Art and Craft

Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced,^[3] the movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920. Some consider that it is the root of the Modern Style, a British expression of what later came to be called the Art Nouveau movement.^[4] Others consider that it is the incarnation of Art Nouveau in England.^[5]

Others consider Art and Crafts to be in opposition to Art Nouveau.^[6] Arts and Crafts indeed criticized Art Nouveau for its use of industrial materials such as iron.

In Japan, it emerged in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and was anti-industrial in its orientation.^[3][7] It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s,^[1] and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards.^[8]

The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887,^[9] although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least 20 years. It was inspired by the ideas of historian Thomas Carlyle, art critic John Ruskin, and designer William Morris.^[10] In Scotland, it is associated with key figures such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh.^[11] Viollet le Duc's books on nature and Gothique art also play an essential part in the esthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface", as well as displaying "vulgarity in detail".^[12]

Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),^[13] all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly-made things.^[14] The organizers were "unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits."^[15] Owen Jones, for example, complained that "the architect, the upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter" produced "novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence."^[15] From these criticisms of manufactured goods emerged several publications that set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analysed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for "more logic in the application of decoration."^[14]

Other works followed in a similar vein, such as Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), Gottfried Semper's Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ("Science, Industry and Art") (1852), Ralph Wornum's Analysis of Ornament (1856), Redgrave's Manual of Design (1876), and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856).^[14] The Grammar of Ornament was particularly influential, liberally distributed as a student prize and running into nine reprints by 1910.^[14]

Jones 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".^[16] A fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, whereas these writers advocated flat and simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that "style" demanded sound construction before ornamentation, and a proper awareness of the quality of materials used. "Utility must have precedence over ornamentation."^[17]

However, the design reformers of the mid-19th century did not go as far as the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. They were more concerned with ornamentation than construction, they had an incomplete understanding of methods of manufacture,^[17] and they did not criticise industrial methods as such. By contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.

Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic Revival in architecture. For example, he advocated truth to material, structure, and function, as did the Arts and Crafts artists.^[18] Pugin articulated the tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society with the Middle Ages,^[19] such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor – 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 he "reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmanship 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 which he specified for a building in 1841, "rush chairs, oak tables", as "the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo."^[19]

The Arts and Crafts philosophy was derived in large measure from John Ruskin's social criticism, deeply influenced by the work of Thomas Carlyle.^[20] Ruskin related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of its 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 that they made. He believed factory-made works to be "dishonest," and that handwork and craftsmanship merged dignity with labour.^[21]

On the artistic side Ruskin was influenced by his contemporary Viollet le Duc whom he taught to all of his pupils. In a letter to one of his pupils Ruskin writes : "There is only one book of any value and that is the Dictionnary of Viollet le Duc. Everyone should learn French". And according to some Ruskin's influence on Arts and Crafts was supplanted in 1860 by that of Viollet le Duc.^[22]

His followers favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about the loss of traditional skills, but they were more troubled by the effects of the factory system than by machinery itself.^[23] William Morris's idea of "handicraft" was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery.^[24] Morris admired Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice and had read Modern Painters, but he did not share Ruskin's admiration for J. M. W. Turner^[25] and his writings on art indicate a lack of interest in easel painting as such. On his side, Ruskin dissented firmly from the idea that became Arts-and-Crafts orthodoxy, that decoration should be flat and should not represent three-dimensional forms.^[26]

William Morris (1834–1896) was the towering figure in late 19th-century design and the main influence on the Arts and Crafts movement. The aesthetic and social vision of the movement grew out of ideas that he developed in the 1850s with the Birmingham Set – a group of students at the University of Oxford including Edward Burne-Jones, who combined a love of Romantic literature with a commitment to social reform.^[27] John William Mackail notes that, for the Set, "Carlyle's Past and Present stood alongside of [Ruskin's] Modern Painters as inspired and absolute truth."^[28] The medievalism of Malory's Morte d'Arthur set the standard for their early style.^[29] In Burne-Jones' words, they intended to "wage Holy warfare against the age".^[30]

Morris began experimenting with various crafts and designing furniture and interiors.^[32] He was personally involved in manufacture as well as design,^[32] which was 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".^[32]

In 1861, Morris began making furniture and decorative objects commercially, modelling his designs on medieval styles and using bold forms and strong colours. His patterns were based on flora and fauna, and his products were inspired by the vernacular or domestic traditions of the British countryside. Some were deliberately left unfinished in order to display the beauty of the materials and the work of the craftsman, thus creating a rustic appearance. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form.^[33]

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", The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (2002)^{[34][page needed]}

William Morris shared Ruskin's critique of industrial society and at one time or another attacked the modern factory, the use of machinery, the division of labor, capitalism and the loss of traditional craft methods. But his attitude to machinery was inconsistent. He said at one point that production by machinery was "altogether an evil",^[12] but at others times, he was willing to commission work from manufacturers who were able to meet his standards with the aid of machines.^[35] Morris 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 labor.^[36] The cultural historian Fiona McCarthy said of Morris 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."^[37]

Morris insisted that the artist should be a craftsman-designer working by hand^[12] and advocated a society of free craftspeople, such as 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."^[38] Medieval art was the model for much of Arts and Crafts design, and medieval life, literature and building was idealized by the movement.

Morris's followers also had differing views about machinery and the factory system. For example, C. R. Ashbee, a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, said in 1888, that, "We do not reject the machine, we welcome it. But we would desire to see it mastered."^[12][39] After unsuccessfully pitting his Guild and School of Handicraft guild against modern methods of manufacture, he acknowledged that "Modern civilisation rests on machinery",^[12] but he continued to criticise 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."^[40] William Arthur Smith Benson, on the other hand, had no qualms about adapting the Arts and Crafts style to metalwork produced under industrial conditions (see Crawford quotation above).

Morris and his followers believed the division of labour on which modern industry depended was undesirable, but the extent to which every design should be carried out by the designer was a matter for debate and disagreement. 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 essential to the definition of craftsmanship. Although Morris was famous for getting hands-on experience himself of many crafts (including weaving, dying, printing, calligraphy and embroidery), he did not regard the separation of designer and executant in his factory as problematic. Walter Crane, a close political associate of Morris's, took an unsympathetic view of the division of labour on both moral and artistic grounds, and strongly advocated that designing and making should come from the same hand. Lewis Foreman Day, a friend and contemporary of Crane's, as unstinting as Crane in his admiration of Morris, disagreed strongly with Crane. He thought that the separation of design and execution was not only inevitable in the modern world, but also that only that sort of specialisation allowed the best in design and the best in making.^[41]

Few of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society insisted that the designer should also be the maker, although they considered it important that the maker should be credited, which was the practice in the catalogues of their exhibitions. 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."^[42] 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".^[42]

Many of the Arts and Crafts movement designers were socialists, including Morris, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, C.R. Ashbee, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner, and A. H. Mackmurdo.^[43] In the early 1880s, Morris was spending more of his time on promoting socialism than on designing and making.^[44] Ashbee established a community of craftsmen called the Guild of Handicraft in east London, later moving to Chipping Campden.^[9] Those adherents who were not socialists, such as Alfred Hoare Powell,^[23] advocated a more humane and personal relationship between employer and employee. Lewis Foreman Day was another successful and influential Arts and Crafts designer who was not a socialist, despite his long friendship with Crane.

In Britain, the movement was associated with dress reform,^[45] ruralism, the garden city movement^[8] and the folk-song revival. All were linked, in some degree, by the ideal of "the Simple Life".^[46] In continental Europe the movement was associated with the preservation of national traditions in building, the applied arts, domestic design and costume.