functionalists, is not merely a vain entertainment. It responds to specific needs for moral comfort or escape. To deny this reality is to deny all the values of civilization. It is to reduce daily existence to a limited number of material desires that must be satisfied. It is to contest the rights of imagination, dreams, and fantasy.
“A house,” proclaims Frank Lloyd Wright, the undisputed master of new architecture in America, “is only a vulgar machine for living in to the exact extent that the human being is only a digestive tract.”
The opposition between the beautiful and the useful reveals the full intensity of the crisis of which we are witnesses. It is, moreover, curious to note that this crisis spares certain fields and certain forms of human activity. The most intransigent and fanatical purists do not dream of contesting the right of great tailors and couturiers to dress their clients by treating suits and gowns from the perspective of beauty.
Naturally, there can be no question of adorning houses that are incompletely equipped. Domestic tools must be made available to French citizens in cities and the countryside to limit the burden on housewives. But all apartments must also be made poetic, taking into account the fact that aesthetic joys are by no means the prerogative of an elite and that the deeper layers of the population must have access to them. The harmony of forms and colors is no less necessary for the balance of souls than air and light are for the physiological balance of bodies.
It remains understood that clutter and ornamentation are not synonymous, and that a space stripped of ornaments, but strongly rhythmic and punctuated with shimmering tones, can become a source of delight and delectation.
(*) in orange are SLAVIK’s reactions
SLAVIK AND THE ANGEL OF THE ODD BY WALDEMAR GEORGE
The Angel of the Odd animates the unusual art of this draftsman. Baudelaire described Ingres as a Chinese man lost in Athens. With his emaciated and diaphanous face, his long drooping mustache, and his misty gaze, is Slavik not a model of Edgar Poe lost in a world of iron and concrete? I would hardly be surprised to see him pacing the avenues of the city leading, like Gérard de Nerval, a monstrous lobster on a leash. In Meudon, from where he overlooks Paris, its roofs and lights reminiscent of a set for “Louise” at the Opéra Comique, Slavik lives in a dilapidated dwelling, which he has turned into a sorcerer’s or mage’s lair. Rare are the men who leave their mark on the places where they stay. Slavik makes his presence tangible and perceptible, as much by the choice of objects surrounding him as by their arrangement. These accessories of life or these relics of a bourgeois existence are diverted from their natural course. They become unsettling objects of poetry and escape the grip of banality. The setting in which Slavik moves borders on phantasmagoria. But this furniture and architectural framework is not, as one might believe, a means of escape or compensation. It is a direct or indirect projection of the artist’s self. An illustrator and builder of window displays—those ephemeral puppet theaters—Slavik is made to animate scenes. While waiting for the day he is discovered by a Parisian or American show producer, he creates imaginary worlds on paper: his visions of hell that join Orcagna, his dream landscapes evoking Patinir, his Piranesian ruins, his dances macabre of German inspiration, and his perspectives in which one finds the hallucinatory power of the Quattrocento masters, both geometers and visionaries. In an age where ignorance is elevated to the level of dogma, Slavik prides himself, like Picasso, on being ignorant of nothing. But he absorbs the knowledge acquired. Instead of being subjected to it, he masters his culture and makes it the starting point for research of a scholarly and demonic audacity.
