Crafts Movement Research Articles

The contemporary geographies of craft‐based manufacturing

AbstractThis paper reviews the literature on craft production to explore the ways in which the normative landscape of craft is affecting the contemporary geographies of craft‐based manufacturing. Craft forms of production have enjoyed a revival in recent decades in what is now called the “third‐wave” craft movement. In this paper, I consider the origins and characteristics of third‐wave craft as well as its historical precedents. I highlight 3 distinct geographies associated with contemporary craft‐based manufacturing, including a fusion of industrial and cultural production in industrial workspaces, a relocalization of small‐scale industrial production in advanced economies, and a tendency towards spatial agglomeration in both urban and rural areas. Drawing on the case of the American craft‐brewing sector, I offer a picture of these distinct geographies in a representative manufacturing industry and highlight the need to consider the ways in which craft production and articulations of its values manifest differently in different industries. Finally, I conclude by offering reflections on the landscape of craft‐based manufacturing and potential avenues for future geographical engagements with craft production.

The furniture craft in Vilnius in the second half of the 19–20th centuries: development and exhibitions

The development of the furniture craft in Vilnius in the second half of the 19th – beginningof the 20th centuries, as well as the status of the furniture craftsmen belonging to the guilds,acquisition of professional skills, training and participation in Vilnius exhibitions are presented.The mass-produced products spread in the Western European market in the second half of the 19thcentury gained ill-feeling to the industrial production articles and raised nostalgia. The Arts andCrafts Movement in Great Britain became the resistance expression of the mass industrial produc-tion. This movement inspired by artists, when the wares of craftsmen were driven out by industrialproducts, stimulated the revival of the old crafts, returning to the hand-made wares and admirationfor the medieval craftsmen guilds. Indeed, the situation in Lithuania was different. The develop-ment of the advanced and modern craftsmanship was impeded by the medieval relict – the guildsystem, which existed until the end of the 19th century. Craftsmen of the guilds defending theirmonopoly production rights fought against non-guild craftsmen, craftsmen from other cities andtraders and opposed the establishment of the capitalist industry companies. In the second halfof the 19th century, the furniture production was based on the craftsmen works predominatedin Lithuania continuing the traditions of the guilds craftsmanship. The collision between craftsand industrial production manifested not as the hostile disposition against the mass-producedfurniture, but as an attempt on the guild’s production monopoly.Until the 19th century, the old crafts learning system in the guilds existed in Vilnius. The acqui-sition of occupational skills was hierarchized. Learner–apprentice–master was the traditionalscheme of the craft secrets mastering and the development of the professional career. Only atthe end of the 19th century – beginning of the last century, new processes originated along withthe repercussions of the craft movement. The special courses and schools of crafts, which raisedthe professional level of craftsmen, mitigated backwardness and represented modern craft ideas.At the turn of the 19–20th centuries, the ideas of a new modern style reached Vilnius. The exhi-bitions of art and crafts were invoked for the dissemination and introduction of these ideas tocraftsmen and society. After application of new artistic ideas, they reflected the turn of the formerworkshop craftsman towards the modern applied art creator. However, derivations of differenthistoric styles (Baroque Revival, Renaissance Revival, etc.) were the most demanded types amongVilnius society and furniture manufacturers until the turn of the 19–20th centuries. At first,the takeover of new modern artistic tendencies (English, German) was reflected in the furnituredesign in the exhibition in 1909. The influence of European design tendencies was also reflectedin the popularization of production and increased demand for weaved and bamboo furniture atthe beginning of the last century.

Modern Craft Studies: The Decade in Review

This review essay provides a historiography of modern craft scholarship, focusing on the years following the founding of the Journal of Modern Craft in 2008. The Journal’s own contents are considered on a thematic basis, alongside academic work published elsewhere. Among the issues considered are the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Studio Craft Movement; new technologies of making; the importance of feminist methodologies; craft-based narratives in design and fine art; and geographical differentiation. The essay concludes with suggested areas of inquiry for future craft scholarship.

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Natsume Sōseki, Book Design, and the Value of Art

Judging a Book by Its Cover:Natsume Sōseki, Book Design, and the Value of Art Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe (bio) In a letter to English scholar Nakagawa Yoshitarō written in 1905, Natsume Sōseki states that he wishes to create a book version of his serialized novel I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905-6), no matter the cost. "I don't care if it's too expensive and doesn't sell," he writes, "I've simply told the publisher to make it magnificent."1 Throughout his career, Sōseki contributed to the design of his own books, providing input on the production of everything from the cover to the box and from the title page to the printer's mark. Sōseki's longest collaboration in book design was with Hashiguchi Goyō, an artist whose portfolio included exhibition painting, woodblock printing, and commercial design.2 Both Sōseki and Goyō were heavily involved in the material aspects of printing and publishing books, a process by which they aimed to transform the literary object into a three-dimensional work of art.3 By selecting luxurious materials for the presentation of his publications, Sōseki indicated that literature was something to be treated with care and discerning taste. Toward the end of his career, Sōseki became increasingly concerned with the visual expression of his work, as he personally funded and designed his novel Kokoro (1914) while studying painting under Tsuda Seifū, the designer of his last two books. With each project, Sōseki treated book design as a medium that expressed the value of literature, in artistic and material terms, by means of the physical presentation of the work. The first volume of Sōseki's I Am a Cat went on to become legendary as the fountainhead of luxury book design in Japanese literature (fig. 12.1).4 The volume was designed by Goyō with an illustrated jacket, a vellum cover, a title written in stylized seal script and printed in gold leaf, a symmetrical design of two cats printed in vermillion ink, an illustrated title page, an illustrated publisher's mark (for the joint publication by Ōkura and Hattori presses), and a colophon with an Art Nouveau border in the back of the book.5 Most famously, it featured golden-gilt top edges and uncut paper that required [End Page 159] the reader to use a pen knife to separate pages while reading. Far from sitting back and letting Goyō make all of the creative decisions, Sōseki was actively involved in the process of his book's design at almost every step. In a letter to Goyō dated August 9, 1905, he writes, "My apologies for last night. In regard to the cover that I requested at the time, I have decided upon thick, light yellow torinoko paper, with something done in lacquer and gold. I look forward to your completing this request. With haste…."6 From the very beginning of his career then, Sōseki demonstrated that he was seriously concerned with the look and feel of his books, as he supervised matters ranging from the thickness and quality of paper to the type of ink to be used on the cover. Click for larger view View full resolution 12.1. I Am a Cat, volume one (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905), book cover. Designed by Hashiguchi Goyō. Published by Ōkura and Hattori Presses. Courtesy of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley. Sōseki appears to have first become interested in book design during his stay in England from 1900 to 1903, where he encountered the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau, two aesthetic philosophies that treated the book and other common objects as works of art. While in England, Sōseki acquired a copy of The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), a heavily illustrated collection of the poetry of William Morris, the central figure of the Arts and Crafts movement.7 Morris sought through his movement to reintegrate art into daily life by emphasizing craftsmanship in the production of goods, including tapestries, tiles, windows, and books. After studying medieval calligraphy and illumination, he founded the...

Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Julia L. Mickenberg (bio) Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde, edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2015. Merely perusing the table of contents made it clear that essays in this book would be essential sources for an essay I was writing for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on “Radical Children’s Literature,” and, reading the book itself, I was not disappointed. This is an important book. Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is self-consciously international in its approach, although its focus is on Europe. The volume emerged from a conference on Children’s Literature and the European Avant-Garde, held in Sweden in September 2012. Despite the explicit focus on Europe, the conference call for papers suggests that the impact of the European avant-garde on non-European children’s literature should be investigated as well; however, when it comes to this volume, outside of Europe, only the United States and Britain, which may or may not be considered part of Europe, are represented, although the Soviet Union seems to play a larger role than the conference organizers had originally anticipated. Divided into three sections, “Vanguard tendencies in the early twentieth century,” “The impact of the Russian avant-garde,” and “Postbellum avant-garde children’s books,” this volume’s eleven chapters are richly illustrated with color plates, adding immeasurably to the book’s quality and utility, and contributing to a growing scholarly literature that recognizes children’s literature’s connection to modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, a literature the editors cite in their excellent introduction. Notably, much of this scholarship and the works themselves are not published in English, making the volume under review especially valuable. Editors Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer explain that the term “avant-garde” emerged in late nineteenth-century France to designate progressive and politically engaged art and literature, but note that the term has had various meanings in different times and places. Their overarching definition of avant-garde is “a spatial-temporal network that has constituted an artistic alternative to hegemonic art since the beginning of the twentieth century, with peaks in the 1910s and 1920s and again in the 1950s and 1960s, which still lives on in contemporary art” (4). Applied in the context of this book, they add: “avant-garde ideas about children’s literature often reflect a general desire to break free from artistic boundaries and labels, but also from previous norms in children’s literature and traditional conceptions [End Page 248] of childhood, similar to the concept of ‘radical children’s literature’ explained in Reynolds (2007).” In her book of that title, Kimberley Reynolds defines “radical children’s literature” as boundary breaking in terms of form and/or content. Finally, they emphasize—and individual essays in the book confirm this point—that avant-garde ideas in children’s books are always related to “movements in arts, education, social systems, and ideologies” (8). Chapters are rooted in varying national and transnational contexts, with some focusing on individual authors or texts and others offering more of a general overview. Marilynn Olson’s marvelously rich and provocative essay on “John Ruskin and the mutual influences of children’s literature and the avant-garde” actually does both of these things by focusing on an individual who had a wide-ranging influence. Olson tackles an earlier period than any other essays, making it a good choice as the volume’s opening chapter. Although Ruskin is a focus for her essay, Olson more broadly “looks at childhood as a touchstone for the overthrow of Academic standards in painting, at children’s books and their influence on those who became avant-garde artists and thinkers, and at the power of the Victorian avant-garde to influence the ideals of the twentieth-century picturebook” (20). She points to Ruskin’s influence on the pre-Raphaelites, early examples of England’s avant-gardes, and also on William Morris and, through him in particular, on the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin’s emphasis on art and beauty as tools of social reform, as...

Izidor Kršnjavi and beginning of arts and crafts movement in Zagreb in the 1880s

Izidor Kršnjavi and beginning of arts and crafts movement in Zagreb in the 1880s

New Woman and New Profession: Women Garden Designers in Arts and Crafts Movement

New Woman and New Profession: Women Garden Designers in Arts and Crafts Movement

Nineteenth Century Wood Engraving: its commercial decline

The use of wood engraving as a method of graphic reproduction for books, periodicals and newspapers continued for a surprisingly long time after the development of photographic methods. End-grain boxwood engraving was a truly Victorian phenomenon and an understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, versatility and limitations of this technique may perhaps best be reached through an exploration of its commercial decline. The period 1860–1900 saw a combination of competing technical, economic and aesthetic demands influencing the development of illustrative processes and eventually led to the end of commercial wood engraving. A form of engraving closer to Bewick's original interpretation of the craft re-emerged through the arts and crafts movement and the establishment of private presses during the inter-war period.

PROMOTING THE COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT AND NETWORK GOVERNANCE THROUGH CRAFT MOVEMENT Taking Two Taiwan Ceramic Workshops as Case Studies

PROMOTING THE COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT AND NETWORK GOVERNANCE THROUGH CRAFT MOVEMENT Taking Two Taiwan Ceramic Workshops as Case Studies

Review: Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England, by Maureen Meister

Maureen Meister Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2014, 304 pp., 23 color and 120 b/w illus. $45, ISBN 9781611686623 In Arts and Crafts Architecture : History and Heritage in New England , Maureen Meister examines the work of twelve architects, eleven men and one woman, who took leadership roles in the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts from its founding in 1897 to 1917: Robert Day Andrews, George Edward Barton, Ralph Adams Cram, Lois Lilley Howe, Alexander Wadsworth “Waddy” Longfellow Jr., Charles Donagh Maginnis, Louis Chapell Newhall, William Edward Putnam Jr., George Russell Shaw, Richard Clipston Sturgis, Charles Howard Walker, and Herbert Langford Warren. The book provides useful biographical background on these architects, charts their intersections in Boston arts and social organizations, and glosses their building designs. Meister's intention is to flesh out our understanding of the generation of Boston architects who studied design or worked as draftsmen in the 1870s (or so) and practiced through the interwar period. Focusing on those architects who were associated with the Society of Arts and Crafts, Meister aims to “examine this Boston-based architecture in a comprehensive way, locating the architects and their buildings within the social, political, and philosophical contexts of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New England” (8). Key in this regard is the intellectual legacy of British leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement—John Ruskin and William Morris—and their champions in Boston, especially Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton. The body of work that Meister considers coincides historically with the production of New England architects who were brought to modern scholarly attention by Vincent J. Scully Jr.'s pioneering 1955 study The Shingle Style and the Stick Style and by a number of articles that appeared in the May 1973 issue of this journal.1 Framing the …

Review Essay: The Material and Performative Culture of 1916

Review Essay: The Material and Performative Culture of 1916 Catriona Crowe (bio) The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish. Ed. Vera Kreilkamp. University of Chicago Press, 2016. 298pp. €40.00. ISBN: 9781892850256 Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising. Eds. Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück. Liverpool University Press, 2015. 294pp. £25.00. ISBN: 9781781381229 The Abbey Rebels of 1916: A Lost Revolution. Fearghal McGarry. Gill and Macmillan, 2015. 376pp. €29.99. ISBN: 9780717168811 The centenary of the 1916 Rising has seen a plethora of books, performances, exhibitions, conferences, concerts, parades, websites, and many other events and products to mark the occasion. A welcome development has been new scholarship on the material and performative culture of the period. Because of the availability of new archival sources, it is possible to track all kinds of themes, environments, behaviors, locations, and objects in a way that could not be done before now. For example, if you search for the term “biscuits” on the website of the Bureau of Military History, you will find 104 results, ranging from the biscuit-gorging of the 1916 garrison in Jacob’s Biscuit Factory to the lice-ridden mattress, known as a biscuit, on which Kathleen Lynn slept as a prisoner and the rock-hard biscuits given to prisoners in Ennis Barracks in 1921. The books under review here deal with three different aspects of material and performative culture in and around 1916: Making It Irish with the distinctively Irish Arts and Crafts movement; Making 1916 with objects, locations, and performances from the period and its aftermath; and The Abbey Rebels with the employees of the theatre who [End Page 124] participated in the Rising, as well as with their subsequent treatment by the independent state. The three books, taken together, provide a kaleidoscope of valuable information about the material world inhabited by the people of the period, the powerful artistic movement that produced so many highly charged objects relevant to a reimagined Ireland, and the birth and development of what is now our National Theatre during a time when it influenced, and was influenced by, the real events taking place outside its doors. “We Were Making Little Gold Crosses When You Were Living in Holes in the Ground”: The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish In 2016 Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art offered a major exhibition of widely sourced objects illuminating and reflecting on the Irish Arts and Crafts movmeent that created so many visual motifs and ideas that we take for granted today. Making It Irish was curated by Vera Kreilkamp and Diana Larsen, and Kreilkamp has edited a beautifully illustrated selection of essays relevant to the exhibition and its broader contexts. The book is laid out in four sections: political, literary, and geographic contexts; the Honan Chapel; stained-glass revival; and women’s work. In her introduction Kreilkamp outlines the vision of the movement: “Arts and Crafts practitioners, like their literary counterparts, turned to a distant preconquest past in their search for themes and images expressing their country’s claims for the future. This look backward played a significant role in shaping literature, music, popular culture, and the visual arts during Ireland’s seemingly unstoppable passage to modernity” (9). She outlines the development of the English Arts and Crafts movement, whose origins preceded that of Ireland by less than a decade and which espoused the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris: ennobling, skilled craft work as opposed to the demonic mills of the industrial revolution; the value of handmade objects; the end of hierarchical distinctions between artists, designers, and craft-workers; and the value of good design in improving domestic and public environments. Although Ireland, aside from the northeast, had nothing like the industry England possessed, there were other reasons for wishing to espouse such a movement: the glance back [End Page 125] to a monastic and pre-Christian past allowed ideas of pre-invasion sovereignty to gain ground at a time when both constitutional nationalism and separatist republicanism were seeking to weaken, or break altogether...

Vachel Lindsay at Gulf Park, 1923 to 1924

DAMON FRANKE University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Vachel Lindsay at Gulf Park, 1923 to 1924 VACHEL LINDSAY (1879-1931) WAS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS POETS IN America when he taught at the Gulf Park College for Women on the Mississippi coast from 1923 to 1924.1 Seven years later he killed himself at fifty-two by drinking a bottle of Lysol after the Great Depression and new poetic fashion had ruined his livelihood. In Mississippi, he had the promise of a permanent income, and he was in love with a young student. The story of Lindsay’s unreciprocated love can be found, often obliquely, in various biographies, but they overlook that Lindsay’s ensuing year at Gulf Park as “poet-in-residence” was a desperate turning point in his career as he sought new creative forays into the study of cinema, the revision and expansion of his Collected Poems, and the cultivation of. “New Poetry” through his teaching. While the object of his affection may have kept him on the Mississippi coast and then compelled him to leave, the year on campus was also marked by outbursts of poetic energy that were alternately fulfilled and frustrated. When Lindsay arrived in Gulfport in January 1923, his poetry had already made him a celebrity. He had traveled much of small-town America by foot preaching what he called “The Gospel of Beauty” and seeking to instill the virtues of the Arts and Crafts movement into the lives of average people. He was a reform-minded traditionalist with a romantic and Luddite sensibility. “The Gospel of Beauty” was part of a longstanding progressive vision that he called the “Village Improvement Parade,” and amid this pageantry was a utopian belief in “The New Localism,” which would “make our home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in the world” (Gospel 16). In his grand vision for his life’s work, he wanted to a sing a song for each one of the United States as a paean for the commonwealth of the nation. Lindsay likened his early career to that of Johnny Appleseed, seeing 1 Gulf Park College for Women formally opened on September 28, 1921, and ran for fifty years until it became the Gulf Park Campus of the University of Southern Mississippi. The Spanish Colonial Revival architecture of the main buildings accentuates the landscape and history of the Old Spanish Trail on the Gulf Coast. For further information, see Elias. 434 Damon Franke himself as walking across America spreading the seeds of his verse in exchange for bed and bread. The prairie troubadour had tramped over 2,800 miles during the course of his walking tours in 1906, 1908, and 1912. Often his reputation for dramatic performance preceded him on subsequent whirlwind recital tours in which his notable vocalizations, his vitality, and his flair drew massive audiences. Edgar Lee Masters claims that over a million people had heard him speak (331). His recitation of his most famous poem, “The Congo” (1914), was a must-see and -hear. In an eyewitness report of a performance in Albuquerque in the early 1920s, Paul Horgan describes how Lindsay “became a total instrument” and “spent himself wholly” as he “waved his hands in the air for religious glory” and “beat the floor with full foot for his heavy accents” (567). When Harriet Monroe included his work in The New Poetry (1917), Lindsay’s cachet arguably reached its zenith. After the publication of the other significant poems, “General William Booth Enters Heaven” (1913) and “The Chinese Nightingale” (1915), his work was extolled as part of the burgeoning “Chicago School” alongside that ofCarlSandburgandEdgarLeeMasters. His celebrity statuscommanded newspapers announcing his recitals and documenting his new work. On February 1, 1922, Lindsay’s world changed dramatically with the death of his mother, Catharine. Her dominant personality teemed with both intellectual curiosity and religious fanaticism, and she had been Lindsay’s confidant, whom he devotedlystill sought to please as an adult. Dennis Camp stresses that Lindsay was an instrument of God in her eyes and that he was desolate with grief at the loss of the “most powerful personality” he had known (Ch.4, p...

National beer in a global age: technology, taste, and mobility, 1880-1914

This paper uses professional brewing journals from the United States, Britain, and Germany in order to understand the construction of a particular variety of lager beer as a global standard. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European beer traveled the world through circuits of trade, migration, and colonialism. In doing so, it came to be assciated with a global version of consumer culture. Informed by Bruno latour, George Marcus, and Elizabeth Zanoni, this paper examines intellectual, professional, and market exchanges between brewers in different countries as well as the debates over production techniques and taste that accompanied the evolution of brewing over this period. It seeks to incorporate notions of mobility studies, particularly the relationship of things that travel with things that stay rooted, to see the connections between global commodity chains, itinerant brewers, migrant populations, and ideals of localism over the course of two centuries. it concludes that cosmopolitan brewers attempted to claim distinctive national styles during a period of international rivalry on the eve of World War I, notwithstanding the increasing convergence of their products toward the homogenized tastes that the craft movement would later decry: light, clear beverages that were low in body and alcohol.

Arts & Crafts stained glass

Beautifully illustrated and based on more than three decades of research, Arts & Crafts Stained Glass is the first study of how the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement transformed the aesthetics and production of stained glass in Britain and America. A progressive school of artists, committed to direct involvement both in making and designing windows, emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, reinventing stained glass as a modern, expressive art form. Using innovative materials and techniques, they rejected formulaic Gothic Revivalism while seeking authentic, creative inspiration in medieval traditions. This new approach was pioneered by Christopher Whall (1849-1924), whose charismatic teaching educated a generation of talented pupils-both men and women-who produced intensely colorful and inventive stained glass, using dramatic, lyrical, and often powerfully moving design and symbolism. Peter Cormack demonstrates how women made critical contributions to the renewal of stained glass as artists and entrepreneurs, gaining meaningful equality with their male colleagues, more fully than in any other applied art. Cormack restores stained glass to its proper status as an important field of Arts and Crafts activity, with a prominent role in the movement's polemical campaigning, its public exhibitions, and its educational program.

Arts and Crafts Painting: The Political Agency of Things

Can there be such a thing as “Arts and Crafts” painting? This article will address that question by interrogating the points of connection between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Arts and Crafts object. Taking its cue from William Morris’s reflection on the “English Pre-Raphaelite School” from 1891, this article examines the interplay between painting and design in both Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Arts and Crafts movement. It addresses the ways in which paintings depicted decorative art, as well as the aspiration of decorative art to the symbolic potential traditionally associated with painting. It is my contention that Pre-Raphaelite painting unleashed a radical possibility for decorative art: the Arts and Crafts belief in the political agency of things.

Religion, Archaeology and Modern Calendar Buildings: A Study of Avon Tyrrell House in England

This paper will explore a modern example of the tradition of constructing cities and sacred sites as re?ections or embodiments of the sky. By creating spaces which were connected to the celestial bodies it was possible to create human communities which were linked to celestial ones, encouraging social stability and harmony. Such ideas underpinned traditions of the foundation of cities from China, through India, the Middle East and Mesoamerica. The paper focuses on Avon Tyrrell House, a substantial private residence which was designed and built in 1891–93. The architect, William Lethaby (1857–1931), was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and one of England’s leading modernists. The paper will frame discussion of the building within notions of the continuity of ancient traditions of solar symbolism in architecture, the consideration of function in the archaeology of the present and immediate past, and will refer to the theory of vernacular and material religion.

Anarchy & beauty: William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960

William Morris (1834-96) regarded beauty as a basic human birthright. In this fascinating book, which accompanies a major exhibition, Morris' biographer Fiona MacCarthy looks at how his highly original and generous vision of a new form of society in which art could flourish has reverberated through the decades. In 1860 Morris moved into the now famous Red House at Bexleyheath in Kent. Here his ideas found practical expression in its decoration, undertaken with the help of his artist craftsman friends Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who envisaged the project as the first stage in a campaign against the debased artistic standards of the mid-Victorian age. From these beginnings, MacCarthy charts the development of a revolution: the setting-up of Morriss shop (later Morris & Co.), his embracing of radical ideas of sexual freedom and libertarianism, and the publication of his visionary novel News from Nowhere (1890), in which he advanced his hopes for a dismantling of the stultifying structures of society and their replacement by a more equable and fluid way of life. Later chapters explore how Morris' ideas came to influence the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, Europe and the USA, the Garden City movement, and numerous artists and craftspeople who sought to negotiate a viable place within the modern world in the troubled years that followed the First World War. Finally, MacCarthy explains the continuing relevance of Morris' ideals, as expressed in the planning and execution of the Festival of Britain in 1951, a regenerative project of the post-war Labour government that inspired a number of young designers such as Terence Conran with a direct sense of mission to bring the highest design standards within the reach of everyone.

The resilience of sustainability, creativity and social justice from the arts & crafts movement to modern day “eco-painting”

This paper develops an earlier one on key principles of Green Aesthetics published in City, Culture & Society. It extends the application of such principles backwards in time to the original Arts & Crafts movement as practised in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century, and in terms of contemporary eco-art, forwards to a variety of styles including site-specific art, environmental art (both strongly sculptural) and eco-painting, which is organic, local and sustainable. It is shown how, from the beginning, these styles have shown great resilience in the face of a dominant industrialist paradigm. In the process such ‘outsider’ art has maintained an evolving and striking creativity and innovativeness. The evolution in styles has also contained its own inner dynamic where some strands of eco-art favour modernity and modernism while others seek a synthesis of medieval modes of guild production yet with a view to producing for commercial markets. More recently a strong strand of extreme disenchantment is evident in the work of some ‘land artists’, for example represented at Fattoria de Celle sculpture park near Pistoia in Tuscany against today’s capitalistically signed and saturated dominant semiotics. This is expressed in references in such work, including Richard Serra, Richard Long and Robert Morris to Neolithic motifs captured in the megalithic remains of such culture.

“Feeling for Beauty”

ABSTRACTMay Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting.

Burning Bright: William Blake and the Art of the Book, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, February–June 2013

The display contextualized the reception of Blake’s craftsmanship by juxtaposing designs with images by the Ancients, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the members of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as Samuel Palmer, William Holman Hunt, and Walter Crane, as well as a facsimile published by William Muir and an example of a newly illustrated edition—a Blake poem illustrated by Jacynth Parsons from the 1927 edition of Songs of Innocence published by the Medici Society. The mixture of books, sheets, designs, and images resonated with what this Blake exhibition was about: the art of the book.