Henry van de Velde: Three Sins Against Art

Although I did not grow up in any beautiful environment, I still clearly remember how I suffered in my father's house from not being able to connect with any object that was simply and naturally suited to its purpose, like the people, girls, and servants with whom I interacted, because they were simpler and more straightforward, and because their faces and true feelings displayed the fulfillment of the tasks they undertook. But the mask of our furniture and objects distanced me from them, and the jumble of their forms aroused a deep discontent within me, which, when summarized, turned into profound resistance and confusion.
Just at the moment when we were giving up all thought of resistance, the echo of Ruskin's words, who preached the religion of beauty across the channel, reached us on the continent. And this beauty we could observe, we could touch with our hands in the works of his pupil Morris, which stood out from all other creations of the nineteenth century by their unusual perfection both in execution and in the quality of materials.
The revelation of such a miracle restored our confidence in life and triumphed over the faintness of our hearts: according to Dante, the sinful faintness of the hearts of those, “who voluntarily live in sorrow.” It gave our existence a new sense of purpose and justified in one stroke the mission that then became the guiding force of our lives, a task to which I dedicated all my abilities and strengths from that moment on.
In 1892, we appealed for the first time to the public and raised our voices to awaken the conscience and self-awareness of our spiritual dignity. We did not possess eloquence, poetic talent, tireless zeal, or the material independence of Ruskin. We also lacked the thorough practical knowledge of the various crafts that Morris possessed. We did not share his belief that everything ugly would disappear with socialism. Morris and his English pupils readily promised what the true founders of the new doctrine never promised. In doing so, they subjected socialism to undeserved reproaches when the miracle did not occur.
I personally believe that the problem of the ugliness and beauty of production in the field of construction or industry is not dependent on socialism and the generalization of the socialist regime. By merging the issue with socialist doctrine, the English group not only failed to simplify it, but even delayed its solution.
Well then, we ourselves were very impatient, and although we were aware of how socialism could help us restore the dignity of work that had been granted to manual production in guilds under the rule of machinery, we did not want to confuse the problem of human dignity with the problem of ugliness or beauty of machine products and working conditions under capitalism from the very beginning of our movement.
Yet we wholeheartedly endorse the demands laid out by W. Morris in his lecture “Art and Socialism”: There he states that
“it is necessary and just that all people perform their own work.
But first: this work must be worthy of execution.
Furthermore: this work must provide pleasure to the one who performs it.
And thirdly: this work must be performed under conditions so that it is neither exhausting nor induces anxiety.”
These demands indicate, in our opinion, not with sufficient clarity what is worthy of execution, but they do not provide any adequate guarantees that the products that arise under these conditions will attain the level of perfection and beauty that we long for.
If, in order to fulfill these conditions, we first have to set aside machines and intensive production, we voluntarily abandon the realm of economic reality and immediate results.
At the time when Morris preached socialism, it was easy to be mistaken about the degree of power of this reality. Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill did not fail to express doubt whether the machine was invented to somewhat relieve the worker's toil. But today, after three-quarters of a century of machinery and the industrial regime, we fully know the power of this reality. In these circumstances, socialism will continue to evolve and will again restore dignity to work, as it is directly in its power, while the dignity of the product depends on a single condition, which we will later determine, and in our view, this dignity can be attained immediately, without the establishment of a socialist regime.
We are concerned about the victory of beauty over the ugliness that has infiltrated everywhere and has destroyed everything, not only the efforts and taste of producers but also consumers and the populations of the entire world.
We have often expressed our sympathy for socialism, which puts an end to the brutality of the most ruthless exploitation of the proletariat and restores the human dignity of the worker, giving the dispossessed the opportunity to develop their spiritual powers.
But alongside this stance, which, I repeat, is not directly related to the problem we must solve or the apostolate we have chosen, we want to act much more directly than our illustrious predecessors, and since the insensitivity of the hearts of our contemporaries is clear to us, we shall attempt to appeal not to their emotions but to their reason.
From this direct appeal to reason, I deduce that the movement we initiated on the continent has been applied more quickly and effectively, achieving more reliable results than those achieved by my illustrious predecessors in England. Yes, I attribute this success to the fact that we recognized the truth and that the current generation is inclined to be convinced by reason and good arguments rather than being moved and led by the impulses of the heart.
Ruskin and William Morris believed that beauty could combat ugliness. We insist on the relentless, immediate use of hygiene, which, by eliminating the toxicity of ugliness, can more effectively prepare the return of beauty and perfection than the most brilliant decrees of fanatic desire for beauty or exceptional patterns of products that arose outside of time and its given working conditions.
To eliminate the decline and deviation, to which the relentless pursuit of beauty has led for centuries, public taste must be opposed by a new discipline. This discipline, far from being
enticed by false promises of beauty, must reach back to the instinctual, innate capacities of mental perception, must reassert a reasonable, correct conception of all things, an understanding for substantial, specific, and pure form.
The new discipline, applied as a hygienic mandate, was a program that, in my feeling, was to eradicate evil and confront all the misfortunes that arose from the interference of fantasy in areas where it had nothing to do.
However, it was not enough merely to outline a program; it was also necessary to calm the minds, to awaken a sense of dignity, and to show that our better judgment had been violated at the very moment when corruption deprived it of its rightful place and elevated arbitrary emotions in its stead.
Therefore, in order to better convince those I addressed, and to more accurately, certainly, and clearly illustrate the mental confusion and lack of dignity that resided in the “masking” of all forms, I resorted to the so-called informational medium: I described, in fact, certain examples from contemporary or earlier architecture, certain particularly admired pieces of furniture and objects that were housed in our museums, where they served as models and prototypes.
For the success of the attempt, there is no need for the participation of any prejudices or ill intentions. It merely concerns a perfect description — a very precise detailed so-called inventory description.
Imagine any building, a piece of furniture, a facade, a goldwork, a piece of porcelain, or a lighting fixture, and try to perfectly describe what you see. And if until this point you have harbored no doubts about the beauty of the object you are to describe, I bet that during the description certain doubts will arise. For you will have so much to say about the facade, about the cabinet, about the soup bowl and the tray, that you will surely finally ask yourself: “Is this building, this facade, this cabinet all that? If this soup bowl and this plate and this chandelier and this wall lamp are everything I am describing, then this building may not even correspond to the purpose for which it was constructed, this facade may not suit any building, this cabinet is not a cabinet at all, and nothing of what I have previously considered beautiful is what it should be.”
I have compiled a whole collection of such inconsistencies and I supplement it with a bit of malicious glee. Whenever I have verbally described a new object, I say to myself: “But this is again the most tasteless object in my collection.” But I have always been mistaken; for always after some time have I either encountered on the street, in a museum, in a palace, or in a private house, something that, in terms of tastelessness, surpassed everything I had collected until then. For example, I have in this archive numerous descriptions of cabinets that are everything possible except cabinets. However, when I recently visited a museum in Basel, I discovered here a cabinet for coins and commemorative coins that exceeded my wildest imagination.
Before this object, every description was powerless; the most diligent office worker would labor in vain to leverage all his knowledge.
All elements, columns, dormers, framing, infinite perspectives on cleaned places and gardens; all these elements, which elsewhere even in the most incoherent examples of this kind always retain some semblance of organic existence, meaning, and mutual relationships, here exhibit themselves completely independently and also without any pretense to function or relation. This tangle could only be the work of wild and treacherous chance, in which one might vainly imagine that either an earthquake or a hurricane had displaced these columns from beneath the dormers and thrown them on both sides of the furniture, where, like sentries, they guard the entrance to the enchanted place in which the entire world of beings from mythology struggled with all their might for a chaotic rearrangement of the hidden drawers in the most intricate, truly tropical vegetation (This cabinet once belonged to Doctor Remigius Essch, and we also learn that it was made by Franz Pergo and Grand' Fontaine in Pruntrut at the beginning of the 17th century. Certain names must live in history....).
But let us not deceive ourselves; the escape to such unbridled fantasy ultimately signifies a lack of inventive power and creative ability and cowardice. For, how much harder and bolder it would have been to seek such a solution as would best correspond to the true purpose of this furniture meant for storing coins and memorabilia, and which would most beautifully embody its most substantial, most convincing form! Only when we find nothing that corresponds to our sense of beauty through the normal route of rational conception, do we flee to the realm of fantasy. This is the prostitute who, placing her hand on the forehead of the struggling artist, convinces him that, having been only inspired, he is already a creator!
It is undoubtedly easier to place a glass or metal bowl on the head of an armored emperor leaning solemnly on his shield; or to put a floating shell on the head of a black man; or to set the bottom of a ship on the head of a standing heraldic lion catching a golden ball with its front paws; or to place something similar on the tail of a dolphin, or on the antlers of a rearing stag — all that and thousands of other inventions from these spheres — indeed all of that is certainly much easier than to find a solution for how an element can be organically connected with another: a leg with a bowl, a lamp, or any container, a solution for how the functions of different organs could smoothly transition into each other without shock (jolts) and interruption, for such a solution implements the problem of absolute, eternal form, whose most perfect examples we find in the artistic creations of prehistoric human beings, in the perfect industrial products of wild and primitive nations in ancient Greek and ancient Chinese art, Romanesque art, and everywhere where the creative genius of humanity has not been diverted by anything intrusive from the goal set by its reason. Thus, in the world of forms, this is the goal: namely to achieve the result that is the most substantial, the most convincing, and the most appropriate to its intended purpose.
I admit that it is indeed a great deal to ask when I demand that we forego the thousandfold lie to which existing stylistic forms have taken refuge. They were, after all, cloaked in such seductive garments, cloaked in a spirit so enticing that they could fully count on our indulgence. I also admit that against all this carelessness and frivolity, I am setting a very ruthless rule and an unyielding strictness as merciless as morality itself, whose authority I proclaim.
However, when I tell you that the duration of the rule of the neutral phenomenon, the rediscovered primal form, corresponds only to the aggregated hours of crisis, you will surely be patient. You will then endure the test all the more willingly if you gain the conviction that beauty can only arise anew from the harmony of the surroundings of neutral phenomena and the strength of the only relationship that unites all objects. This relationship will reveal to us that the form and appearance of all these objects are the immediate outcomes of one and the same effort, one and the same thought, and that they all bear the seal of that rational and correct conception, which is the most normal function of our reason. Thanks to such harmony and kinship, beauty will rise again as in the earliest times: simply, plainly, naturally, cheerfully, and proudly; because it owes nothing to the destructive fantasy. It will appear to us in the shining nakedness of its body and limbs, whose only ornament is their own flowing life!
Meanwhile, every germ of ugliness will be suffocated, and during the reign of this neutral state, we will receive all guarantees against the possibility of relapse. And those forces, which we had — without even realizing it — to expend to avert ugliness, will now be released for the calm enjoyment of fervent, normal mutual influences, which will finally be reestablished between us and our surroundings based on the consent to subservience to services rendered and mutual trust.
In such intimacy of relationships, we will be able to sufficiently approach objects, and our capacity for feeling will participate in their being. The shapes of their actions will be the shapes of our feelings, whereby the organic and functional determination of objects will transition from cold impersonal automatism to an activity encompassing our entire being — to a living force, in which we will again find the miracle and wonder of our own life.
As for the education of humanity, one can appeal to its reason with the same result — just as when an educator appeals to the reason of children. However, it is necessary to wait until people and children reach the age of reason, until they become mature enough to understand.
In Ruskin's time, during the initial transformations that only concerned railroads, machine operation in industry, and the emergence of factory chimneys in the landscape, it was certainly easy and excusable to be mistaken about the meaning, significance, and purpose of such transformations. Ruskin exploited this right abundantly and broadly: he created his outstanding position from misunderstanding.
However, we later cannot claim this preferential right to similar excuses.
Today, we can observe it in all its extent and scope: these iron and concrete constructions, thousands of industrial and economic machines, inventions in the field of transport, aviation, electricity — all these novelties that previously arose only in long periods distant from each other.
These creations of men of a new profession, engineers, form a world of new shapes and a consonance of shapes of the new world.
Their unity is so striking and the source from which they arise is so evidently the same everywhere that one can conclude from it that the spirit manifesting in all these new creations has finally found its way.
The appearance of all these creations is merely the result of a completely rational and correct conception; the creations were designed as they are, with the intention to adapt as directly as possible to our needs.
Thus, they realize that neutral state to which we appeal in the struggle against ugliness and misguided taste.
In the field of engineering and machine construction, we most clearly and precisely recognize the neutral state of all things: a state in which all things are as they must be and do not wish to be anything else. There is no ugliness in this world of technical inventions, machines, and thousands of useful objects that serve purposes as important as architecture and the applied arts. Yes, their forms, overwhelming in their truth and courage, have won the highest admiration from all those who passionately awaited a new future of beauty. J. K. Huysmans, Emile Zola, Octave Mirabeau, and others immortalized structures such as the Forth Bridge, the machine palace at the Paris exhibition, the monumental machines from the Krupp factories, and the blast furnaces from Oberhausen, which in their essence resemble the beasts of the Apocalypse, seemingly settled on our earth.
Well, we desire to see the guiding principle of such creations applied throughout the entire field of architecture and the applied arts in such a way that everything that surrounds us appears before our eyes in the truest, purest forms, and most appropriate to specific purposes.
In this, our program differs from the program of Ruskin and Morris in that, in order to achieve the return of beauty, we have adopted precisely this principle — the principle of rational and correct conception, whose expression incites so much resistance in some and so much concern for the future of the applied arts in others. (Hopes and Fears for Art; lecture by W. Morris). The signs of miracles we see, for we find that precisely from the soil which Ruskin placed under condemnation, the first promises of new beauty, of contemporary style, have sprouted.
And is it not noteworthy from the other side that the perfection for which Morris wanted to lead us back to the Gothic style is the most elementary, immediate, and least dispensable first condition of everything that modern technology brings?
For surely you could not have overlooked that the metal industry, optics, electricity, hygienic devices, surgical instruments, and tools, etc., provide us with products that testify to such perfection of the materials used, to such delicacy of execution, that we can assume that the worker performed his work without burdensome unrest and bitter thoughts about the cost and true utility of his occupation.
Do not all these things correspond to the demands that William Morris presented in the name of art and socialism under points 1 and 2?
First: that they are worthy of being executed;
Secondly: that the one who created them found joy in his work.
And should we not be moved by the fact that they were indeed executed without any secondary reference to art and socialism?!
However, this certainty should not cause our efforts to improve the social conditions of work to fall asleep, nor should it rust the weapon that each worker holds in their hands, which consists of the refusal to dedicate all their time and strength to the production of things that insult their reason and that have no right to exist.
On that day, however, when all the efforts, reflections, and awareness of all architects, all engineers, and designers, whose creations relate to the products of the applied arts or simply the industry, are directed towards the same common goal, then there would be no need for such a rejection, and everything would proceed according to the division and freely negotiated acceptance of roles: those creating and executing for the purpose of preserving the original idea's complete moral purity, significance, and effect.
I have tried to clarify what the fundamental differences are between the motivations that led Ruskin and Morris in England to their mission and those that defined my activity on the continent. In conclusion, it should also be noted that we all share a common resistance against the great sin.
Ruskin, alarmed by the ugliness of steel wires, telegraph poles, factory chimneys, which at that time first appeared in the landscape, was taken with horror. He resisted the burden of this sin against nature. His anger and despair resembled the outpourings of a lover, and his pathethic lament was entirely in the tone of that romantic effect of a loving time.
Morris felt the invasion of machines, bad materials, cheapness, and tastelessness in craft and industry as a sin against the dignity of the worker and craftsman. He felt this sin intensely, as his conviction and worldview led him to regard craftsmanship as the most dignified occupation a person could engage in.
And as for me, I felt that the corruption which led us to perceive objects, buildings, and all that is visual and form-related without logical meaning and without purposefully determined consistency meant a tremendous sin against human reason.
As a conscious witness to the ongoing decline, which ultimately reached a complete lack of style and a heaven-calling tastelessness in our time, I did not cease to emphasize that the exclusion of reason from the domain, where it is the decisive, creative, and infinitely productive force, signifies nothing more than exclusion and a shameful degradation of our most exalted capacity. — It alone can recreate the world. If things are presented to our eyes and spirit simply, without masks and without nonsensical exaggeration, just as they are and ought to be, nothing will impede beauty from returning simply and radiantly in the atmosphere of the utmost balance and highest consonance, where what pleases our eyes also pleases our reason and where again our reason has no objections to that — on which our eye finds delight.