was done by hand, and because there is something more satisfying and
human about printing by hand, they must therefore work in an antique
printing style and make Colonial and Venetian books in order to enjoy
themselves. This is a false syllogism. I strongly recommend printing by
hand to amateurs because it will give them greater satisfaction, not
because it will make their books look like antiques. It is too easy to
fabricate such antiques, and to do so will in the long run give you
less enjoyment than making something which in style is original and new.
As a matter of fact it is already too late to think in terms of
revivals and reproductions. In printing, the revival habit started over
a hundred years ago with Whittingham and Pickering, when they dusted
off the forgotten Caslon types and the eighteenth-century style. It has
been going on ever since, and reached a climax of understanding and
skill in our century at the hands of Updike, Rogers, Rollins, Goudy,
and others. This revivalism was a kind of search for humanism, and a
kind of rebellion against commercialism. These men were not unique. In
every generation since 1800, in every art and craft, every field of
thought, the Industrial Revolution has prompted men to make the same
search backward for satisfactions which the modern world did not seem
to offer.
Too many of our amateurs are still making the same search, although
the Industrial Revolution is well over one hundred years old, all the
necessary backward searching has been done, and all the historical
styles have been reworked. Our predecessors have made it unnecessary
for us to go through the process once again. We can see now that their
work was an escape perhaps for them, but that it can never be a durable
way of creative realization for us. From now on, we must join up with
the forward-looking crowd who think they can build a new world.
The book-printing industry has not been very forward-looking in matters
of style. With the exception of a few printers and designers, book
printers have been unhealthily backward. Therefore the time is ripe for
amateur book-experimentalists to prod and teach them. The amateur can
do it.
He is, or should be, a man with interests in other fields of culture
than his own. He is aware already of what has been done in painting
and music, in fabrics and furniture design, in architecture too--most
important of all. He must now help printing to develop its own new
styles, equivalent to those in other fields. That he can do so is
evidenced by the fact that in recent years the greatest strides forward
have been taken not by the professionals but by people who in a sense
are amateurs, but who have known how to apply modern ideas from other
fields.
The Bauhaus group first became notable, between the wars, by applying
the functional theories of modern architecture to the printed page.
The Black Sun Press and Harrison of Paris applied the ideas of Monroe
Wheeler and others who were stimulated by modern painting. There may
be similar publishing projects in this country today, but they are
not yet influential. The most effective, most vocal, most lovable
of contemporary American influences is that rugged individual Merle
Armitage, whose ideas have been influential in shaping my own attitude.
Such people all know that the world has changed; that it will never
turn back again; and that it is up to us to catch on to the flying
coattails of Today. I urge other amateurs to join the ranks of these
apostles of change. It will be a great day for all of us when ninety
out of one hundred are experimentalists, and not the other way around.
Of course in urging amateurs to develop new styles, I am not
recommending any easy hobby. It is simple, but dull, to copy an old
style. It is hard, but exciting, to work out a new one. And while you
are working at it, you must expect cynical observers to give your
experiments the adjective "wacky"; you must expect certain curious
kinds of people to praise your work for the wrong reasons; and you must
expect alternating moods of conceit and frustration. The proofs you
gloat over at night will become commonplace by dawn. Your wife may go
back to her mother in rage and despair. You may need sleeping pills.
You will make misjudgments about the intelligence of ordinary readers.
You will make mistakes of taste. You will find it too easy to get an
effect by means of shock, and you will forget that any book, even a
twenty-first-century book, must be a coherent unit. And you will often,
since there are no highway markers for the explorer, feel lonely and
discouraged, and want to go back to the old familiar well-traveled
roads again.
But if you go through with it, or even if you just play with it
sometimes as a hobby, you can have great fun. For it will put you out
in the open, free to please yourself, with the boss and the customer
left far behind. You can be subtle or bold, as you feel the urge, for
you do not have to please the great common denominator, the common man.
You can advance your own work by looking to other fields of creation,
enjoying and profiting by the experiments going on in them. You can
feel yourself a part of the whole forward-looking culture of your day,
and not someone off in a little forgotten corner.
And, if you do strike a vein with the glitter of real gold in it,
you will become rich indeed. For you will have become a creator in
a new sense; your duty done as an amateur will be compensated with
a twenty-four-carat satisfaction. At such a moment of realization
you will have earned the privilege to rest and feel content. As on
a seventh day after six of creation, standing late at night with
bloodshot eyes and inky fingers and aching back in a paper-littered
room, you have become a creator. You have not merely escaped from the
flattened monotony of the machine age--you have become one of the
shapers of its future. More power to you in that work!
T. M. CLELAND
_Harsh Words_
An address delivered at a meeting of The American Institute of Graphic
Arts, in New York City, February 5th, 1940, on the occasion of the
opening of the eighteenth annual exhibition of the Fifty Books of the
Year. Copyright 1940 by T. M. Cleland. Reprinted by permission.
Mr. Chairman and Members of The American Institute of Graphic Arts:
The generosity of your invitation to me to speak on this important
occasion leaves me a trifle bewildered. I am so accustomed to being
told to keep my opinions to myself that being thus unexpectedly
encouraged to express them gives me some cause to wonder if I have,
or ever had, any opinions upon the graphic arts worth expressing. But
since it is the theory of your Committee that I have, and it may never
be anybody's theory again, and they have gone so far as to give me no
instructions or suggestions as to the scope or the limitations of what
I might say, it would seem as ungracious to decline such an exceptional
offer as it would be to abuse it. So if I accept it as wholeheartedly
as I believe it was given--if I take you at your word and say things
that I have long wanted to hear somebody say--I hope it will not be
thought an abuse of this kindly tendered privilege.
I realize that, nominally at least, my subject must be that of
printing and typography as exemplified by the selection of the fifty
best books of the year which we are here to celebrate; and I suppose,
by comparison to deplore the fifty thousand worst books which may be
seen elsewhere. But by what may seem a very odd paradox, I don't quite
know how to stick to this subject without wandering a good way off it.
Or, perhaps I should say that I cannot approach it directly except by a
very roundabout way.
If I have a thesis for these remarks, I can only develop it in terms
of a tree. This is because I do not believe that invention in the arts
can be picked from empty space like objects in a prestidigitator's act.
Fruits really grow on trees and trees have roots in the earth. The tree
I have in mind is cultural civilization: one of its limbs is art and a
branch of this we call the graphic arts, and a twig on this branch is
printing and typography. I promise not to dig into the roots of this
tree, but I may be found, monkey-wise, climbing all over it before I am
through.
I am at some disadvantage in that I do not belong to any organizations
for the advancement of typography and the graphic arts--not even to
this one--and I am ill-informed and out of touch with what is going on
in these fields except by casual observation. But as members of this
very useful organization, you are not engaged in printing or other
graphic arts, I take it, solely for each other, but for the enjoyment
and delectation of the world at large. So there is a partially
compensating advantage in my being "at large" myself, and thus able to
speak of present trends in the graphic arts as they appear from the
outside, looking in. But this advantage may in turn be offset by the
fact that I cannot honestly speak of what I see with much enthusiasm.
I can bring you no message of hope or light of inspiration. Much as I
am filled with admiration and respect for many individual talents and
accomplishments that still contrive to exist, they seem to me to stand
unhappily isolated in what I can't help viewing as artistic bankruptcy
and cultural chaos. Among them are printers making beautiful books
and other things about as well as these things have ever been made.
But as to the general volume of printing, no one has asked me, to be
sure, what I thought was the lowest point of artistic taste in the five
hundred years of its existence which we are celebrating this year,
but if anyone _should_ ask me, I would be bound to say that we have
reached that point just about now. Things may get worse, but it's hard
to see how they can. To paraphrase a remark in the concluding chapter
of Updike's classic work on printing types, it has taken printers and
publishers five hundred years to find out how wretchedly books and
other things can be made and still sell.
I am not forgetting that there were some very benighted periods of
taste in other centuries that would seem to refute this sweeping
assertion. Perhaps it is worth noting here--and the fact is peculiarly
ironical--that the design and style of official and governmental
things--money, postage stamps, bonds and stock certificates--was
created and solidified into a seemingly unalterable convention at
that hitherto all time low point of the decorative arts in the
mid-nineteenth century. So powerful is this convention that we would
be suspicious of a ten dollar bill that was not visually saturated
with ugliness. A counterfeiter with aesthetic sensibilities must not
only sweat blood but weep tears over the job of imitating one. But in
the sadly perverted taste of that epoch there was a kind of innocence:
standards were still respected, and proficiency, though overworked and
misdirected, was recognized and not condemned.
Today when I look about in the bookstore, and more especially on the
newsstands, or open the pages of most of the magazines with the biggest
circulations, I want to do what the little boy did in the story which
was a favorite of my friend, the late Hal Marchbanks. The little boy
had been to his first party, and when he arrived home, his mother
said: "Did mama's little boy have a nice time at the party?" "Yep," he
replied. "What did mama's little boy do at the party?" "I thow'd up."
Against this steady decline in both taste and workmanship, your fifty
books selection and exhibit each year has been a noble effort, and in
this country, almost the only concerted one of consequence to uphold
some standards. You have inspired both publishers and printers to
earnest endeavor to improve their products with frequently admirable
results. But these are only fifty books out of how many other books
and other printed things. Without this good work of yours, one wonders
if any standards at all would survive the flood of cheap and easy
mechanization, careless workmanship and bad taste. Not that there
is anything wrong with machines. The first hand press, it should be
remembered by its sentimental admirers, was also a machine. We have
not learned to use the machines at their best, but accepted them like
fruits in the Garden of Eden, and thought of nothing but how much we
could get out of them in speed and quantity and profit. Because we can
do with them easily what formerly demanded time and pains to do at all,
we have too easily assumed that they delivered us from the need of any
time or pains.
Before I go any farther on or off the track with these random
remarks, I should like it to be understood that I am addressing them
particularly to any students and beginners in the graphic arts that may
be present, rather than to those who are arrived. I am a student and
still a beginner myself, and so my interest and my heart are naturally
with my own kindred. I speak as an old beginner to younger ones. I am
at a great disadvantage with regard to the number of years I have left
in which to get started, and if I have any advantage at all, it is
only in experience with the bewilderments and illusions that clutter
our common way in learning and trying to practice one or more of the
graphic arts. The confusions and distraction of this day make the path
of the student and beginner rough and tortuous. Having travelled it for
more years than I like to admit, when I look backward, I am astonished
to discover the number of twists and turns and pitfalls I might just as
well have spared myself.
Perhaps the most foolish of these was the fear of not being
original--what Romain Rolland calls "the fear of the already said."
The notion that I must do something new every day, or I would not be
creative--forgetting that God made the planets all the same shape
as far as we can see, and that the oak tree does not alter the
form of its leaves from year to year. There is no supposition so
pathetically misleading as that creative originality is within your
own volition--the notion that it can be acquired leads to deplorable
results. It distracts the mind and energies of the young student from
gaining needful technical competence--from learning his trade, and in
more mature stages tempts the would-be artist into vulgar mannerisms
and formulas which he will call his "style."
The idea that originality is essential to the successful practice
of the graphic arts is more prevalent today than it ever was in the
days when the graphic arts were practiced at their best. The current
belief that everyone must now be an inventor is too often interpreted
to mean that no one need any longer be a workman. Hand in hand with
this premeditated individualism goes, more often than not, a curious
irritation with standards of any kind. The conscious cultivator of his
own individuality will go to extravagant lengths to escape the pains
imposed by a standard.
But of all the perils that lie in wait for adolescent artists there
is none more seductive than the bewildering array of ologies and isms
that leer and beckon to him at every crossroad of his journey. Just as
isms and ologies have taken the place, in social and political life, of
right and wrong; so have they become the accepted terms of the arts.
In fact, nonsense is now so universally the language of art that it is
nearly hopeless to try to make oneself understood in any other.
Brood mare to all of these extravagancies--and I have lived to see many
of them come and go--is that one which achieves the super absurdity of
calling itself "modernism"; and none has been expounded and exploited
in more contradictory and antic ways. To deliberately call oneself
"modern" is no less ludicrous than something an old Danish friend
told me years ago about a line in one of the books of a very prolific
writer of historical romances in his country. In a tale with a medieval
setting this writer had one of his knights in armour cry out to
another: "We men of the middle ages never take insults, etc."
Embraced with fanatic enthusiasm by many architects and designers is
the current quackery called "Functionalism." It, in common with its
many predecessors, offers a new gospel for the regeneration of our
aesthetic world by restricting all design to the function of its object
or its materials. Like the new religions and philosophies that have
paraded in and out of our social history for countless generations, it
purports to be an original concept. It has brought to us such gladsome
gifts as concrete boxes with holes in them for buildings, chairs of
bent pipe with no hind legs, glass fireplaces, beds of cement blocks
joined by structural steel, the queer agglomeration of unsightly
edifices we call the World's Fair and many other specimens of stark and
forbidding claptrap. Unless all signs are misleading me, it is another
mass vulgarity like the age of golden oak and mission furniture, even
now on its way to the junk pile or the attic, perhaps to be someday
rediscovered there and dragged out by future generations in search of
quaintness.
It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that _all_ art was _modern_ when
it was made, and still is if it is suitable to life as we now live
it; and I look in vain for any applied art worthy the name that was
not also, in some sense functional. From the buttresses of a gothic
cathedral to the gayest Chippendale chair one finds, upon analysis,
a perfect work of engineering perfectly adapted to its purpose. If
this were not so, these things would hardly have endured for so long
a time. So that common regard for function which has always been the
basic principle of first-rate design, assumes the impressive aspect of
a religion, with high priests and ritual, by the simple addition of an
"ism." As students and beginners in search of truth, we are today being
pushed and pulled about by no end of such bogus preachments--familiar
faces with false whiskers--old and common principles dolled up with new
names and often used to account for incompetence and laziness.
And what is the meaning of this term "functionalism"? Must a design be
related to no functions except mechanical and material ones? Might not
the most fantastic and elaborate works of the geniuses of the baroque
and rococo styles have also been functional in that they expressed the
spirit and fitted perfectly the life they were intended to serve?
We hear much holy talk of "simplicity" in this day and the idea of
simplicity expressed by a total absence of everything not essential to
mechanical function has been elevated to a fetich. We have divorced
simplicity from its old mate charm as we might break up the happy
relationship of ham and eggs or pork and beans. But in this reverent
renunciation of all adornment not strictly functional in this limited
sense, have we paused to ask whether we are in fact following a basic
human instinct, or merely attempting to make a virtue out of poverty of
invention? There is no evidence that man is imbued with an instinctive
love of simplicity in the objects with which he finds it useful to
surround himself. Indeed, our museums are bulging with evidence to
the contrary. From the Cro-Magnon cave to gothic cathedrals, from the
temples of India to the palace of Versailles, the earth has been made
to flower with man's inherent love of ornament. It would seem then that
ornamentation is deeply rooted in the human instinct since no tribe,
however primitive in other respects, is without it. The restraints of
this instinct and the tempering of it with what we call taste is a
cultivated faculty like the restraint of our other appetites; but to be
a teetotaler in ornament or in anything else, is to confess to either
weakness of control or incapacity for enjoyment. "A teetotaler," said
Whitman, "is just another kind of toper."
This instinctive yearning for ornamentation is well demonstrated in
the case of our own Rockefeller Center; where it has been catered to
with peculiar ineptitude. Here all the important structures have been
piously stripped of everything non-essential to mechanical function.
Pillars, pilasters, cornices and mouldings--ornaments that at least
have their genesis in structural functions--have all been piously
renounced. And then because it was found that the human spirit could
not tolerate such barren starkness, and business might suffer from it,
ornaments have been pasted around its doorways and approaches like gold
paper lace on a pasteboard box--ornaments completely unrelated to any
structural function of any kind. Sculptures, fountains, trees, flowers
and awnings have all been pressed into service to compensate for this
spurious simplicity. Many of these things are beautiful in their own
right like Mr. Manship's golden figure of Prometheus. One of the little
office girls that further decorate the scene at the noon hour, was
overheard the other day explaining to another that this was a statue of
"Primiscuous escaping from Responsibility."
So under this wildly flapping banner of "Modernism" marches a quaint
array of worn and shabby syntheses for art, each day parading a
new dress and a new alias. The common urge for self-expression can
always find one or another of them at its service. For those who are
particularly deficient in the talent, energy and patience demanded
for the mastery of an art, something called "non-objective" art has
been invented. For this the only things required are a box of paints,
brushes and a surface to exercise them on. With these simple and easily
procurable tools you express your own inner emotions and need not
trouble yourself with anyone else's or with what anyone else sees. If
you watch the others you will see that it is mostly being done with
triangles, circles or vortexes of paint just as it comes from the tube.
If you have no paint, toothpaste will do as well. If, after a few
minutes of this, you are tired, stop--you will have added spontaneity
to its other attractions. The fact that it deals only with your own
emotions will not prevent you putting it on exhibition for other people
to enjoy. If anyone balks at enjoying it, you smile wanly and shrug
your shoulders and pity them for their dumb enslavement to outworn
tradition. It works like a charm--no one will dare attack you--they
will all be afraid that you've got something there. People have a
terror of making mistakes--as if they had not been made by the best
people in all ages. It is the most perfect device yet invented for
attracting attention to yourself with the least trouble. A generation
ago we heard a great deal about "art for art's sake": now it is art
for the artist's sake, like bread for the baker's sake or medicine
for the doctor's sake. And I say, for God's sake, tell me what art
made through the vision of a human eye with a brain behind it is _not_
"non-objective"? No two men will ever draw or paint the same picture
of the same object. Only the lens of a camera will render it quite
objectively, and even the camera in the hands of an artist is capable
of some degree of subjectivity.
And since I have inadvertently mentioned the camera, I ought to say
a good word for it too. It is just now in its hey-day and people are
taking greater pains with it than they are willing to take with any
other medium of artistic expression. I see a great many very fine
pictures made with it, in spite of its obvious limitations. But it
has also been tortured into serving as a medium for self-conscious
originality until its "new ideas" have come to be, in their way, in
their monotony and staleness, an intolerable bore.
The marvels of color photography have revealed to us hitherto
unsuspected depths of aesthetic sordidness. This factual reproduction
of what we are told are "Nature's colors," I am given to understand, is
not yet wholly perfected. Only when it is will we know the worst--only
then will we know what the things that through our eyes have stirred
us by their beauty, really are! Perhaps another super instrument of
disillusionment will be invented to reveal us, not in form and color
alone, but in spirit, to each other as we really are. Good-by then to
human love, respect and friendship!