Stately and
simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for
your men and women; those are the conditions of a real artistic
movement. For the artist is not concerned primarily with any
theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness
that should come daily on eye and ear for a beautiful external
world.
But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour
gaudy. For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the
colours that seem about to pass into one another's realm - colour
without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord.
Barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that
desecrate not merely your cities but every rock and river that I
have seen yet in America - all this is not enough. A school of
design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately and
noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the
world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren
whitewashed room and bid them work in that depressing and
colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the American schools
of design, but give them beautiful surroundings. Because you want
to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste in your workman,
he must have always by him and before him specimens of the best
decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him: 'This is
good work.
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