The Stockholm Exhibition

...Yet in summing up one's impressions from the viewpoint of Sweden's most distinctive contributions to the endowment "of homes and their interiors with a superior quality and an attractive appearance," which is the avowed nature of the exhibition, it will unquestionably be these and kindred objects which stand out...

...For example, the aim of the decorative arts and crafts is not essentially to serve and enrich life, but rather to establish the pecuniary position of the householder...

...Here we have the irrefutable evidence of Sloyd's success in keeping alive among the peasants the lofty traditions of craftsmanship that flourished in the middle ages...

...And Sweden, we are told by one of the official pamphlets of the exhibition, "has the highest standard of living of any country, next to the United States...

...Blithe, summery structures tiptoe down to the shore of the lagoon-like Djurgardsbrunnsviken, smiling in flags and flowers and winking their interminable ribbon windows to the sunshine...

...Its purpose is to develop the pupils mentally as well as to afford skill in some trade...

...In the crafts and architecture its adherents preach the interdiction of the inessential, the denial of ornament purely as such, a determination of form by the utilitarian end envisaged in keeping with the nature of the materials employed...

...But the mere technical heritage as such would have been of minor importance...

...The glassware produced by the Orrefors works is worldknown since its recognition at the Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in 1925...

...There, on a hillside running gently down to the water's edge, a few dozen temporary, permanent and semi-permanent cottages hunch and huddle uncomfortably...

...There is nothing of the faked permanence, the gimcrackery and gingerbread in stucco and canvas that usually cankers an exposition of this sort...

...Within, instead of the gay, "business-like," if sometimes almost surgical, asceticism of a Gropius or Le Corbusier interior, one finds only a grubby, half-physicked Victorianism...

...But the most purely Swedish display of the whole exposition is to be found in the Textile Hall...

...About a decade ago a training school was inaugurated with the result that today the firm has in its employ a considerable staff of experienced glass-blowers, cutters and engravers...

...In pewter the formal candor of much of the work of the firm Svensk Tenn is arresting in its freshness...

...It is national...

...And it is primarily a national interest in it that brings craftsmanship in Sweden to probably the highest level which is to be found anywhere in Europe or the Americas today...

...Artists are employed by the group and new patterns are continually dispersed throughout the country as models for the workers in the various techniques...

...Today there are some thirty of these organizations scattered throughout the country...

...If this is true, and the standard of living referred to is the standard of living we know, it should be more difficult to reconcile "the contribution of Sweden in present-day attempts to use artistic talent to endow homes and their interiors with a superior quality and attractive appearance," with a dogma based on conspicuous economy, than would generally seem to be the case...

...And all with the butterfly charm of an evident transitoriness...

...Unfortunately the bourgeois culture which dominates the western world today is founded, as Thorstein Veblen set forth in his Theory of the Leisure Chiss, upon the principle of conspicuous waste...

...And today a supervisory organization known as the Svensk Hemsloyd devotes its energies to keeping the tradition free from academicism, or even a conservatism in the matter of design that in time might decay interest...

...For instance, the haute-lisse weaving introduced from Flanders years ago is practised nowhere else in modern Europe save in the Swedish province of Scania where we find it highly developed...

...In ceramics, while Gustavsberg porcelain boasts Sweden's best-known designer in Kage, the Boberg works offer patterns of perhaps even greater charm, particularly those of Edward Dahlskog and Eve Bjork...

...And especially so, since the nature of the articles they house is so alien to the policy which governed Asplunt's designs...

...At least 'wherever the current exhibit is popularly reviewed, The doctrine of functionalism, properly understood, car, be shrunk into the axiom "Form follows function...

...And damask weaving, which is general throughout the Occident today, in Sweden alone is preserved as a handicraft...

...As designer-in-chief of the exposition, he has handled most of his problems felicitously...

...And from the products we can immediately realize how this pride in craftsmanship leaves its mark on the entire national culture...

...However, inasmuch as these are professedly mere display cases, it is illogical that their character should be predicated of the exhibition as a whole...

...Then gradually recognition again kindled and Sloyd societies one by one were founded...

...In this way the craft is kept living...

...The truly invaluable service rendered by Sloyd has been the preservation of an aesthetic sense of color and form among the people through the darkest period of industrialism and nineteenth-century tastes...

...and their fascination lies in the frank exploitation of their materials, their adaptation to environment and their simplicity...

...Functionalism does enter here tentatively: the buildings are intended as magnified showcases...

...And save for the Balkan states, Sweden has at present the most widely ramified Sloyd system in Europe...

...Sloyd is a system organized for the promotion or fostering of home industries...

...However, during the industrial revolution Sloyds did verge on extinction...

...The main body of the exhibition is a dance of light...

...The finest offerings on view at the present exhibit, both in the colored Graal glass and the engraved crystal, are those of two artists, Simon Gate and Edward Hald...

...Persistent experimentation since 1916 has produced a continual flow of new felicities in color, lustre and transparence...

...they pretend to be nothing more...

...One has only to visit that corner of the fair dedicated to "the model home" to be convinced how far afield are Stockholm's aims from the ideally functional...

...By means of this system in Sweden the old traditions of weaving in particular have been preserved...

...Probably what has given more impetus that anything else to the association of Stockholm with "modernism" has been the architecture of E. G. Asplunt...

...For centuries in Sweden this system has been carried out both in the wooded uplands and on the arable plains...

...It is obvious that such a policy is based on the principle of conspicuous economy...

...It is so here in the United States...

...It is a system of manual training in the use of tools and materials and in the making and use of plans and specifications connected with trade work...

...Fortunately in the province of Kalmar, an agricultural region, the handicrafts were protected and fostered...

...The manufacturers had no conception of—or more probably no interest in—the stimulative living values of home industry...

...It would certainly be difficult to force Orrefors glass, Gustavsberg porcelain or the bulk of the textiles on view into line with a code of conspicuous economy...