Find the following words in a dictionary and memorize their meaning

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aesthetic
affect
artistic
banality
barbarous
barely
canvas
collage
completely
endow
expression
imitate
impact
impetus
impose
invention
juxtaposition
mechanical 
motif
ornament
painterly
particularly
redesign
render
significance 
spectacular
still-life
subject matter
subtle
trivial
unaltered
visibility
 
 
4. Read the text. 
The late nineteenth-century decorative arts existed within the broad con-
text of the Symbolist movement. Symbolism had its roots in literature, but 
came to affect all forms of artistic expression. General currency was first 
given to the term by the minor French poet Jean Moreas, in a manifesto pub-
lished in the French newspaper “Le Figaro” in 1886. Symbolism in its first 
phase involved a dandified revolt against materialism. 
Symbolism, like all major cultural movements, had an inexorable dyna-
mism of its own. Artists and craftsmen who pursued ever more esoteric and 
refined effects and sensations eventually reached the point where both they 
and their audience began to feel permanently jaded. The first stage of the reac-
tion is contained within the general current of Symbolism itself, and is 
summed up in the bold neo-primitivism of Gauguin. But the search for the 
barbarous soon proved to be as disillusioning as all the other quests the Sym-
bolists had pursued, and eventually a new generation began to feel that there 
was something even more fascinatingly brutal in the heart of their own soci-
ety –
the machine. 
The first group actually to proclaim this view was the Italian Futurists, and 
it was they who established mechanical objects and the products of industry as 
key subjects in modern art.
In their paintings the Futurists wanted to render the dynamism of contem-
porary life – the movements of crowds in cities, and the rapid motion of an 
automobile or a train. The Futurists' paintings of crowds and machines in mo-
tion were perhaps their most spectacular achievements, but they did tackle 
other subjects as well. They even made Futurist versions of traditional still-
life. Ardengo Soffici’s “Decomposition of the Planes of a Lamp” takes as its 
principal motif a banal mass-produced object. Soffici treated it in a way which 
gave it a new and startling authority. The Cubists, too, gloried in the banality 

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of much of their source material. The collage –
the key invention of Synthetic 
Cubism – featured scraps of newspaper, old labels, fragments of wallpaper, in 
fact all kinds of industrial detritus. The invented ‘reality’ of art was brought 
into shocking juxtaposition with the kind of reality that surrounded everyone. 
The Dadaists, particularly Duchamp, took matters even further, presenting 
mass-produced objects completely unaltered within a fine art context. The 
ironic suggestion was made that these be looked at not as objects of use but as 
formal inventions. 
Three things established themselves at the very heart of the modernist aes-
thetic, and continued to influence artists long after Futurism had exhausted its 
impetus. One was the cult of the machine itself. Machines could be treated in a 
number of different ways – as a basis for abstraction, as in the impressive draw-
ings of “Mechanical Elements” which Fernand Leger did in the early 1920s. 
The second development was perhaps subtler, and also further-reaching in 
its effects. Duchamp presented ordinary mass-produced objects as if they were 
works of art. Other artists, less radical than he, took them into their vocabular-
ies as subjects for painterly transformation. The American artist Stuart Davis, 
heavily influenced by French Cubism, took the Lucky Strike package as the 
subject-matter for a picture. Even before Raymond Loewy redesigned it, this 
package was one of the most familiar and ordinary of twentieth-century 
American objects. Davis asked his audience to shift focus and look at it in a 
totally different way, almost as if they had never seen it before. 
Another American painter, Gerald Murphy, already seems to anticipate the 
Pop Art of the 1960s in a canvas produced in 1922. A matchbox, a safety-
razor and a fountain pen are presented in quasi-heraldic fashion, almost as if 
they were images on an inn sign. Murphy seems to be saying that these indus-
trial products, trivial and little considered, are in fact the emblems of a whole 
civilization and tell more about it than things with much greater pretensions to 
significance. 
The fascination with machine forms had an inevitable impact on the deco-
rative arts. Luxury products acquired an added frisson when they imitated 
what factories produced by the thousands or even the millions. Parisian jewel-
ers made pendants in the shape of shells for heavy guns, and bracelets that 
seemed to be studded with ball-bearings. These fashionable follies were never-
theless a symptom of something important. People had started to study the 
products of industry in a new way, to savour industrial logic for its own sake. 
It is not too much to say that modern art, by separating industrial forms from 
their context, and holding them up to be admired in isolation, robbed industry 
of its innocence. 
But there was a different kind of dialogue as well. In the nineteenth century 
pure machine forms were invisible. They only acquired visibility once they 

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were ornamented in some way. Now art had endowed them with a kind of 
moral authority of their own. Design ceased to be pragmatic; men began to 
think of industry not as a brute force barely under the control of those who had 
created it, but as the paradigm of an ideal world. The machine must now be 
allowed to suggest its own forms and images, rather than having these im-
posed upon it by ignorant mankind. 

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