The Arts & Crafts Movement (1890 - 1929)
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Yurie Goto | Cesar Sanchez | Anna Lee
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he last decades of the Nineteenth Century were characterized by the rise of industrialization and the factory system, the British Empire's unstoppable expansion into Asia and Africa, and by the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This movement was a reaction to the growing dehumanization of work in the modern world. With the onset of the industrial revolution, workers were used as part of a production system, they no longer produced things from beginning to end as craftsmen. Inspired by a belief in art and beauty and by the writings of John Ruskin, who argued that great art only happens in a society that values the work of true craftsmen, the Arts and Crafts Movement became popular worldwide, causing a revival in handicrafts and high quality work in architecture, textiles, fine arts, and more.
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t is important to note that the Arts and Crafts Movement is an exception to the general trend in social organization and labor at the time, Great Britain was enjoying worldwide dominance due to its industrial base and iron industries, and it was the first society to develop hugely rich capitalists who made their money on the backs of everyday laborers. Many of the wealthy clients who bought stuff from the Arts and Crafts Movement were able to do so because they made money through mass production that cared more about profits than quality. Ruskin’s concern with the emergence of the factory and the dominance of processes over content and craft took the form of championing the individual. He was concerned to discover and demonstrate how craft could flourish even against this background of factory and the onset of mass production with its alienation from context and meaning.
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Towards the middle of the 19th century, a small group of young English painters, poets, and critics formed a secret society known as the Pre-Raphaelite as a reaction against what they felt was “the frivolous art of the day.” The group’s intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They deeply admired the simplicities of the early 15th century and wanted to bring English art back to a greater “truth to nature,” something they felt had been lost. Although the official “Brotherhood” lasted only a few years, their work and objectives influenced a second wave of English painters and artisans, which included Edward Burne-Jones, British artist and designer, and William Morris, an artist, designer, printer, typographer, bookbinder, craftsman, poet, writer and champion of socialist ideals, who came down to London from Oxford University to begin their careers in 1856.
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The Arts and Crafts Movement, a mixture of personal and collective efforts, initially developed in England as a reaction to the growing dehumanization of work in the modern world. The members feared that industrialization was destroying the environment in which traditional skills and crafts could prosper, as machine production had taken the pride, skill and design out of the quality of goods being manufactured. They believed that hand crafted objects were superior to those made by machine and that the rural craftsman had a superior lifestyle to those who slaved in the urban mills and factories. They were convinced that the general decline of artistic standards brought on by industrialization was linked to the nation’s social and moral decline.
Architects, Designers, Artisans, & Thinkers of the Arts & Crafts Movement
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any of the people who contributed to the Arts & Crafts Movement were often renaissance people with many talents and interests. The participants did not all share the same objectives or tastes but all were united in the desire to see well designed goods of every kind made available to all levels of society. • William Morris was a leading member and is widely credited as the founder of the Arts & Crafts Movement. He believed that a designer should have a working knowledge of any media that he used and as a result he spent a lot of time teaching himself a wide variety of techniques. Like many designers of his time, Morris was skilled in a wide range of arts and crafts. In 1861, Morris and his friends
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Ford Madox Brown, Edward BurneJones, Charles Faulkner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, P. P. Marshall, and Philip Webb founded a company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., which, under the supervision of the partners, designed and made deco-
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rative objects for the home, including wallpaper, textiles, furniture and stained glass. Later it was re-formed as Morris & Co.
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In 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, named after the village near Oxford, where he had lived since 1871. The Kelmscott Press produced high quality hand-printed books to be seen and cherished as an object of art. Morris designed and cut the typefaces, ornamental borders and title pages, which were based on the style of medieval man-
uscripts, while the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward BurneJones, created the illustrations. The books were printed on handmade paper, copied from 15th century Italian samples, and bound in vellum.
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“The Defence of Guenevere” • John Ruskin is viewed by many as a member of a group of men who began the Arts & Crafts Movement in England during the latter half of the 19th century. Ruski was critical of the new industrialization taking place in Europe and America. His most radical idea was his total rejection of any machine produced products, as he characterized all machine made objects as “dishonest.” He believed, along with Morris, that hand-
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work and craftsmanship brought dignity to labor. Ruskin is most famous for his two books; “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1849) and “The Stones of Venice” (1853).
• Walter Crane was part of the Arts & Crafts Movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children’s books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts.
“The Lighthouse”
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• Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, was known best for his architectural work and designs.
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The Arts and Crafts Movement members formed various crafts guilds to try to recreate the dignified working environment that existed in the medieval crafts guilds. The medieval crafts guilds were groups of artists, architects, and craftsmen who formed an alliance to maintain high standards of workmanship, regulate trade and competition, and protect the secrets of their crafts. The guilds were usually composed of smaller workshops of associated crafts from the same town that banded together into larger groups for their own protection and prosperity. They operated on a Master, Journeyman and Apprentice system where the master would take on apprentices to train them in the skills of his craft. They gave themselves names such as the Century Guild, the Guild of Saint George, the Art Workers Guild and the Guild of Handicraft.
Subsequently, this style was taken up by American designers with somewhat different results. In the United States, the Arts and Crafts style was also known as Mission style. This movement was inspired by the social reform concerns of thinkers such as Walter Crane and John Ruskin, together with the ideals of reformer and designer, William Morris.
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Tools/Technology of the Arts & Crafts Movement
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lthough technology seemed to have played an insignificant role in the Arts and Crafts Movement, it was actually one of the main reasons, if not the most influential reason, that the movement became what it is known as today. It is true that the movement occurred during the Industrial Revolution, where many
inventions were created and there were countless advancements in technology. There were inventions, like the rotary press that evolved into the web
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rotary press. There was also an engraving machine called the Benton Pantograph, which allowed scaling and limited manipulation of font design patterns, and the first successful linotype and monotype. Yet the purpose of the movement was for the exact opposite reason of embracing these inventions. People who believed and participated in the Arts and Crafts Movement turned away from the new technologies of that time and created quality work with old fashion techniques. A prime example of how illustrated books were created came from the Kelmscott Press. The press lasted from 1891 to 1898 and had produced 53 different books, totaling more than 18,000 copies. Morris used 15th century printing techniques to produce the books in the Kelmscott Press. He had found white unbleached handmade paper from the Batchelor mill and used very black ink that was thicker than usually and dried slower. Gebr체der J채necke, a German manufacturer, had manufactured the ink.
Morris had also produced some work in color and his sources came from various commercial suppliers. For the text and bindings, Morris used high quality vellum from Henry Band in Middlesex.
Morris used Albion presses, which were early iron hand printing presses. In particular, he had a Demy Albion Press and a Super Royal Genuine Albion Press. The presses worked by pulling a handle bar across, “ which causes an inclined piece of wedge-shaped steel, called the chill, to become perpendicular; in so doing the platen is forced down, and the impression takes place at the moment the chill is
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brought into a vertical position. On the return of the bar the platen is raised by a spiral spring, placed in a box and fixed at the head of the press.� During this time he also created three typefaces that were based on the style from the 15th century, which he used in the books he produced. These typefaces are Golden, Troy, and Chaucer. He used dark, bold typefaces with less spacing between the words and lines to create a more striking effect. Positioning and how the entire composition would be seen together was an important consideration for every page and every book. Morris had woodcuts to create the illustrations that went with the text, rather than the conventional wood or metal engravings. Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, and Charles March Gere created most of the woodcut illustrations for the books. He also used woodcut to create the ornaments, borders, and initials.
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For the creation of the book of Geoffrey Chaucer: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Morris had prepared the borders and ornamentation, which was then transferred to blocks by the engraver W.H. Hooper.
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alter Crane studied wood engraving at an early age with William James Linton. Wood engraving is a technique where the image is carved into the wood block. In 1894, he collaborated with William
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Morris to create a decorative page in The Story of the Glittering Plain. The style of the illustration was influenced by 16th century Italian and German woodcuts. 25
The Decline of the Arts & Crafts Movement
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reat consideration and care was put into every aspect of each well-designed home goods such as furniture, fabric, books, wallpaper and architecture, which resulted in a limited numbers. They could only fail in their socialist ideal of producing affordable quality hand-crafted design for the masses as the production costs of their designs were so high that they could only be purchased by the wealthy. This evolved English Arts and Crafts style came to be known as “Aesthetic Style.�
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The 'dark Satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution
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References • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 28
http://designhistory.org/ArtsCrafts.html http://www.morrissociety.org/ http://www.arts-crafts.com/ http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/ graphic_designers/william_morris/william_morris.html http://www.designhistory.org/ArtsCrafts.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_ Morris#The_Kelmscott_Press http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/teach/privatepress/ kelmscott.html http://www.alfredom.com/art/morris.htm http://www.kelmscottbookshop.com/store/16087. htm (Chaucer images) http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/ morris/ http://www.lib.umich.edu/pursuit-ideal-life-artwilliam-morris/kelms.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_engraving http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/virtual-
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tour/side_crane.htm (Crane Image) http://chrisdaunt.com/products-services (Wood Block Image) William Morris by Himself, ed. by Gillian Naylor. Little, Brown, and Co., Boston 1988. William Morris, by Linda Parry. Wilson Publishing Ltd., London 1996. William Morris Décor and Design, by Elizabeth Wilhide. Abrams, Inc. 1991. John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, Penguin 1985 John Ruskin, Our Future Voice- A Lesson in Craft and Vision By Michael Hulme, www.michaelhulme. co.uk (May 2003) The Arts & Crafts Movement
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