Arts and Crafts movement
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This article is about the art and design movement. For handicrafts generally, see Handicraft. For other uses, see Arts & Crafts (disambiguation).
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international movement in the decorative and fine arts that began in Britain and flourished in Europe and North America between 1880 and 1910,[1] emerging in Japan in the 1920s. It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and was essentially anti-industrial.[2][3][4] It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s,[5] and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards.[6]
The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887,[7] although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least twenty years. It was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), writer John Ruskin (1819–1900), and designer William Morris (1834–1896).[1]
The movement developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles,[5]and spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and North America.[8] It was largely a reaction against the perceived impoverished state of the decorative arts at the time and the conditions in which they were produced.[2]
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[hide]Social and design principles[edit]
"Unlike their counterparts in the United States, most Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain had strong, slightly incoherent, negative feelings about machinery. They thought of 'the craftsman' as free, creative, and working with his hands, 'the machine' as soulless, repetitive, and inhuman. These contrasting images derive in part from John Ruskin's (1819-1900) The Stones of Venice, an architectural history of Venice that contains a powerful denunciation of modern industrialism to which Arts and Crafts designers returned again and again. Distrust for the machine lay behind the many little workshops that turned their backs on the industrial world around 1900, using preindustrial techniques to create what they called 'crafts.'"
Alan Crawford, "W. A. S. Benson, Machinery, and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain"[9]
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The Arts and Crafts style emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid 19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production, and was in part a response to items shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 that were ornate, artificial and ignored the qualities of the materials used. But it was as much a movement of social reform as design reform and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.
The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner has said that exhibits in the Great Exhibition showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface" and "vulgarity in detail".[10] Design reform began with the organisers of the Exhibition itself, Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),[11] and the dislike of excessive ornament and badly made things was not exclusive to the Arts and Crafts movement.[12] Owen Jones, for example, declared that "Ornament ... must be secondary to the thing decorated", that there must be "fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented", and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain".[13] Where a fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, an Arts and Crafts, like the Artichoke design illustrated above, would use a flat and simplified natural motif.
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William Morris, a major figure in 19th century design reform, whose ideas inspired the Arts and Crafts Movement, advocated production by traditional craft methods but was inconsistent in his view of what place machinery should play. At one point he said that production by machinery was "altogether an evil",[10] but he was willing to use manufacturers able to work to his standards with the aid of machinery;[14] and he said that, in a "true society", where neither luxuries nor cheap trash were made, machinery could be improved and used to reduce the hours of labour.[15] Fiona MacCarthy says that "unlike later zealots like Gandhi, William Morris had no practical objections to the use of machinery per se so long as the machines produced the quality he needed."[16] Morris's followers also had subtly differing views or changed their minds over time. C.R.Ashbee, for example, a central figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement, shared Morris's ambivalence. At the time of his Guild of Handicraft, initiated in 1888, he said, "We do not reject the machine, we welcome it. But we would desire to see it mastered."[10][17] After unsuccessfully pitting his Guild and School of Handicraft guild against modern methods of manufacture, he acknowledged that "Modern civilization rests on machinery",[10] but he continued to criticize the deleterious effects of what he called "mechanism", saying that "the production of certain mechanical commodities is as bad for the national health as is the production of slave-grown cane or child-sweated wares."[18]
Morris insisted that the artist should be a craftsman-designer working by hand[10] and advocated a society of free craftspeople, which he believed had existed during the Middle Ages. "Because craftsmen took pleasure in their work", he wrote, "the Middle Ages was a period of greatness in the art of the common people. ... The treasures in our museums now are only the common utensils used in households of that age, when hundreds of medieval churches - each one a masterpiece - were built by unsophisticated peasants."[19] Medieval art was the model for much Arts and Crafts design and medieval life, before capitalism and the factory system, was idealised by the movement.
Morris and his followers believed the division of labour on which modern industry depended was undesirable, but not all Arts and Crafts artists carried out every stage in the making of goods themselves, and it was only in the twentieth century that that became an essential part of the definition of craftsmanship. The founders of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society did not insist that the designer should also be the maker. Peter Floud, writing in the 1950s, said that "The founders of the Society ... never executed their own designs, but invariably turned them over to commercial firms."[20] The idea that the designer should be the maker and the maker the designer derived "not from Morris or early Arts and Crafts teaching, but rather from the second-generation elaboration doctrine worked out in the first decade of [the twentieth] century by men such as W. R. Lethaby".[20]
The Arts and Crafts Movement was associated with socialist ideas in the persons of Morris, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, Ashbee and others. In the early 1880s Morris was spending more of his time on socialist propaganda than on designing and making.[21] Ashbee established a community of craftsmen, the Guild of Handicraft, in east London, later moving to Chipping Campden.[7] Those adherents who were not socialists, for example, Alfred Hoare Powell,[22] advocated a more humane and personal relationship between employer and employee. Lewis Foreman Day, a very successful and influential Arts and Crafts designer, was not a socialist either, despite his long friendship with Crane.
In Britain the movement was associated with dress reform,[23] ruralism, the garden city movement[6] and the folk-song revival, and in continental Europe with the preservation of national traditions in building, the applied arts, domestic design and costume.[citation needed]
Origins and influences[edit]
A. W. N. Pugin[edit]
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Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by A.W.N. Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic revival in architecture. For example, he, like the Arts and Crafts artists, advocated truth to material, structure and function.[24] Pugin articulated the tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society (such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor) unfavorably with the Middle Ages,[25] a tendency that became routine with Ruskin, Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. His book Contrasts (1836) drew examples of bad modern buildings and town planning in contrast with good medieval examples, and his biographer Rosemary Hill notes that in it he "reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmaship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail." She describes the spare furnishings he specified for a building in 1841 - "rush chairs, oak tables" - as "the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo."[25]
John Ruskin[edit]
The Arts and Crafts philosophy derived in large measure from Ruskin's social criticism, which related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of work. Ruskin considered the sort of mechanized production and division of labour that had been created in the industrial revolution to be "servile labour" and he thought that a healthy and moral society required independent workers who designed the things they made. His followers favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about the loss of traditional skills, but they were arguably more troubled by effects of the factory system than by machinery itself[22] and William Morris's idea of "handicraft" was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery.[26]
William Morris[edit]
Morris, the towering figure in late 19th century design, was the main influence on the Arts and Crafts movement. The aesthetic and social vision of the Arts and Crafts movement derived from ideas he developed in the 1850s with a group of students at the University of Oxford, who combined a love of Romantic literature with a commitment to social reform.[27]By 1855 they had discovered Ruskin and, believing there to be a contrast between the barbarity of contemporary art and the painters preceding Raphael (1483-1530), they formed themselves into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to pursue their artistic aims. The medievalism of Mallory's Morte d'Arthur set the standard for their early style.[28] In Edward Burne-Jones' words, they intended to "wage Holy warfare against the age".[29]
Morris began experimenting with various crafts and designing furniture and interiors.[31] He was personally involved in manufacture as well as design,[31] which was to be the hallmark of the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin had argued that the separation of the intellectual act of design from the manual act of physical creation was both socially and aesthetically damaging; Morris further developed this idea, insisting that no work should be carried out in his workshops before he had personally mastered the appropriate techniques and materials, arguing that "without dignified, creative human occupation people became disconnected from life".[31]
In 1861 Morris began making furniture and decorative objects commercially, modeling his designs on medieval styles and using bold forms and strong colors. His patterns were based on flora and fauna and his products were inspired by the vernacular or domestic traditions of the British countryside. In order to display the beauty of the materials and the work of the craftsman, some were deliberately left unfinished, creating a rustic appearance. Truth to materials, structure and function became characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement.
