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If Englishman William Morris (1834-1896) did not single-handedly create the Arts and Crafts movement in his home country, he was certainly at the centre of it, as its very embodiment. A person of enormous creative energy, Morris was an embroiderer, a calligrapher, a pattern designer, a fabric-maker and an architectural preservationist, among many other things.
He was devoted to the sacred cow of decorative arts as an idealisation of the handmade object during the Industrial Revolution. In an era when factory workers were increasingly cranking out standardised household objects on assembly lines, his firm, Morris and Company, held high the torch of the nobility of individually handcrafted creations, from mantlepieces to wallpaper, reed-seat chairs to candlesticks. One shudders to think what they would have thought of our plastic world a century later.
The Arts and Crafts movement was officially born in Great Britain around 1880, and it developed until the First World War. From England its influence spread rapidly throughout Europe and the US. Offshoots of the original sprang up by the turn of the century in Vienna’s Sessionist art, in Catalan Modernisme and in Frank Lloyd Wright’s American furniture and buildings. A movement in the sincerest sense of the word, Arts and Crafts ideals glorified the design of utilitarian objects and the importance of know-how in everyday life. It mattered to them what sort of trees their ceiling beams came from.
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in London in 1887, also revered humanist philosophy and the aesthetics of Gothic architecture and design. Morris and his supporters were pioneers in the sensibilities of a historic preservation movement (in their Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) that respected both the forms and the uses of the generations of architecture that preceded them. The ‘Gothic’ style of the Arts and Crafts movement, however, is less ‘neo’ or ‘retro’ than it is ‘Gothic continued’ in the spirit of Augustus Pugin (1812-1852), who ranted against the evils of the Industrial Revolution and lived in a sort of romanticised Middle Ages.
The subsequent generation, which included Morris, was less fanatical in its abhorrence of mechanised industry, but definitely included humanists for whom the individual work of human hands was paramount. But did they revere the Gothic? It’s quite clear from this exhibition that they did; Morris went so far as to create two original printing fonts based on hand-lettered medieval script. His zealously embellished edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a sight to behold. His collaborator Edward Burne-Jones said of it, “It will be like a pocket cathedral, so full of design, and I think Morris the greatest master of ornament in the world.”
Many other unique objects of superb quality are among the 300 works on loan from such prestigious institutions as the William Morris Society, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Paintings by well-known Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the aforementioned Burne-Jones, hang side by side with Morris’ own tapestries and wallpaper, in an appropriately egalitarian installation in which craft equals art. Dozens of Morris’ signature wall decorations are on view, and I was particularly arrested by a presentation of the woodblocks that were used to produce them. In some cases you can match individual woodblock forms with the subtly coloured prints on the wall. Such a focus on the handmade seems, in our age of instant digital reproduction, at the very least comforting and quaint, and at the most, awe-inspiring.