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Published: 27 May 2010
by DAN CARRIER

IT was while waiting for a train that the artist and art critic Roger Fry experienced an epiphany that was to change the look of British homes forever.

“He sat in a Victorian waiting room,” his biographer, Camden-based art historian Frances Spalding reveals. “He looked about him, and took in the stained-glass windows, the heavy woodwork, the pots, plants, chairs and light fittings. It remained in his mind as a collage of horrors. It struck him that not one of the items in that railway room had been made by someone who enjoyed the process of making, or because it would give people pleasure.”

Fry concluded the furnishings were intrinsically attached to the idea of social status – that heavy Victorian decor said something about you, suggested a membership of a class and paid respects to a certain British way of doing things.

He decided to do something about it.

This week, conser­vation group English Heritage have celebrated his contribution to art and design by unveiling a blue plaque at his Fitzroy Square address, where he established in 1913 for a short time Omega, a crafts factory turning out the very best in post-Victorian, 20th-century design.

“He was against conformity, he was against machine finishes, against products as a means to enhance social status,” says Frances.

He chose the word Omega as it was the last letter in the Greek alphabet, and, as Frances says, “he wanted it to be last word in fashion. He wanted freshness and spontaneity. It was original, it had a preference for sensibility over wealth.”

The Victorian staidness was to be banished, says Frances. “They covered anything that was capable of being decorated,” she says. “They used strong colours that had previously been confined to children’s toys and Gypsy caravans.”

As Frances reveals, Omega was not without its critics – one of which, surprisingly, was  George Bernard Shaw, who had encouraged Fry at the start of the venture to the tune of handing over a grant of £1,000 to help get the studio started. But he was not impressed by what he decided was “Fitzroy Street squalor,” and tried to persuade Fry he should install a shop front to show off the work the studio was producing. “Your business is like a private clique,” he wrote to Fry, and warned the building would “look like an ortho­paedic hospital,” a remarkable statement considering that is exactly what the building later became.

The studio was set up in 1913 just before the the outbreak of the First World War. The careful creation of high quality household goods was not on a list of priorities, and the studio had to close in 1919. But not before Fry had helped radically alter British aesthetic sensibility, and lay the ground for a British avant garde movement.

While the war hit his firm, it also underlined his intrinsic belief that the machine age carried great dangers with it. The war was, he recognised, organised mass murder made possible by technology: and the link between mass production and the deaths of a generation in the fields of northern France was not lost on him. 

Omega closed in 1919, just six years after it opened: but it’s  influence on future designers is not underestimated, as the Blue Plaque, gracing the building, reveals.

• Frances Spalding’s book Roger Fry: Art and Life is published by University of California Press