At the Wembley Exhibit, English craftsmanship is again a British glory —beauty and care of execution in the applied arts compensating for the noticeable lack of imagination and emotional power in the so-called fine arts. The Queen's Doll House (TIME, Oct. 29) is a huge and delicious toy, perfect to the last minute detail. The art of bookmaking touches the highwater mark in the artistic display, perfect in taste and in texture. Decorated interiors, varying in merit, may be observed in six rooms, one of 1750 with Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits, a Handel duet on the table; one of 1815 designed to reproduce the character of a sitting- room of the Becky Sharp-Waterloo period; the 1852 room of the now so fashionable mid-Victorian era is the most amusing, every available inch strenuously decorated—that great age when even ladies were upholstered; the 1888 room is all preRaphaelite, with the arts, crafts and esthetics of William Morris, Holman Hunt and deMorgan pottery; ending up with two modern rooms, not too successful, particularly in the dining-room, a product of that hokum theory that if you use enough color it must be modern.
In the exhibition hall devoted to the Arts are examples of weaving, needlework, lace, jewelry—"faultless taste, painstaking craftsmanship." Ecclesiastical ornament is displayed in a basilica expressly designed for that purpose— banners, books, altar carpets, stained glass, tiled floors, sanctuary lamps, "full of traditional design and symbolism but signifying little." There are interesting photographs of architectural projects as well as the architectural manifestations of the exposition itself. The art of the Theatre is more historical than contemporary in import, as Gordon Craig, Lovat Eraser and others of the modern theorists are absent. There are contemporary drawings of David Garrick, and stage designs by John Webb and Inigo Jones, 1650, a Shakespeare first folio, the program of an amateur performance of the Merry Wives in which Dickens and Cruikshank took part, and delightful models of the old theatres which help to swell the interest in this section. The pictures merely serve for a comparison of English Art with itself. Particularly, a comparison of the immediate predecessors of our generation is illuminating, for men like Watts, Landseer and Edward Burne-Jones are here. It is only mildly entertaining to note the increased intensity of color in Canadian painting, more like our own in key, and the distressing effect of occidentalism on Indian Art.
Fake Show