Men for the Royal College

Editorial: Men for the Royal College

That high society man, Sir William Rothenstein, commenting upon his appointment in 1920 as principal of the Royal College of Art, London, wrote, ‘The appointment raised a storm in the National Society of Art Masters [ 11 ; both Fisher [2] and I were abused, questions were asked in the House of Commons, a protest was made at the Board of Education. Certain qualifica- tions were required to entitle a man to become head of an art school; the Board had selected a man with none to be Principal of the chief school in the country. . . ’ [ 31

Those who have seen the play ‘Vice-Versa’ may recall a scene in the dormitory and some verbiage that goes somewhat as follows. The towering headmaster is addressing a group of small and homesick boarding-school arrivals. He purrs reassuringly, ‘We must have, dear boys, an atmosphere of peace and homelike security-’, then bellows ‘-even if I have to flog each and every one of you!’

The aesthetic inmates of that elite South Kensington institution, the Royal College of Art, having suffered three rectors within three years (if you count the one about to climb into the hot seat), seem to have got the small boys’ treatment: they have got Jocelyn Stevens. With no education in art and design, Stevens, the Press tells us, is just the man to give whacko and what-for. We are also told that the Old Etonian ended his ‘explosive career’ at Express Newspapers ‘in a puff of smoke’, and that his hobbies include shooting and throwing filing cabi- nets out of third-floor windows [4] -altogether superb qualifica- tions for disposing of staff and other outdated equipment at sw7.

Sir Terence Conran, distinguished founder of Habitat and a resigning governor of the College has said ‘the RCA is ungover- nable, full of factions fighting each other. There is a crying need in this country for a really first-rate industrial design school-which the RCA could be.’ Alas, the institution, despite all its financial advantages, has never been the leading European institution of art and design education: the spirit of the unity of art, crafts, design, and architecture, advocated by Morris, Crane, Lethaby, Newbery, and Gropius, never really planted roots in South Kensington; and, while we are on roots, that is the root cause of all the divisive weakening, not only at the RCA, but from primary school level upwards.

The history of England’s central art institution could be outlined as a series of shocks for Government, shocks resulting from the realisation that other institutions were doing South Kensington’s job more effectively. To a great extent this recurr-

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ing phenomenon has been due to the governors’ choices of men to run the place, right from the word ‘go’ in 1837, when the Normal School of Design was established by the Board of Trade in Somerset House with the object of improving design in Britain.

The first Director, John Buonarotti Papworth was an archi- tect, appointed by the RAs on the Council of the School to ensure that it became only a place for supplying boys who could copy out historic architectural patterns, and that it could in no way rival the RA Schools by producing artists. Drawing from the live nude was banned lest ‘young men be tempted to leave the intended object to pursue that which is more accredited and honoured’.

But a year passed, before the perennial see-saw moved. The Board of Trade, frustrated that the total School attendance was nineteen boys by day, and twenty-seven by night, abolished the Directorship along with Papworth; and in July 1838 appointed William Dyce, the notable Nazarene painter, to turn the School into a trades school based on the German Gewerbeschulen.

Dyce managed to stick it for five troubled years. Within a month of his appointment as Superintendent and Professor, drawing from the live nude had to be permitted by the Council, because young men were flocking to a rival school in St. Mar- tin’s Street to draw ‘a fine female model’ posed by Benjamin

. Haydon, who believed that design without art was ignorance. Next, Dyce set up a werkstatt with a Jacquard loom and a Monsieur Trenel. But the boys in the textile trades knew looms well enough: the others had no interest. What they sought was art education. The werkstatt folded after a year, its maximum attendance being six. Dyce also found that the manufacturers preferred their apprentices to study art. Dyce resigned in disgust in 1843, on being requested by some of the Council to spend more time at the School.

The see-saw of policy was then perversely rocked with a vengeance. On 2 May 1843 Charles Heath Wilson of the Trustees’ Academy Edinburgh was appointed Director and Headmaster at Somerset House. An extreme historicist, even by Victorian standards, Wilson had tracers dispatched to Pompeii and stacked the School’s rooms with so many large casts of the Antique that the public expressed fears of the floors giving way. One of Wilson’s staff, John Rogers Herbert, said ‘it looked a good deal more like a large Pompeian bath than an English School of Design’. Wilson managed to cling to office for four years, despite a staff/student rebellion in Forty-Five, during which Wilson and Herbert squared up to each other, fists aloft, the Director calling Herbert ‘a liar and scoundrel’; Herbert calling him ‘a snob’. On 3 November 1847 Wilson was virtually sacked by being ordered to confine his attention to the branch schools, but he secured the . headship at Glasgow, and after fifteen happy years making that school into a cast museum, he made for Italy to spend his last years among his beloved Antique [ 5 ] .

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The Board of Trade now really decided to spread confusion and appointed three headmasters, H. Townsend, head of Form; J. C. Horsley, head of Colour; and W. Dyce, head of Ornament. The pupils avoided Dyce’s Class of Ornament and some had to be forced into it by the other two heads. It was reported that the only commendable work in Dyce’s class was done at home by a designer.

During this time of triumvirate, Henry Cole, brilliant civil servant, and organiser of the Great Exhibition of 1851, con- ducted a sharp campaign against the School in hisJourna1 of Design; his object being to take over public art education. The Board of Trade were very impressed by Cole’s arguments that the School had done nothing for design and industry: Cole got his way. On 16 February 1852 the Board created the Depart- ment of Practical Art with Cole as General Superintendent and Richard Redgrave as Art Superintendent.

Cole gave the see-saw of policy a great rock. Although he had cleverly attacked the School of Design for not helping design in industry, his true objective was to become supervisor of a widespread national system of drawing. Cole was astute enough to realise that, if middle-class students were enrolled to study drawing and painting in Government art schools, their fees would finance his schemes for public art education. He was also astute enough to realise that the politicians would be far happier if art schools cost central government nothing, and were partly filled with young ladies involved in the innocent pastime of painting flowers; thus under Cole’s regime the provincial Schools of Design changed their names to Schools of Art. In 1856 the Board of Trade gratefully handed over the whole business to the Education Department. Cole now had his kingdom of art education: he had outmanoevred the Government.

Cole ruled for twenty-one years, abdicating in 1873, and claiming quite rightly that he had ‘witnessed the conversion of twenty limp Schools of Design into one hundred and twenty flourishing Schools of Art’. But what type of art was flourishing? That dictated by the twenty-three Stages of Redgrave’s National Course of Instruction: a course of geometrical drawing, linear ‘freehand’ (actually very tight) , and stumped, hatched, and fudged copying from casts of the Antique. Redgrave’s system of design consisted mainly of outline drawings of plants within given geometrical figures. The hub of the whole national system was the Central Art Training School, South Kensington.

Slight tremors had passed through the art officials there from 1871 onwards, when they became aware that wondrous drawings were being produced from life at the Slade School daily, com- pared with the weary efforts produced at South Kensington, three-monthly. Two ex-students of the French ateliers, Edward Poynter and Alphonse Legros were responsible for this great leap forward in the teaching of drawing, i.e. true freehand drawing of form in the contemporary French manner.

Redgrave resigned as Inspector General for Art two years after


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his partner Cole had gone, and was succeeded by Poynter, whose title was Director of the Art Division of the Department of Science and Art. Poynter was incapable of directing any policy of design because of his obsession with the Classical past, the very obsession which brought his pictures such praise in the Academy shows. Everything at South Kensington got in a muddle, but one thing was clear: the new Director loved to see a good chalk study of classical drapery arranged on the nude model.

Two violent shocks were felt by art officialdom in the nineties. On 5 October 1896 a collection of posters, murals, metalwork, furniture, and needlework from Glasgow was observed in the New Gallery at the private view of the Arts and Crafts Exhibi- tion Society. The young designers of this collection, namely Mackintosh, MacNair, and the two Macdonald sisters, were products of the Glasgow ‘technical art studios’, founded in 1892, and the technical art classes included in the curriculum of Glasgow School of Art from 1893. This work by ‘The Four’ shattered not only officialdom, but also Morris’s disciples. The head at Glasgow, Fra Newbery, was encouraging not only design and craftsmanship, but also original style! Not only that, but it was rumoured that the Painting up there was far superior, and, unbelievably, that Newbury was about to put up a ‘modern’ new School building, trusting an ex-pupil to do it! It was quite clear that Glasgow was becoming the best British school of art, but nobody in London, save the staff of The Studio magazine, wanted to know. By the turn of the century the Glasgow School had gained a leading reputation in Europe, especially in Austria.

Thus, when the National Art Training School, South Ken- sington was reconstituted as the Royal College of Art in 1896, Newbery, on merit, should have been begged to take the post of Principal; but the Art-Workers’ Guild, which was now dominant in London, was against Newbery for daring to be modern, rather than traditional, so in 1898 the job went to Walter Crane, a very successful designer. Traditional light crafts were practised by some of the intending teachers of art, but industrial crafts such as printing, book production, cabinet work, and textile design were not carried out as they were in the L.C.C. Central School of Arts and Crafts. Crane stuck it for a year, could not stand the ‘official’ atmosphere, and left in 1899. He was succeeded by Augustus Spencer, who wore a dress morning coat, was de- scribed as ‘an art official’, and officiated for twenty dull years.

A chance was missed during the years 1913-1918 when Frederick Burridge, Principal of the LCC Central School fought his campaign to have all higher scholarship awards for craft and design areas removed from the Royal College and transferred to his School, on the grounds that it excelled in those areas and that only by such a transfer would the country ever have a central institution properly committed to design. Burridge’s scheme was rejected, because of the higher social status of the Royal College and the opposition of jealous principals.

Shortly after this, in 1920, William Rothenstein, whose forte

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was chalk portraits of princes, premiers, and pre-eminents, was handed the RCA job on a part-time basis. The College after twenty years of Spencer ‘had the “look” and even the smell-not of an art school but an inferior elementary school’, moreover the staff ‘resembled clerks’ (61. The new principal replaced the smell of stale soap with the invigorating vapours of turpentine and linseed, and imported gifted practising artists as tutors. In 1924 Rothenstein toured the Continental art schools, but com- pletely ignored the Bauhaus. Under him the RCA became an elite fine art shop. From then on ambitious students in local and provincial schools regarded South Kensington as the ultimate goal for an aspiring fine artist, the top of the national pyramid. Rothenstein resigned shortly after the Board of Education was stirred into action by the attacks on his exclusively fine art policy in the Journal of the Design and Industries Association led by Frank Pick. Rothenstein dismissed design education as ‘voca- tional training’.

There was not much opportunity for change under the next principal, Percy Jowett: the war came on. Then after the conflict, under the direction of Sir Robin Darwin the College swung to specialisation in various fields of design. Design research spon- sored by industry flourished. A royal charter granted the College university status in September 1967.


Self-portrait by Sir William Rothenstein, Principal of the Royal College of Art 1920-1935.

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From the Sixties the national art and design pyramid has been immersed by the rise of the Polytechnics which now provide students with the opportunities to take honours degrees and to continue on to research degrees. Certain specialised design de- partments in Polytechnics are now as good as, some reckon better than, their equivalent at the RCA; so it is understandable that a new and distinct elite identity is now being sought by the authorities governing the College.

The appointment in 1982 of Dr Lionel March, basically a maths and science man, was a new departure in the College’s history, and was seen as an attempt to swing too strongly towards high technology [ 71. One of his aims was to enrol students interested in technology, but not necessarily qualified in art or design. The basic objection to the intended development was that this College of Ar t might change into an institution of high technology which had little to do with maintaining and raising artistic standards in design. The heat is now so intense that Dr March leaves the South Kensington kitchen, and the governors’ solution is to appoint for the first time a man who is not an artist, designer, or technologist. Was it not possible to find in Great Britain a strong-minded artist/designer and educa- tor, a progressive person with both a manifest love of art and design, and a respect for the advantages of modern technology? Surveying the history of appointments at South Kensington, it seems that the governors never get the balance of the art and design see-saw right.

Stuart Macdonald

Notes and references 1 Now the NSAE. 2 Then Minister of Education. 3 ROTHENSTEIN, SIR W. Men and Memories, London, 1932, p. 366. 4 ‘Guts and gaiety at the RCA’, The Observer, London, 4 March 1984. 5 MACDONALD, S. History and Philosophy of Art Education, London

6 ROTHENSTEIN, SIR J. Summer’s Lease, London, 1965, p. 99. 1970, pp. 88-98.

7 See J A D E VOl. 1, NO. 1, p. 157.

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Men for the Royal College

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