The Studio 1931

Random day, random book.

Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook 1931. C.G. Holme, ed. The Studio, Ltd., London.

This is fabulous. The only thing that’s too bad is that there isn’t more color.

The Yearbook is organized thusly:

• Introduction: A Survey of Modern Tendencies in Decorative Art
• Exterior and Plan. (Mostly British)
• Interior Decoration in Europe and America
• Furniture and Hangings
• Lighting and Heating. Interesting to remember that heating was a component of interior design.
• Pottery, Glass, Table and Kitchen Ware, Decoration and Ornament

A sample of the writing.

Modem ornament seeks to represent neither a likeness of the thing which is its nominal theme, nor yet a fanciful interpretation of its lineaments, but a sort of synthesis of the basic idea underlying it. It selects some arbitrary aspect of its model, such as its appearance in motion, and proceeds to stylisize the pattern this particular impression produces by eliminating all reference to the others, much as the sculptor of a torso ignores head and limbs. These “modem antiquities,” as Josef Frank calls them, have been rather unjustly ridiculed because they are eagerly snapped up by the sort of people for whom art is a sequence of neurotically æsthetic thrills. It is a common error to imagine that abstract forms must necessarily exclude any vestige of the picturesque or the quaint, those characteristic manifestations of the romantic spirit innate in Mankind, which are stealthily creeping back into our homes under the most unexceptionally Modernist disguises.

pg. 125

The several pages of advertisements at beginning and end confirm the obvious. The readership of Studio was apparently unaffected by the current economic state.