Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Lines of strength and beauty

by
March 2006, no. 279

Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius by Nikolaus Pevsner

Yale University Press, $85 hb, 192 pp, 0300105711

Lines of strength and beauty

by
March 2006, no. 279

‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.

Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius

Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius

by Nikolaus Pevsner

Yale University Press, $85 hb, 192 pp, 0300105711

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.