Description

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For those of advanced tastes, the Modern Movement was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. The products of light industry were as untutored in the 1920s and 30s as massed housing and both took scant interest in the idealist thinking that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress. Robert Best, one of Britain's leading industrialists in this period, shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled by Modernism's promoters, for reasons that they found hard to understand. If the few knew better than the many, and had an obligation to elevate them whether they liked it or not, where did this leave the democratic principles that our liberal society prided itself on? Best felt that the campaign to popularise Functionalist design took propaganda into territory that had uncomfortable political overtones. In this extraordinary memoir, written in the early 1950s but never previously published, Best explored his concern about the sense of noblesse oblige that lay behind such bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944 ostensibly to raise the saleability and quality of British manufacturing but also, in his view, to brainwash the public into denying what it liked in favour of more cultivated but untested alternatives.

About the Author

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Robert Dudley Best (1892-1984) was an industrial designer, famous for creating the Bestlite, the first iconic modern object in 1930s Britain. Born into a privileged Birmingham family, he and his brother wanted to be music hall entertainers, but were derailed--first by their industrialist father, R.H. Best, who wanted them to work in his lighting factory and insisted they study at Germany's best art school, in Duesseldorf, and then by WW1, which only Robert survived. He was an early disciple of F.M. Alexander, the posture therapist and guru, and was politically active in the Common Wealth Party, founded in 1942 by J.B. Priestley and Sir Richard Acland, among others. He went on to pen Brass Chandelier, an appreciation of his father's business innovations, and a memoir of his early life, published by EnvelopeBooks as From Bedales to the Boche.