Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale
Posted in Reviews on Wed Dec 20, 06 by Kyle under Books and Decorative Arts.
I recently found a book at the San Francisco library titled Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale by Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings. Before I had even turned beyond the copyright page something caught my eye that told me how wide a gulf stood between the period when this book was written and the present era.
The book begins with a disclaimer that:
This book has been produced in full compliance with all government regulations for the conservation of paper, metal, and other essential materials.
This simple perfunctory sentence said a lot about the mentality and material circumstances of the United States at the time. In fact, the book dates from 1944, nearly a year before the end of World War II on September 2, 1945. Material deprivation and the rationing of materials needed to fuel the war effort was still in full effect and this siege mentality seeps into the book. The author elaborates on two main thematic points throughout the course of the book.
The first theme is a snappy, verging on glib and flippant, anecdotal summation of the history of interior decoration in America especially vis-à-vis the establishment of the antiques collecting “industry”. Which you are soon informed, as if the title of the book did not make it abundantly clear, he throughly deplores. He chides the American 19th century middle and upper class nouveaux riches for patronizing and appropriating a style based on the tastes of the European aristocracy and royalty (who’s own land based economic power if not their social standing was declining in comparison to the upstarts of industry).
By now this recounting and analysis of events and taste seems simplistic and overexposed, but at the time I would expect the criticism that he lavished upon the generation that preceding him was quite scathing and pointed. One might expect that as a decorator and furniture designer he would naturally be upset that those with decor fever were off searching out and paying exorbitant prices for the masterpieces of long dead designers and were not particularly interested his own and other designers’ new designs and ideas.
Standing contrapposto to his vehement opposition to antique furniture was his concern with the state of the American furniture industry and how it would be able to accommodate the projected explosion in demand for housing and accompanying furnishings after the war ended and the economy re-calibrated to peace time production. Robsjohn-Gibbings felt that America was at an aesthetic turning point and that the old stylistic paradigms that had hitherto dominated design would not be aesthetically, socially, or economically suitable for the new age he predicted the country was about to embark on. The war and depression of the 1930s had slowed the development of new housing across the country and many people were concerned that there would be insufficient housing for all of the returning WWII veterans. Robsjohn-Gibbings predicted that this shortcoming could be addressed but only if America radically altered its aesthetic taste and patterns of living.
This single-mindedly forward looking attitude makes Robsjohn-Gibbings’s book an excellent textual example of High Modernist optimism, Faith in Progress, and the derision of everything stylistically associated with previous generations, especially anything even slightly tainted by the hint of aristocratic bearing. Despite the occasional moments of ponderously earnest didacticism and an attitude forced into gravity by deprivation, the books is also very funny and makes every effort to be approachable and appealing to the “common man” (a kind of “awww-shucks” trope aimed to convince the common woman or man to part with their cherished flowered wallpaper and overstuffed easy chairs).
Thoroughly more vaudeville than Voltaire, this is not a book for those hoping for great theoretical revelations. However its candid humor makes it an excellent, if contrary, companion to Tom Wolfe’s From the Bauhaus to Our House. It is a book with a similarly snarky and amusing take on the American architecture and design scene that looks back with rapacious disdain on the era that Robsjohn-Gibbings was so eagerly anticipating. Even though a mere 36 years separate these two lithe and winsome tomes they could not be more different in countenance or character.
Wolfe deftly explains the contradictions and incongruities of how the richest, most prosperous and economically productive country on the globe came to be duped into a thinking a style based on worker housing designed for industrial slums by a small cadre of European architects was the epitome of haute corporate decor. Wolfe’s scathing rebuke of the billionaire corporate executive luxuriating in his wan, sparse, and pallid abode reminiscent of a “insecticide refinery” could only be matched by Robsjohn-Gibbings’s incredulous and tongue-in-cheek prediction that America’s absorption in antique mania would soon lead manufactures to produce completely incongruous Chippendale chairs rendered in translucent plastic. Once can easily imagine them engaged in a vigorous and rousing conversation. Naturally they would have to be seated on a damask upholstered tête-à-tête in the middle of the Farnsworth House.
As it turns out it took a couple decades longer than Robsjohn-Gibbing expected, and he missed the mark by a several stylistic ticks of the clock but the sprint of his predictions were right on and his book is an excellent unintentional portrait of the rabid zeal of High Modernism. Today Philippe Starck’s Louis XVI Ghost Chair is the translucent glimmering highlight in the contemporary furniture fashionista’s eye, but very few today could be pressed to remember that a Chippendale is anything other than a buff dancer in a bow tie.
