design


DESIGN AND TASTE

Michael Bogle

Andrew Montana
The Art Movement in Australia:
Design, Taste and Society 1875-1900
The Miegunyah Press $80.00hb, 288pp
0 522 84879 6

ALTHOUGH DESIGN HISTORY IS a relatively young field, most of its textual models were well established by the mid-20th century by such writers as Herbert Read (d.1968) in Art and Industry (1934) and Nicholas Pevsner (d.1983) in Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). These scholars accepted and documented the importance of designers in moulding the modern world. In doing so, Pevsner, Read and others dignified the study of the designers' milieu (materials, methods and markets) and gave design history a modest academic credibility.
     Andrew Montana's The Art Movement in Australia follows this tradition and provides a new chapter to the nation's emerging history of design. The author chooses, however, a title that may perplex would-be readers unfamiliar with the lexicon of late 19th century design. The 'Art Movement' refers to the era's philosophical attempts to meld the aesthetic values of visual arts such as painting and sculpture with those of manufactured goods such as furniture, textiles and wallpapers. The omnibus treatment of colonial interiors from 1788 to 1914, Australians at Home (1990) by Terence Lane and Jessie Serle, prefers to place the 'Art Movement' under the more general heading of 'Aestheticism'. While this is a more accessible term for the general audience, it unfortunately conjures up images of Gilbert & Sullivan's parodies and George Du Maurier's satirical illustrations for Punch. But in either case, 'Aesthetic' or 'Art', the methodology and the period remain much the same.
     The 'Art Movement' has much of its earliest expression in Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste, a book that had at least six British and North American editions. Eastlake, a trained architect and the Secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), began a periodical column of pedantic 'hints' on architecture and interior design in periodicals in the early 1860s. This journalism, widely popular in this reforming age, was later illustrated and gathered into a single volume in 1868.
     'We can hardly hope...in our own time to sustain anything like a real and national interest in art while we tamely submit to ugliness in modern manufacture,' Eastlake writes. 'We cannot have ...one taste for the drawing-room and another for the studio.' It is this philosophical union of art and manufacturing in Hints that leads directly to the 'Art Movement' and ultimately to 'Art-Manufactures'.
     The Art Movement in Australia is a history of the transportation of the aesthetic values of Britain to its English-speaking colony in the South Pacific. Parallel histories could be assembled from the Cape Colony of South Africa, Canada or New Zealand. Montana tells the story of the acclimatisation of visual ideas transmitted through various means: locally consumed British publications; shamelessly pirated reprints of British articles in Australian periodicals; the still-familiar tour of the spurious foreign 'Expert'; and the grand international exhibitions in the colonial capitals (the venerable ancestors of the perennial Home Show).
     The book illustrates and discusses the importance of this traffic in ideas and demonstrates how a Creole culture such as Australia analyses, absorbs, accepts, alters and rejects them. This is a rich area for investigation. Montana insists from his evidence that the 'Art Movement' in interior decoration was embraced by the broadest possible spectrum of the Australian middle classes.
     A wide range of illustrations support the thesis of assimilation. Amongst the many plates (colour and black & white) is a surprising photograph of the Council Chambers in Trades Hall, Carlton, Melbourne, in 'Art-Furnishings' livery. More evidence also comes from the enormous attention paid to aesthetic matters in the popular press. The footnotes bristle with references from the Argus, the Daily Mail, The Age, the Daily Telegraph and the Tasmanian Mail. It is in these analyses of consumption where the earlier design history models falter and contemporary historians excel.
     Approval of the imported style proves to be widespread and there is no shortage of endorsements. 'We Australians should consider whether it would be advisable to give...[the Aesthetic Movement] ...some consideration, for it seems to me aestheticism is particularly suited to our climate...", writes one anonymous journalist. "...[I]n many country homes in New South Wales, where the heat is more felt than in Sydney, I should fancy the cool look of some cane chairs, waxed floors and abundance of flowers would meet with general approval.'
     The author establishes the 'Art Furnishings' markets as well as their all-important promotions by closely observed chapters on the 'Art Movement' in Sydney and Melbourne, an analysis of the Melbourne furniture company Rocke & Co. (Art Furnishers and Decorators) and a summary of the history of the famous Sydney decorating firm Lyon, Cottier & Co.
     Despite the largely urban nature of the 'Art Movement' in Britain, natural selection in Australia carried the Aesthetic taste to the new Melbourne suburbs such as Kew, Camberwell and Toorak and in Sydney, new developments including Ashfield and Annandale. There was also great interest amongst the Australian rural dynasties in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria.

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Michael Bogle is a historian specialising in the histlry of design. He is a curator with the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and the author of Design in Australia 1880-1970 (Craftsman House, 1998)

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