Shock of the Old: an exhibition on the celebrated Victorian designer Christopher Dresser has just moved from the Cooper-Hewitt to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Martin Levy assesses its presentation of a man often claimed as a proto-modernist

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Martin Levy

Since: the publication in 1936 of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Dr Christopher Dresser's reputation has, to a large extent, rested on his credentials as a proto-modernist. In the exhibition which has just arrived at the Victoria and Albert Museum from the Cooper Hewitt (where it was called 'Shock of the Old'), Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) is presented as a far more complex and multifaceted designer.

Artists and architects have, for centuries, created designs for furniture, metalwork, glass, textiles and ceramics, mostly for wealthy patrons. At the height of the industrial revolution, Matthew Boulton had recognised the potential for producing 'architect designed' works of art by modern manufacturing methods, but he too was still courting aristocratic patronage. During the 1840s, while principally working on private and public commissions, A.W.N. Pugin gave designs for production to favoured manufacturers such as John Hardman and Herbert Minton. What distinguishes Dresser from his predecessors, and from contemporaries such as E.W. Godwin, is that his best work was designed almost exclusively for manufacturers. His purpose was to take advantage of modern production processes and thereby bring good design to a wider and less exclusive audience.

One of the clues to Dresser's peculiar success is his early career as a distinguished botanist, the field in which he was awarded his doctorate. Stuart Durant, in a brilliant essay, 'Dresser's Education and Writings', in the book which accompanies the exhibition, shows the extent to which Dresser's design was informed by his understanding and interpretation of natural forms. (1)

Dresser's lecture drawings of plants, a few of which are included in the exhibition, should be looked at in conjunction with his writings. In The Art of Decorative Design (1862), Dresser stated: 'The designer's mind must be like the vital force of the plant ever developing itself into forms of beauty, yet while thus free to produce, still in all cases governed by unalterable laws; and in the action of the mind being controlled by rules we rejoice, and not mourn.'

Dresser's familiarity with the structure of fauna and flora was transferred not only into functional vessels, but also onto decorative objects. Indeed, it is very clear from this exhibition that the familiar and much vaunted 'functional' objects are only one part of the story. An Elkington electroplate sugar basin, illustrated right, displays several quintessential 'Dresser' features: the simple form, the modest material, and the structural strength wrought by the double horizontal ribbed lines, fulfilling the same function as the ribs of a leaf. Equally characteristic of Dresser's design, however, is the quite different Minton vase with a pattern known to the designer as 'Old Bogey' (left). Here Dresser is demonstrating how elements of natural forms can be transformed into decoration. In this vase we see Dresser's humour, a feature of some of his most appealing work, and a trait he shared with his contemporary William Burges.

In addition to his direct debt to nature, Dresser, like many of his contemporaries, drew on a multitude of historic influences, including Roman, gothic, occasionally renaissance (although this was a source he claims to have despised), Egyptian, Peruvian and, most famously, Japanese. Some of his cast-iron tables, chairs and stands, manufactured by Coalbrookdale, are clearly gothic in their structure and decoration. Those examples shown under the deeply-ribbed palm tree leaves of the Cooper-Hewitt's conservatory were provided with a setting that Dresser would surely have appreciated.

Most revealing in the exhibition of Dresser's skill as a designer and ornamentist are the works from his own hand--for example, his striking and beautifully rendered watercolours from the 'Metropolitan Album'. An understanding of his creative mind at work can he gleaned from the 'Ipswich' sketchbook, of which more might have been made by use of photographic reproduction.

Dresser took ultimate responsibility for all the work emanating from his design studio, and also advised manufacturers. The exhibition is revealing in providing some explanation for the consequent aesthetic diversity of objects associated with him. His direct responsibility results, for example, in the spectacular, geometrically-decorated ceramics created for Wedgwood--embodying the 'idea of power, energy, force or vigour'. But many of the so-called 'cloisonnes" manufactured by Minton, merely 'under Dresser's influence', are often neither exciting in form nor original in decoration.

If botany was the key early influence on Dresser as a designer, the second was the seminal moment of his 1876-77 visit to Japan. It is during the period immediately following this trip that Dresser produced his most memorable and distinctive metalwork, the recognisable output of 'the world's first industrial designer'. The angular teapots, claret jugs and toast racks, for example, all appeal to the present age, when taste often equates with minimalism.