Form and Color of Interior Decoration
Form and color, the two media of decorative expression, are essentially unlike. Form is intellectual, color emotional. Form requires a mental process for its apprehension. Color requires none, and therefore makes a wider, more instant, and more powerful appeal.
Man’s attitude toward form and color has always been influenced by his philosophy. In the Orient color is dominant, because there the soul is regarded as the source of knowledge. In the Occident, where under the influence of Greek philosophy the mind is regarded as the source of knowledge, form is dominant. The Greeks attained to an incomparable perfection of form; they used color merely to outline and to embellish. The Orientals, on the other hand, though they have created forms of exquisite and imperishable loveliness, have in all ages used color not as the hand-maiden of form, but for the sake of its own beauty and the subtle spell it casts upon the soul.
Only once in historic times has color been dominant in Europe. During the Middle Ages, under the sway of early Christianity, man’s soul became his chief concern, and the mysticism of the age found immediate expression in color. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries there was everywhere evident-in the dress of the common people, the gay costumes of the nobles, the gorgeous trappings of chivalry and the rich colorings of the medieval houses, as in the glow of stained glass and the red and gold of the cathedrals-the same passion for color that has in all ages moved the East. The passion passed, of course, with the religious and philosophical conditions which helped to create it. Toward the beginning of the modern period, with the approach of the Renaissance or rebirth of the spirit of the Greeks, mysticism died out, and with it color yielded place to form.
After the lapse of centuries the pendulum seems to be starting to swing in the other direction. Certainly two tendencies are everywhere evident in the western world to-day. On the one hand, we see a remarkable increase in the use of color; on the other hand, the decline if intellectualism, and the slow breaking-up of the purely scientific and materialistic ideals by which we have so long been actuated. The spirit of mysticism is coming back into the world; not only contemporary literature, but contemporary music and painting are more and more tinged by it. And with mysticism there is coming a deeper and a growing love of color, not for what it reveals and embellishes, but for its own sake.
In its effect upon the mind, form is solid, hard active and masculine; while color is fluid, soft, passive and feminine. Form is of course imperceptible apart from color, and the two media of expression are of necessity used together in every composition. The relative emphasis placed upon them, however, may be and certainly ought to be varied by the decorator in working out the motive of his treatment. Beyond doubt form has in the past been too much emphasized in our homes, with the result of giving them not only the obvious defects of over-ornamentation and complexity, but also a real though intangible effect of hardness and ungraciousness. The present marked tendency toward the freer use of color and the elimination of non-essential objects and patterns is therefore a much-needed corrective.
However, the primary concern of the decorator is not with the separation of form and color, but with their convergent use in composition. Beauty and the expression of emotional ideas largely depend in all the arts upon the convergence of effects. Such a convergence is produced in symphonic music when a pastoral theme is announced in the high passionless voice of the oboe, and in the drama when a speech is uttered by an actor physically fitted and costumed for his role. Pope exemplifies the idea poetically in two couplets: “oft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows. But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar.”
This principle is of basic importance in decoration, and will be found, as we proceed with this study, to enter into every problem of composition. No room can be beautiful without a convergence of decorative effects, and any room will be more or less beautiful as the convergence is more or less complete. Whatever is said by the proportions of a room, and by its dominant lines and shapes, must be affirmed, not contradicted, by its coloring. Thus is we make low tones of olive, golden-brown or blue dominant in a long, low room filled with furniture largely characterised by horizontal lines and long low shapes, the mind is convinced and satisfied. But if we treat such a room in a gay scheme of azure, rose and ivory, or if we venture upon a staid and somber coloring in a room marked by light yielding forms and gay upturned curves, the mind, perplexed by the pull of opposing esthetic forces, is dissatisfied, and filled with the consciousness of confusion and hence of ugliness.
In the three following chapters we shall study the grammar of decoration, and shall attempt to develop, as fully as possible in so limited a compass, the emotional significance or meaning of the elementary factors of the art. With the completion of this task we shall be equipped to take up the principles of composition, which underlie the art of selecting and combining these elements into artistic wholes.