"Robert Dudley Best (1892-1984) had a ringside seat at the birth of the Modern Movement in England and this remarkable memoir sets the story straight on what the real issues were as British design emerged into the 20th century.
For those of ""advanced"" tastes, the Modern Movement was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. Massed housing of the 1920s and 30s was as untutored as the products of light industry and both operated far from the enlightened thinking coming out of Central Europe that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress.
Robert Best, the only British industrialist to have trained at art school, shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled by the methods of Modernism's propagandists, for reasons that they found hard to understand. If ""the few"" knew better than ""the many"", and ""the many"" were incapable of raising their own standards, was it not reasonable for ""the few"" to impose those standards from above? And if they did not do so, were they not betraying their enlightenment and their obligation to help elevate the less capable?
Best did not think so, and in this extraordinary memoir, written in the early 1950s but never published, he explores his own growing concerns about the sense of noblesse oblige that directed such bodies as the Council of Industrial Design, set up in 1944, to raise the quality of British manufacturing and its saleability.
This overdue book needs to be read widely to understand what lay behind the idealism of the design world in the second quarter of the 20th century.
AUTHOR: Robert Dudley Best (18921984) 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."
By:
Robert Best
Imprint: EnvelopeBooks
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 203mm,
Width: 127mm,
ISBN: 9781838172084
ISBN 10: 1838172084
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 01 June 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified
Robert Dudley Best (1892-1984) was a British manufacturer deeply involved with the Modern design movement in and immediately after the interwar years. He took over Best & Lloyd, his father's light industrial engineering works in Birmingham, having previously trained as a metal designer at Behrens's art school in Duesseldorf. He went on to design the Bestlite, an iconic Bauhaus-styled desk lamp that remains in production and was used by Winston Churchill in Whitehall. Best was an early apostle of the posture therapist F.M. Alexander of the Alexander technique, campaigned for better art-school education for industrial apprentices, and was a founder of the Common Wealth Party in 1942. His social circle included a group of Birmingham artists and intellectuals including Prof. Philip Sargant Florence and others associated with Birmingham University. He also befriended Nikolaus Pevsner during Pevsner's 15 months in Birmingham between 1934-5, and hosted the first visit of Walter Gropius to the Midlands after Gropius's departure from Germany in 1934. Best wrote prolifically, though only one of his books was published in his lifetime: Brass Chandelier, his history of his father's experiments with metal manufacturing and promotion of progressive German pedagogic ideas, which Pevsner reviewed in the Architectural Review. Best's history of his own early life and that of his younger brother Frank, both of whom served in the First World War, was published posthumously in 2020 by EnvelopeBooks as From Bedales to the Boche.
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. Robert went on to pen an appreciation of his father’s business innovations, an unpublished history of design in the early the 20th century, and a memoir with recollections of F.M. Alexander, the posture therapist and guru.
