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| THE
ARTS & CRAFTS MOVEMENT 1851-1914 |
| A
return to naturalism & craftsmanship |
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1851, Victorian England.
"Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean."
The Earthly Paradise William Morris.
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 The
main figure associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement is
William Morris -designer, writer and poet. A Victorian,
also a Romantic, he was a man idealising the traditional life
of England while all around him raged the Industrial Revolution;
a totally new phenomenon, his being the first nation to experience
rapid industrialization.
1851 was the year of the Great Exhibition
a celebration of the product of the Industrial Revolution
in England. Sponsored by Prince Albert and held in the Crystal
Palace, a huge building of iron and glass built especially for
the occasion, this exhibition was a stylistic anarchy, with
most objects displaying ornament for ornaments’ sake.
Ornament was seen as exotic, giving an object status,
making it look more expensive than it was, and disguising its
often banal function as well as poor construction. Handmade
decorated objects were expensive so new machining and casting
processes simulated these. But ornament was often arbitrary,
drawn from ornamental pattern books of the period, which were
collections of engravings illustrating decorative forms.
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Great
Exhibition piece
from the catalogue
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Product
design was driven by technology and was treated as a process
of decorating the surface of the product, an afterthought rather
than incorporating its essential design. This was anathema to
Morris and his contemporaries, who rejected this use of unnecessary
decoration, seeing instead the need for a new design ethos to
clearly express the function of the thing itself, and to emphasise
the materials and quality of construction. Decoration, when
used, was to be in harmony with these principles.
In 1861, William Morris formed the Arts and Crafts company,
The Firm (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), to create
a new aesthetic for design, substituting well-made, well-designed
products for the mass-produced goods of the factories. They
described themselves as 'fine art workmen in painting, carving,
furniture and metals'.
Note that they called themselves ‘workmen’ and not ‘artists’.
To them, the most impressive objects in the Great Exhibition
were the machines and utensils because they were designs of
absolute utility, lacking ornament and achieving a ‘noble simplicity’
as a result.
In industry, the intensive use of machines and breaking
up of the production of goods into specialised factory areas
led to a fragmentation of the design and fabrication activities.
This separated design from the making of the product and meant
that the skilled artisan no longer created and designed the
product as a craftsman. With industrialisation, skilled jobs
were replaced by semi- and unskilled machine operators.
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Voysey
chair
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William Morris saw the over-ornamentation of mass produced goods
as symptomatic of the alienation of workers from the products
they made. In the factories, designs were drawn from pattern
books and workers and designers had no individual control over
the finished article, so quality suffered The answer, Morris
believed, lay in a return to the crafts traditions of old England.
He wanted to return to the mediaeval tradition of the Guild,
the association of craftsmen working together.
He was influenced in this belief by John Ruskin, whose book
The Stones of Venice had a profound influence on him.
In this book, Ruskin viewed the development of Gothic architecture
and its beauty in terms of the simple moral virtues of mediaeval
society that produced it. Ruskin despised the new industrial
era pioneered in England and in his writings pushed the concept
that decoration had to be based on stylised natural forms.
He declared the Gothic style was the model to follow,
designers needing to re-establish the forms indigenous to Britain.
Rejecting what he saw as the ‘fatal newness of the furniture’
displayed at the Great Exhibition, he saw it all as ‘machine-made
ornament’. To him, true design lay in making things by hand,
and this gave joy in work to the craftsman.
While he didn’t want to do away with machines, in his printing
activities William Morris followed a policy of excluding all
machinery in favour of tools immediately controlled by hand.
Seeking a new aesthetic based on handcraft but using machines
to assist its production, he said:
"It is not this or that tangible steel or brass
machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible
machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of
us all."
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| Morris
wallpaper design |
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His
greatest achievement, apart from an enduring influence on designers
was in the field of wallpapers, book design and textile design;
which were influenced by his knowledge of Mediaeval works and
observation of forms in nature.
Some William Morris wallpapers are still in production, in their
original colours.
His legacy lay in his idea that any design for living
-a chair, wallpapers, book or building should be an artistic
product- an object designed, not merely a manufactured
one.
For as he said:
"If you want a golden rule..this is it: have
nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or
believe to be beautiful."
Morris and his followers in the Arts and Crafts movement believed
that each material incorporated its own value (eg: the natural
colour and pattern of the grain in wood). And the first principle
of good design was to respect the properties of the materials
used. This respect also was transferred to the workers producing
the goods; craftsmanship and pride in work leading to the survival
of humanism and high standards. For as he said:
"it is eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art,
the one certain solace of labour."
While William Morris is the figure we most associate with the
Arts and Crafts Movement, this movement was in fact a collection
of craft societies or guilds, whose members followed to a large
extent the design theories of Morris.
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Philip
Webb table |
Other significant designers associated with the Arts and Crafts
movement at this time were: Philip Webb; Walter Crane; W R Lethaby;
Charles Voysey; William Benson; A H Mackmurdo; Charles Rennie
Mackintosh.
Philip Webb followed the Gothic tradition in his furniture design,
with simple, sturdy forms. An architect and interior designer,
he designed 'The Red House' for Morris in 1860, and was the
main furniture designer for ‘The Firm’.
 Walter
Crane was an illustrator and designer of books, textiles, wallpapers
and ceramic tiles; and his flowing style full of rythm and movement
influenced the development of Art Nouveau in Europe where his
work was popular. His style of book design served to unify the
text and illustration, the lettering having the same weight
and spacing as the image, harmonising them in a way reminiscent
of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts with their exquisitely
hand painted text and image interwoven. But designed instead
for mass production.
William Lethaby was an associate of Walter Crane and in his
furniture designs he epitomised the simple forms of the Arts
and Crafts Movement. In this way his furniture emphasised the
construction and materials used, with minimal embellishment.
Charles Voysey, an architect, first designed wallpapers, textiles
and books, later furniture and metalwork. His work was inspired
by the traditions of Gothic designs and by the swirling patterns
of Morris and Mackmurdo, using lighter colours in his own patterns,
often based on plant forms. Voysey’s domesticware was simple
in his limiting of decoration to minimal forms, such as his
recurring ‘heart’ and ‘flowerhead’ motifs. The work he produced
with timber followed Arts and Crafts ideals about celebrating
the properties of the material used.
William Benson was an associate of William Morris, an architect
who designed metalwork, furniture and wallpapers, and worked
closely with ‘The Firm’ of Morris. In his furniture he combined
metalwork and wood inlays with rich woods such as mahogany.
Unlike most of his colleagues, he embraced modern technology,
using machinery extensively and manufacturing domestic metalwares.
Arthur Mackmurdo, an architect and designer, followed
the fluid style of Morris in his designs for furniture, textiles
and books. Derived from natural plant forms, his work had a
stronger sense of movement than Morris’ and its dynamic quality
and restless curves influenced Art Nouveau. However, like Voysey,
he rejected the curvilinear design of Art Nouveau, calling it
a ‘strange decorative disease’
 Charles
Rennie Mackintosh was an architect, a member of The Glasgow
Four group of designers who developed their own style of
furniture and interior design based on the Arts and Crafts principles.
His furniture was more like sculpture than domesticware, emphasising
architectural forms with elongated backs reminiscent of Voysey,
but extended to exaggerated proportions.
Design icons they undoubtedly were, but solidly
constructed they weren’t. Far removed from the useful function
of a fireside chair -having a coat thrown over it to keep the
sitter warm... a coat thrown over a Mackintosh chair would probably
have destroyed it.
The chairs designed by Mackintosh incorporated Japanese design,
then becoming known in Europe, especially in their grid motifs
and patterns formed from parallel lines.
In its emphasis on being a thing of beauty, its
linear angularity, painted surfaces, and unusual abstract references
to natural forms, Mackintosh’s style was a primary element in
the development of Art Nouveau.
QMR97
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