Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America by Eileen Boris

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 173 Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. By Eileen Boris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pp. xviii+261; illustrations, notes, index. $37.95. Before the appearance of this solid, insightful survey of the arts and crafts movement, scholars had focused primarily on its aes­ thetic achievements—rustic Mission furniture, organic art pottery, hand printing and bookbinding, and the early domestic architec­ ture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps the best of the previous stud­ ies, The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876—1916 (1972), an exhibition catalog edited by RobertJudson Clark, did suggest the so­ cial and philosophical underpinnings of the movement, but its au­ thors correctly emphasized analysis of artifacts. Eileen Boris in Art and Labor has provided a social and intellectual history of the move­ ment, its leaders and followers, its institutions and social goals, but she also never loses sight of its fundamental aesthetic involvement with objects. In fact, Boris opens the book by noting that Tiffany lamps and Rookwood pottery have once again become fashionable. This observation later takes on ironic significance as she explores the gradual failure of the movement—its abandonment of the goal of overcoming the alienation of labor by replacing the factory sys­ tem with craft guilds, and its emergence as a producer of aestheti­ cally pleasing domestic furnishings for the upper classes. The split between reformers and tastemakers not only dominates Boris’s study but also existed in embryo in the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, the movement’s two prophets. They main­ tained, in writings widely read by middle- and upper-class Ameri­ cans, that only skilled craftsmen who controlled all stages in a production process could attain satisfaction in their work and thus wholeness as human beings. At the same time, only objects pro­ duced by such craftsmen attained true beauty and possessed power to uplift and transform people who used them and were sur­ rounded by them in their daily lives. After briefly summarizing this social philosophy, and correctly noting that it represented both a radi­ cal attack on the factory system of industrial capitalism and a conser­ vative yearning for a preindustrial golden age of harmony and innocence, Boris explores its innumerable transformations in the hands of American socialists, settlement workers, aesthetes, crafts­ men, architects, educators, visionaries, club women, welfare capital­ ists, communitarians, and merchandisers. The special strength of her work is its reliance on an exhaustive array of previously un­ tapped primary sources—dozens of manuscript collections scattered across the country, hundreds of articles and books by and about par­ ticipants in the movement, and a score of government reports—all of which contribute to a breadth and depth of coverage lacking in prior accounts of the movement. The broad outlines of Boris’s analysis reinforce rather than under­ 174 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE mine current historical understanding of the movement, and, as a re­ sult, we learn little that is new about such familiar figures as Elbert Hubbard or Gustav Stickley. But Boris provides a wealth of telling de­ tail about many less familiar persons, institutions, and issues, includ­ ing societies that provided public schools with “uplifting” (and, ironically, mass-produced) art reproductions, art potteries that sur­ vived economically only by introducing Taylorist efficiency mea­ sures, lacemaking establishments that self-consciously sought to preserve peasant crafts but paid lower piecework rates than the gar­ ment industry in general, and experimental agrarian guilds that devolved into fashionable summer art colonies. Although these numerous biographical sketches and institutional case studies tend to become predictable in format as the book proceeds, Boris ar­ ranges them according to an overall structure that leads the reader progressively through her argument. She concludes that, even if the American arts and crafts movement never truly understood or confronted the problems of labor in industrial capitalism and eventu­ ally stimulated an upper-class search for beauty through mass pro­ duction, the craftsman ideal continues to inspire individuals who are not even aware of its origins. Jeffrey L. Meikle Dr. Meikle is associate professor of American studies and art history at the Univer­ sity of Texas at Austin. He has written...