Lost Art Press

The Bondage of Tradition

Posted on by Lost Art Press

I admire the everyday ordinary furniture from the past, particularly from before the Industrial Revolution, what’s known as vernacular furniture. The makers are usually unnamed, often not professionals. I like it because of its directness, honesty and functionality. It tends to be kind of minimal and spare for reasons of cost. It is striking how the dictates or slogans of Modernism align with those of the vernacular or craft: “less is more,” “form follows function,” and so on. It’s ironic because Modernism typically saw itself as release from the bondage of tradition.

– Laura Mays, furniture maker

18 thoughts on “The Bondage of Tradition”

  1. Nice picture.
    I miss Woodworking Magazine in black and white and no ads.

    I don’t agree completely in the irony. Since I believe the Modernism wasn’t a countermovement of the pre industrial age, but more a reaction to the later styles as e.g. Jugend (I think you call it “Art Noveau”). The European fashion in the late 1800 and in the early 1900 was with a lot of ornamentation and rather heavy built pieces. So when Modernism saw itself as a relesase from the bondage of tradition, I guess they referred to the styles just prior to their own movement.

  2. Jonas, I would have to disagree. Aesthetic modernism is directly connected to modernist philosophy which was a conscious and complete severing of itself from all that had come before….and not just what directly preceded it.

    1. Jeff, its an interesting discussion. I guess that even modernism borrowed different features from the older ages. e.g. the golden rectangle proportions etc.
      But I am by no means an expert on this field, so I could be wrong.
      It could even be just that in my head modernism is stuff like Bauhaus and the likes which may not be what was referred to by Laura Mays.

      1. Modern, post modern, traditional, ornate, plain, ad infinitum. The brains may have changed, but the arses this furniture serves are the same. 🙂

    2. I also can’t agree with you, Jonas. I would call Picasso a Modernist, and he lifted pretty heavily from African tribal art and archaic Greek art. What you’re describing sounds more like Futurism to me.

  4. I thought the key word was “Bondage”, this is Chris’s blog after all!
    A fine stool and a good example of strong, simple joinery done with a minimum of tools and effort to maximum effect.

  5. I’d argue that guys like Corbusier, and the Bauhaus people were essentially bourgeois artist/designers working in the new industrial rationalism to market to bourgeois customers. I think Mays has it largely right in that while Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts people were certainly known to the Modernists, judging from their furniture and architecture, I think they would have been horrified to have their “form follows function” ideas identified with vernacular, really I would say in their sense, peasant, quaint and archaic forms of furniture and architecture.

  6. Modernism has an odd relationship to the past. On one hand, it IS a self-conscious break with the immediate past, but it’s almost never a total break with the past. The best modernists tended to go poking around in the distant past for inspiration, so what they come up with always has some resemblance to earlier styles, the more obscure the better. The modernists that Laura Mays is talking about were more reductive in their thinking. They thought of themselves as breaking entirely with the past.

  7. This doesn’t have as much to do with the story as it does with the picture, does there happen to be a link or book where I could find a larger picture of the bookcase behind the stool, just from the snippet I can see its looks awesome, love the dovetails? Anyway great blog as always, inspires to think, to question, to continue tradition and most of all to be creative. Thanks

  10. Laura Mays clearly missed the first week class on Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, where the links between Morris, the vernacular and modernism are crystal clear. She may dislike modernist furniture but to deliberately misunderstand its roots is comic. Her Sligo chair is ‘essentially bourgeois artist/designers working in the new industrial rationalism to market to bourgeois customers’ and dishonest, something the modernists and their immediate precursors would never contemplate

  11. Bourgeois? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

    Over educated oikophobes – meh!

  12. Apparently modernism seems something else in Europe then in America. I agree with Jonas Jensen. And if it was the same then how can you call Picaso a modernist, or agree with Laura Mays.

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