The Art and Craft of the machine FLW

The Art and Craft of the Machine
Author(s): Frank Lloyd Wright
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Brush and Pencil, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1901), pp. 77-81, 83-85, 87-90
Published by:
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25505640 .
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THE

ART

AND

CRAFT

OF THE

iAs we work along our various in some sort, an ideal-something

be done.

MACHINE*

there takes shape within ways, us, we are to become-some work to

This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really

to live only when

the thrill

of

this

moves

ideality

us in what

we will

to accomplish. out In the years which have been devoted in my own life to working a feeling in stubborn materials for the beautiful, in the vortex of distorted complex

conditions,

a hope has grown stronger with

the

experience of each year, amounting now to a gradually deepening that in the machine conviction, lies the only future of art and craft a glorious as I believe, that the machine future; is, in fact, the meta of ancient art and craft; morphosis that we are at last face to face

with themachine-the

modern Sphinx-whose

riddle the artist must

that art live-for solve if he would his nature holds the key.
The great ethics of the machine are as yet, in the main, beyond of the artist or student of sociology; the'ken but the artist mind may now approach the nature of this thing from experience, which has

become the commonplace of his field, to suggest, in'time, I hope, to prove, that the machine is capable of carrying to fruition high ideals in art-higher

Disciples

than

the world

of William

has yet

Morris

seen!

cling

to an opposite

view.

Yet

William
Morris
himself sensed the danger deeply to art of the trans force whose forming is the thing of brass and steel sign and symbol we familiarly call a machine, and though of the new art we eagerly

seek he sometimes despaired, he quickly renewed his hope. He plainly foresaw that a blank in fine art would follow the inevitable abuse of new-found power, and threw himself body and' soul into the work of bridging it over by bringing into our lives'afresh
'the beauty of art as she had been, that the new art to come might not have too many dropped stitches nor have unraveled what would still be useful to her.
That he had abundant faith in the new art his every

essay will testify. That he miscalculated themachine does not matter.
He did sublime work for it when he' pleaded so well for the process of elimination

its abuse

had made

necessary;

when

he

fought

the

innate vulgarity of theocratic impulse in art as opposed to democratic; and when he preached the gospel of simplicity.
All

artists

love

and

honor William

Morris.

He

did

the best

in

his time for art, and will live in history as the great socialist, together
* Copyright, I90I, by the Chicago Architectural Club. Abridged from an address published in the Club's Catalogue and reprinted in BRUSH AND PENCIL by special permission. 77

,,

78

BRUSH AND PENCIL

with Ruskin, the great moralist: a significant fact worth thinking about, that .the two great reformers of modern times professed the artist. The

machine

these

reformers

protested,

because

the

sort

of

luxury which is born of greed had usurped it and made of it a terrible engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized world with a murderous which ubiquity, the damnation of their art and plainly enough was craft. It had not then advanced to the point which now so plainly indicates that it will surely and swiftly, by its own momentum, undo the mischief it has made, and the usurping as well. vulgarians Nor was it so grown as to become to William apparent the grand
Morris,
that the machine democrat, was the great forerunner of democracy.
The ground plan of this thing is now grown to the point where the artist must take it up no longer as a protest:genius must progressively dominate the work of the contrivance it has created; to lend a useful hand in building afresh the "Fairness of the Earth."
That
the machine has dealt art in the grand old sense a death blow, none will
The
evidence deny. is too substantial.
Art
in the grand old sense-meaning art in the sense of structural tradition, whose craft is fashioned upon the handicraft or modern; ideal, ancient an art wherein this form and that form as structural parts were labori in such a way as beautifully ously joined to emphasize the manner of the joining: the million and one ways of beautifully satisfying bare structural necessities, which have come down to us chiefly through the books as "art."
For the purpose of suggesting hastily, and therefore crudely, wherein the machine

has

sapped

the vitality

of this art,

let us assume

architecture in the old sense as a fitting representative of traditional art, and printing as a fitting representation of the machine. What printing-the machine-has done for architecture-the fine art-will have been done inmeasure of time for all art immediately fashioned upon the early handicraft ideal.
With a masterful hand Victor Hugo, a lover and a great student of architecture, traces her fall in "Notre Dame."
The prophecy of
Frollo, that "The book will kill the edifice," I remember was to me as a boy one of the sad things of the world. After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing how in the middle ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point-architecture-he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of architecture.
They were the workmen of the great work.
The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved his faSades, the painting which illuminated his walls and windows, the music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself in that time, to come and frame itself in the edifce.

i

_

79

THE ART AND CRAFT OF THE MACHINE
Thus

down

to

the time of Gutenberg

is the principal

architecture

In the fifteenth century universal writing of humanity. writing-the Human thought discovers a mode of perpetu everything changes. ating itself, not only more resisting than architecture, but still more and easy.

simple

Architecture

is dethroned.

book

The

is about

kill the edifice. how architecture lifeless and bare.

See becomes now withers
How one

little by how away, feels the water sinking, to

it little the sap

departing, the thought of the times and people withdrawing from it. The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century 'the press is yet weak,

and at most

draws

from

architecture

a superabun

dance of life, but with the beginning of the sixteenth century, the
It becomes classic art in a miser malady of architecture is visible. able manner; from being indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman:
It is this it becomes true and modern, pseudo-classic. from being
,
sun which
It is the setting which we call the Renaissance. decadence arts; the other to hold
It has now no power for dawn. we mistake

so they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off, each in its own direction. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music.
Hence Raphael, Angelo, and those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century. Meanwhile, what becomes of printing? All the life, leaving archi tecture, comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs and flows, printing swells and grows. That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in building is hereafter to be expended in books; and architecture, as it was, is dead, irretrievably slain by the printed book. Thenceforth, if architecture rise again, reconstruct, as Hugo

prophesies

she may

begin

to do

in the

latter

days

of

the

she will be one of

nineteenth century, she will no longer be mistress, art. the arts, never again thze
So the organic process, of which the majestic decline of architec ture is only one case in point, has steadily gone on down to the present time, and still goes on, weakening the hold of the artist upon the people, drawing off from his rank poets and scientists until archi tecture is but a little, poor knowledge of archeology, and the average of art is reduced to the'gasping poverty of imitative realism; until the. whole letter of tradition, the vast fabric of precedent, in the flesh, which has increasingly confused the art ideal while the machine has been growing to power, is a beautiful corpse from which the spirith?as flown. invincible, triumphant, the
So the artist craft wanes. And, force and knitting thematerial necessities machine goes on, gathering of mankind ever closer'into a universal automatic fabric, the works of art of the century!
The machine is intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that the

BRUSH AND PENCIL

8o

plastic art may live; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man's life upon

the earth

can

-bemade

beautiful,

may

immeasurably

It widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression! is a universal educator, surely raising the level of human intelligence, so carrying within itself the power to destroy, by its own momentum, the greed which inMorris's time and still in our own time turns it to a deadly engine of enslavement.
The only comfort left the poor artist, side-tracked as he is, seemingly is a mean one: the thought that the very selfishness which man's early art idealized, now reduced to its lowest terms, is swiftly and surely destroying itself through the medium of the machine.
The

artist's

present

plight

is a sad one,

but may

he

say

truthfully

that society is less well off because architecture, or even art, as it was, is dead, and printing, or the machine, lives? Is it not more likely that the medium of artistic expression itself has broadened and changed until a new definition and new- direction must be given the art activity

of

the future,

the artist, whether

and

that

has

the machine

finally made

for

he will yet own it or not, a splendid distinction

between the art of old and the art
To shed some light upon this

to come?
-distinction,

us take

let

an

instance

in the field naturally ripened first by the machine-the commercial field. The tall modern office building is the machine pure and simple.
We may here sense an advanced stage of a condition surely entering all art for all time; its already triumphant glare in the deadly struggle taking place here between the machine and the art of structural tra dition reveals "art" torn and hung upon the steel frame of commerce, a forlorn head upon a pike, a solemn warning to architects and artists the world over.
We must walk blindfolded not to see that all that this magnificent resource of machine and material has brought us so far is a complete degradation of every type and' form sacred to the art of old; a pande monium of tin masks, huddled deformities, and decayed methods; quarreling, lying, and cheating. None of the people who do these things, who pay for them or use them, know what they mean, feeling only-when they

feel at all-that

what

is most

truly

like

the

past

is

the safest and therefore the. best.
A pitiful insult, art and craft! With this mine of industrial wealth at our feet have we no power to use it except to the perversion of our natural resources? A confession of, shame which the merciful ignorance of the yet material frame of things mistakes for glorious achievement. We half believe in our artistic greatness ourselves when we toss up a pantheon

to the god

of money

in a night

or two,

or pile

up a mam

moth aggregation of Roman monuments, sarcophagi, and Greek temples for a postoffice in a year or two-the patient retinue of the machine pitching inwith terrible effectiveness to consummate this

~AZI
_

-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
M

THE

ART

AND

CRAFT

THE

OF

MACHINE

83

insult to ancient gods. The delicate unhallowed ambition-this impressionable facilities of terra-cotta become imitative blocks and voussoirs of tool-marked stone, are badgered into all manner of struc and to be honest; or else ignored in vain endeavor tural gymnastics, are cun of Phidias, cut in the fashion of the followers granite blocks, to look "real" about the steel beams and shafts, arranged ningly

leaning heavily upon an inner skeleton of steel for support from floor to floor, which strains beneath the "reality."
See

now,

how

an element-the

vanguard

of

new

the

art-has

entered here. This element is the structural necessity reduced to a skeleton, complete in itself without the craftsman's touch. At once the million and one little ways of satisfying this necessity beautifully, art of build the books as the traditional through to us chiefly coming to is emancipated artist The history. away-become ing, vanish

work his will with a rational freedom unknown to the laborious art tied to the meager unit of brick longer of phrase hampered by the grammatical

tradition-no of structural lintel, nor arch and stone

But he cannot use his freedom. His tradition cannot their making. think. He will not think. His scientific brother has put it to him before he

is ready.

The art of old idealized a structural necessity-now

rendered obso

it through man's accomplished by the machine-and lete and unnatural for the necessity
The new will weave joy in the labor of his hands. a robe of the ideal will have mastered, his machine which of mankind, pos freedom made with a rational no less truthful, but more poetical, the art of old will be as the sweet, beside which sible by the machine,

It will plaintive wail of the pipe to the outpouring of full orchestra. clothe necessity with the living flesh of virile imagination.
This distinction is one to be felt now rather than clearly defined.
The definition large in time;

is the poetry but the more

nition, the more we will satisfy new

conditions,

and

of this machine we, as artists,

age, and will be written into this premo examine find the utter helplessness of old forms to the crying

need

of the machine

for plastic

treatment-a pliant, sympathetic treatment of its needs that the body of structural precedent cannot yield. evidence To gain further suggestive immense middle-ground rative arts-the

of

this, let us turn to the deco sick of all art now mortally

ened by the machine. Here we find the most deadly perversion of all. Without regard to first principles or common decency, the whole is, ways of doing things rendered wholly letter of tradition-that obsolete and unnatural

recklessly

by the machine-is

fed

into its rapa

cious nmawuntil you may buy reproductions for ninety-nine cents of that which originally cost ages of toil and cultivation, reproductions parasites befogging the sensi worth intrinsically nothing-harmful bilities of our natures, belittling and falsifying any true perception of normal beauty

the Creator

may

have

seen

fit to implant

in us.

6

84

BRUSH AND PENCIL

The idea of fitness to purpose, between form and use' harmony with regard to any of these things, is possessed by very few, and util ized by them as a protest the machine! chiefly-a protest against But the machine is the creature and not the creator of iniquity; the machine has noble possibilities forced to degradation unwillingly in the name of the artistic; the machine, as far as its artistic is capacity is itself concerned, the crazed victim of the artist who works while he waits, and the artist who waits while he works.
They are artists clinging sadly to the old order, and would wheedle the giant frame of things back to its childhood or forward to its second childhood, while this machine is suffering age for the artist who accepts, and sings as he works, works, with the joy of the here and now! We want the man who eagerly seeks and finds, or blames him self if he fails to find, the beauty of this time.
Artists
who feel toward modernity and the machine now asWilliam Morris and Ruskin were once justified in feeling, had better wait and work sociologically

where

great

work

activity they will much mischief.
If the he dreads

artist will has made

may

still

be done

by

do distinct harm. only open it possible

his eyes to wipe

them.

Already

In

the

field

of

art

they have wrought

he will see that the machine out the mass of meaningless

torture to which mankind,''in the name of the artistic, has been more or less subjected since time began; for that matter, has made possible a- cleanly

strength,

an

ideality

and

a poetic

fire

that

the art of

the

world has not yet seen; for the minions of' the machine now smooth away the necessity for petty structural deceits, soothe this wearisome struggle to make 'things seem what' they are not, and can never be; satisfy the simple term of the modern art equation as the ball of clay in the sculptor's hand yields to his desire-comforting forever this realistic, brain-sick masquerade we are wont to suppose art.
William Morris pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art. Let us understand the significance to art of that word-simpli city-for it is vital to the art of the machine. We'may find, in place of the genuine thing we have striven for, an affectation of' the naYve, which we should detest, as we detest a full-grown woman with baby mannerisms. English art is saturated with it, fronm the brand-new imitation of the old house that grew and rambled from period to period to the rain-tub standing beneath the eaves.
In fact, most simplicity following the doctrines of William Morris is a protest; as a protest, well enough; but the highest form of simplicity is not simple in the sense that the infant intelligence is simple.
Simplicity in art, rightly understood, is a synthetic, positive qual ity, inwhich we may see evidence of mind, breadth of scheme, wealth of detail, and withal the sense of completeness found in a tree or a flower. A work may have the delicacies of a rare orchid or the

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Grey,
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THE stanch simple

ART

AND

CRAFT

OF

THE

MACHINE

fortitude of the oak, and still be simple.
A
needs only to be true to itself in organic sense. With

this ideal of simplicity,

let us glance

87 thing to be

hastily at several

examples of the machine and see how it has been forced by false ideals to this simplicity; to do violence how it has made possible the highest understood and so used. simplicity, rightly has been
Machinery
for no other purpose invented than to imitate, as closely as possible, the sentimental forms and the wood-carving of the early ideal-with the immediate result that no ninety-nine-cent of furniture is piece some horrible salable without botchwork unless it meaning nothing means that art and craft have combined to fix in the mind of the masses the old hand-carved as the neplus product ultra of the ideal.

Thus is thewood-working

industry glutted, except in rarest instances.

The whole sentiment of early craft degenerated to a sentimentality having no longer decent nor commercial significance in fact integrity; all that is fussy, maudlin, and animal, its existence basing chiefly on vanity and ignorance.
Now
let us learn from the machine.
It teaches us that the beauty of wood lies first in its qualities as wood.
No
treatment that. does not bring out these qualities all the time can be plastic or appropriate or beautiful.
The machine teaches us that certain forms and simple are suitable to bring out the beauty handling of wood and certain forms are not; that all wood-carving is apt to be a forcing of the an insult to its finer possibilities material, as a material in itself having intrinsically artistic properties, of which its beautiful marking is one, its texture another, its color a third.
The machine, by its wonderful cutting, shaping, smoothing, and repetitive has made capacity, it that the poor as well as the rich treatments of clean, strong forms and Chippendale only hinted at, possible so to use it without waste may enjoy to-day beautiful surface that the branch veneers of Sheraton with dire extravagance, and which

the middle ages utterly ignored.

The machine has emancipated these

beauties

of nature

meaningless

in wood;

it possible

to wipe

out

the mass

of

torture to which wood has been subjected since the world

for it has been

began,

made

universally

abused

and maltreated

by all peoples

but the Japanese. Rightly appreciated, is not this the very process of elimination for which Morris pleaded?
And how fares the troop of old materials galvanized the machine?
Our modern materials are these old

by

more plastic guise, rendered so by the machine, very quality

Who machine needed

in material

to satisfy

its own

into new materials life in itself creating the art equation.

can sound the possibilities of burned clay, which the modern has rendered

as sensitive

to the

creative

brain

as a dry plate

to the lens-a marvelous simplifier? And this plastic covering material, cement, another simplifier, enabling the artist to clothe the structural frame with a simple, modestly beautiful robe where before

88

BRUSH AND PENCIL

he dragged in, as he does still drag in, five different kinds of material to compose one little cottage, pettily arranging it in an aggregation a matter of fact, millinery, to be supposed to be picturesque-as warped and beaten by sun, wind, and rain into a variegated heap of trash. Then there is the process of modern casting inmetal-one of the perfected modern machines, capable of any form to which fluid will flow, to perpetuate the imagery of the most delicately poetic mind without let or hindrance-within reach of every one, therefore insulted and outraged by the bungler forcing it to a degraded seat at his degen erate festival.
Multitudes of processes are expectantly awaiting the sympathetic interpretation of the master mind; the galvano-plastic and its electrical brethren, a prolific horde, now cheap fakirs imitating real bronzes and all manner of the antique. Electro-glazing, a machine shunned because too cleanly and delicate for the clumsy hand of the traditional designer, who

depends

upon

the mass

and blur

of leading

to conceal

his lack of touch. That delicate thing, the lithograph-the prince of a whole reproductive province of processes-see what this process becomes in the hands of a master likeWhistler.
He has sounded but one note in the gamut of its possibilities, but that product is intrin sically true to the process, and as delicate as the butterfly's wing.
So

spins

a rough,

feeble

thread

of

the evidence

at

large

to

the

effect that the machine has weakened the' artist; all but destroyed his hand-made art, if not its ideals, although he has made'enough mis chief meanwhile.
These evident instances should serve to hint, at least to the thinking mind, that the machine is a marvelous simplifier; the emancipator of the creative mind, and in time the regenerator of the creative conscience.
Now, l'et us ask ourselves whether. the fear of the higher artistic expression demanded by the machine, so thoroughly grounded in the arts and crafts, is founded upon a finely guarded reticence, a recog nition of inherent weakness or plain ignorance? Let us, to be just, assume that

it is equal

parts

of all

three,

and

try to imagine

an arts

and crafts society that may educate itself to prepare to make some good impression upon the machine, the destroyer of their present ideals and tendencies, their salvation in disguise.
Such a society will, of course, be a society for mutual education.
Exhibitions will not be a feature of its programme for years, for there will be nothing to exhibit except the shortcomings of the society, and they will hardly prove either instructive or amusing at this stage of proceedings.
This society must, from the very nature of the is, proposition, be made up of the people who are in the work-that the manufacturers-coming into touch with such of those who assume the practice of the fine arts as profess a fair sense of the obligation to the public such assumption carries with it, and sociological workers whose interests are ever closely allied with art, as their prophets

Morris,

AND

ART

THE

CRAFT

and Tolstoy

Ruskin,

evince,

OF

THE

and

all,

89

MACHINE those who

have

as per

sonal graces and accomplishment perfected handicraft, whether fashion old or fashion new.
I suppose, first of all, the thing would resemble a debating society, or something even less dignified, until some one should suggest that it was

time

to quit

talking

and proceed.to

do something,

in this

which

case would not mean giving an exhibition, but rather excursions to factories a study.of

and

is, the machine.in

in place-that

processes

processes too numerous to mention, at the factories with the men who organize direct

and

them,

but not

in the spirit

of

the

that

idea

these

things are all gone wrong, looking for that in them which would most nearly approximate

the handicraft

ideal;

not

them with

into

looking

even the thought of handicraft, and not particulary looking for crafts men, but getting a scientific ground-plan of the process in mind, if possible, with a view to its natural bent and possibilities.
I will venture to say, from personal observation and some experi has taken pains to thus edu ence, that not one artist in one hundred to be true, that
I believe
I will go further and say what cate himself. to in America has as yet attempted institution not one educational the and art by training. link between science forge the connecting that develops artist to his actual tools, or, by a process of nature-study

in him the power of independent thought, fitting him to use them properly. So let us call these preliminaries a process by which:artists receive information nine-tenths of them lack concerning the tools they have tools to-day are processes and machines to work with to-day-for
This
a hammer and a gouge. proceeding once where they were value to the artist than to be of far more educational would doubtless be for there would at least for some time to come, the manufacturer, on the part of the artist and an attitude a difficult to.make adjustment that some would artists are chiefly "attitude"
So many to change.

undoubtedly disappear with the attitude.

with

dauntless

that a determined,

Granting

be brought

together with

the machine,

would

body

of artist material

could

sufficient persistent enthusiasm to grapple not some

one be

found who

would

provide

the suitable experimental station (which iswhat the modern arts and experimental station that would represent crafts shop should be)-an inminiature the elements of this great pulsating web of the machine, where each pregnant process or sigoificant tool in printing, lithog raphy, galvano-electro processes, wood and steel working machinery, muffles and

kilns would

have

its place,

scientific blood could mingle with tion, to sotind

the depths

of

these

and where

the

best,

young

the best and truest artistic inspira^ things, to accord

them

the patient,

sympathetic treatment that is their due? is he who can truthfully
To me, the artist in his chosen way. sense of these tendencies the common idealize So I feel conception

90

BRUSH AND PENCIL

a-nd composition to be simply the essence of refinement in organiza tion, the original impulse of which may be registered by the artistic nature as unconsciously as the magnetic needle vibrates to the mag netic law, but which is, in synthesis or analysis, organically consistent, given the power to see it or not.
And
I have the world of art, which we are so fond of calling is not so much science, outside
-as it is the very

great material growth-as

come to believe that the world outside of heart quality of this

religion is its conscience.

Look out over the modern city at nightfall from the top of a great down-town office building, and you may see at a glance how organic the machine has become, how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of our civilization, its essential tool indeed, if not the very framework of civilization itself.
Thus is the machine, the forerunner of democracy, into which the forces of art are to breathe the thrill of. ideality-a soul. FRANKLLOYD
WRIGHT.

THECIGARETTE
GIRL
By Anders
Zorn