Art Craft Class
Art Craft Class
The Arts and Crafts Movement was a British, Canadian, Australian and American design movement that flourished between 1880 and 1910. It was instigated by the artist and writer William Morris in the 1860s and was inspired by the writings of John Ruskin. It influenced architecture, domestic design and the decorative arts, using simple forms and a medieval style of decoration. It advocated truth to materials, traditional craftsmanship and economic reform.
Design principles
The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction against the eclectic revival of historic styles of the Victorian era and the "soulless" machine-production of the Industrial Revolution. This process of reform had been initiated by the Schools Of Design from 1852, and its principles set out in a series of propositions by the outstanding ornamentist Owen Jones in his Grammar of Ornament, a copy of which William Morris owned. Its later practitioners, were more influenced by Ruskin, who was not a designer, but merely a critic. Although like the reformers like Owen Jones he advocated the equality of all the arts, he stressed the importance and pleasure of work; considering the machine to be the root of many social ills. This led some to turn entirely towards handcraft, which made their products expensive and affordable only by the rich.
The appearance of Arts and Crafts objects resulted from the principles involved in their making. One of their hallmarks was simplicity of form, without superfluous decoration, often exposing their construction. Another was truth to material, preserving and emphasizing the qualities of the materials used. Arts and Crafts designers often used patterns inspired by British flora and fauna and drew on the vernacular, or domestic, traditions of the British countryside. Many set up workshops in rural areas and revived old techniques. They were influenced by the Gothic Revival (1830–1880) and were interested in all things medieval, using bold forms and strong colors based on medieval designs. They also shared a belief in the moral purpose of art, as expounded by John Ruskin, author of The Nature of Gothic . Truth to material, structure and function had also been advocated by A.W.N. Pugin, a leading exponent of the Gothic Revival.
The development of these principles was propelled by a revulsion against the style and methods of the designs shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which were ornate, redundant, artificial and ignored the essential qualities of the materials used. 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". 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). 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 have no patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain". These ideas were taken up by William Morris. Where a fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated in a natural motif made to look as real as possible, a William Morris wallpaper, like the Artichoke design illustrated above, would use a flat and simplified natural motif. In order to express the beauty inherent in craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a certain rustic and robust effect. Whereas Cole, Jones and Wyatt had accepted machine production, Morris wedded design criticism to social criticism, made things himself and insisted that the artist should become a craftsman-designer.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Arts and Crafts ideals had affected the design and manufacture of all the decorative arts in Britain.
Social principles
The proponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement were against the principle of a division of labor, which in some cases could be independent of industrial machinery. They were in favor of the master craftsman, who created all the parts of an item and assembled and finished it, with help from apprentices. This contrasted with the French Manufactories, where everything was oriented towards the fastest production possible. The Arts and Crafts movement sought to have the maker work with his hands at every step of creation. Some, such as Morris, were more than willing to design products for machine production if it did not involve the division of labor or the loss of craft talent. Morris designed numerous carpets for machine production in series.
The decline of rural handicrafts, corresponding to the rise of industrialized society, was a cause for concern for many designers and social reformers, who feared the loss of traditional skills and creativity. For Ruskin, a healthy society depended on skilled and creative workers. Morris and other socialist designers, such as Walter Crane and C.R.Ashbee, looked forward to a future society of free craftspeople, which Morris believed had existed in 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."
Yet, while the Arts and Crafts Movement was in large part a reaction to industrialization, if looked at on the whole, it was neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern. Some of the European factions believed that machines were in fact necessary, but they should only be used to relieve the tedium of mundane, repetitive tasks. At the same time, some Arts and Crafts leaders felt that objects should also be affordable. The conflict between quality production and 'demo' design, and the attempt to reconcile the two, dominated design debate at the turn of the twentieth century.
There was debate in the Movement as to whether the machine should be rejected or not. Those who sought a compromise between the efficiency of the machine and the skill of the craftsman tried to find a way in which the craftsman might master the machine rather than becoming its slave. Morris was not entirely consistent. He regarded production by machinery as "altogether an evil", but where he could find manufacturers willing to work to his own exacting standards, he would get them to make his designs. In his socialist writings, 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. Ashbee, after twenty years of pitting his Guild and School of Handicraft guild against modern methods of manufacture, acknowledged that "Modern civilization rest on machinery." This conflict was exemplified in the German Arts and Crafts movement, by the clash between two leading figures of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde. Muthesius, who was head of design education for the German Government, was a champion of standardization. He believed in mass production, in affordable democratic art. Van de Velde, on the other hand, saw mass production as threat to creativity and individuality.
The movement was associated with socialist ideas in the persons of Morris, Crane and Ashbee.
History of the movement
Great Britain
William Morris (1834–1896) was the central figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris's ideas emerged from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which he had been a part, and were influenced by Ruskin's books The Stones of Venice and Unto this Last , which sought to relate the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and designs. Ruskin, of course, was not a designer. In 1861 a company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., was founded by a group of friends which included William Morris and this firm eventually produced decorative objects for the home including wallpaper, textiles, furniture and stained glass, designed and made under the supervision of the partners. In 1890 Morris set up the Kelmscott Press, for which he designed a typeface based on Nicolas Jenson's letter forms of the fifteenth century.
Red House, Bexleyheath, London (1859), designed for Morris by architect Philip Webb, exemplifies the early Arts and Crafts style, with its well-proportioned solid forms, deep porches, steep roof, pointed window arches, brick fireplaces and wooden fittings. Webb rejected the grand classical style, found inspiration in British vernacular architecture and attempted to express the texture of ordinary materials, such as stone and tiles, with an asymmetrical and quaint building composition.
Morris's ideas spread in t
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