Exhibition note.(Art)(Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser)

"Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser" at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, March 5-July 25, 2004.

The strange career of Christopher Dresser can be summed up in a frieze and a teapot, both on view at the Cooper-Hewitt. The frieze shows an outlandish convocation of stick insects, wobbling forward in mock procession. Here the insect kingdom is, literally, a kingdom: the bugs' antennae are drawn up to form crowns and their iridescent green wings unfurl like royal robes of state, while tridents gripped in bony limbs serve as scepters. Here is that curious Victorian impulse to wed the comical and the nightmarish; Dresser dubbed the frieze "Old Bogey." An altogether different sensibility pervades the teapot. No more than a silver square, it sits diagonally, two of its sides extending to form spout and handle. A smaller square is cut out of the middle, placing a void at the pot's center of gravity that declares the axis around which it rotates and pours. Unlike the botanic-insectile phantasmagoria of Old Bogey, this is as laconic as a geometric proof.

It seems impossible that these works could come from the same civilization, let alone the same man. Yet each is an absolutely characteristic product of Christopher Dresser's mind. Such is the revelation of the Cooper-Hewitt's "Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser's Design Revolution," an exhibition organized for the centenary of his death. The rather generic title is unfortunate for the story is anything but generic. It is nothing less than the cultural revolution in which the High Victorian suddenly disintegrated, its components of truth, energy, and muscularity flying apart and improbably reconstituting themselves as delicacy, restraint, and abstraction, reawakening as the Aesthetic Movement.

Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) was born in Glasgow the same year as William Morris, the great arts and crafts innovator. The central fact of each of their lives was the crisis of labor brought about by the Industrial Revolution, to which they responded in opposite ways--Morris by seeking to revive craft traditions through socialism and workingmen's cooperatives, Dresser by accepting the strange products of modern industry, and trying to make them beautiful. This was the mission of the Government School of Design in London, where Dresser studied for seven years.

His mentor was Owen Jones, the celebrated scholar of color, who designed the intense chromatic scheme of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Jones admired the encyclopedic scope of the exhibition, comprising the products of the entire world, and he applied its approach to his celebrated Grammar of Ornament (1856). This compendium brought together all the decorative traditions of the world, from Egyptian wall decoration to the linear patterns of Maori clubs. Jones summarized the principles of each culture, extrapolating from them universal principles of design and color. Here was Victorian confidence at its most optimistic and curious, believing that the entire world was knowable and could be turned to the great work of progress.

Dresser contributed to the Grammar of Ornament a set of botanical illustrations, his specialty. Upon completing his studies, he lectured in botany and produced several books on plant taxonomy, such as Unity in Variety as Deduced from the Vegetable Kingdom (1859), which echoed Jones's search for universal principles, which he found in plant forms. Throughout his career, Dresser derived his ornamental ideas from his studies into the growth and structure of plants. Dresser did not copy nature with subservient fidelity--this was the stultifying dogma of prim John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites. Instead Dresser argued that one should abstract from nature and make stylized forms, and that drawing should be a creative affair rather than one of copying. Here he turned the tables on his class-conscious tutors, who had permitted no life drawing at the School of Design, because it might encourage their pupils to think above their station in life to aspire to the status of artists. In revenge, Dresser made the creation of ornament a supremely intellectual achievement. Perhaps this helps explain the alert, nervous angularity of his mature work, ...