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A Complex Fate: Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman Movement. - book reviews
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Marilyn Fish
The American Arts and Crafts movement was introduced to the academic community in 1972, when Robert Judson Clark mounted the exhibition, The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876-1916, at Princeton University. Clark's ground-breaking work subsequently inspired a steady stream of exhibitions, catalogues, books, and articles of varying quality. Each new work raises the inescapable question - does this effort add to the existing body of scholarship?
I am happy to report that in the case of the exhibition catalogue, Inspiring Reform: Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement, the answer is yes. The essayists take on a pivotal topic - Boston's unique contribution to the nation-wide movement. Their collective work is clearly organized and replete with original insights.
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Edward S. Cooke, Jr., associate professor of American arts at Yale University, sets the stage in an introductory essay. He first describes the role of Boston's cultural elite in establishing schools and museums in the 1870s. While striving to elevate the tastes of the lower classes, they also created a nurturing environment for the transplanted principles of the English Arts and Crafts movement. Charles Eliot Norton, appointed Harvard's first professor of fine arts in 1873, strongly advocated the new principles. A friend and follower of English Arts and Crafts theorist John Ruskin, Norton transmitted Ruskinian beliefs through formal lectures, as well as through informal associations. In 1886 he became president of the Tavern Club, a group that promoted "enlightened activity and enlightened leisure." Eleven years later, several Tavern Club members helped to found the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston (SACB), the first such society in the United States. Norton became its first president. The Society offered patrons and craftsmen educational programs, display space, encouragement, and the company of like-minded individuals. It also produced a short-lived but widely distributed publication, Handicraft, to which members contributed essays exploring Arts and Crafts themes. By the early years of the twentieth century many Boston-trained teachers and craftsmen had begun to disseminate Boston's standards of restrained taste and meticulous technique throughout the land.
Beverly K. Brandt, associate professor of design at Arizona State University, picks up the story with a detailed description of the SACB. Readers learn the particulars of patronage, mission, rigorous membership and exhibition policies, and factions. In the final analysis, Brandt points out, the SACB's chief accomplishment may have been to inspire the formation of similar organizations elsewhere, and to fulfill its role as a guide to the younger institutions.
With a clear understanding of the general context, readers are now prepared for the specifics that fill the remainder of the book, organized by media: a chapter on furniture and wood-carving by Edward S. Cooke, Jr.; pottery by Susan J. Montgomery; metalwork by Jeannine Falino; jewelry by Marilee Boyd Meyer; textiles by Nicola J. Shilliam; book arts by Nancy Finlay; photography by Anne E. Havinga; print-making by David Acton. Despite the involvement of eight authors, there is a sense of cohesiveness to the overall effort, owing to the common threads woven through the chapters. Each author pinpoints uniquely Bostonian characteristics (when present), highlights Boston's best-known craftsmen, and illuminates their talented, but previously little-known, counterparts. The essays are followed by a lucidly organized catalogue of the exhibition and a biographical dictionary of the artists and manufacturers whose works are represented.
Clearly, a variety of stylistic and technical influences were at play in Boston, although Anglo-American (often Jacobean) influence sets many of its produCts apart from those of other cities. Associated with the original settlements of coastal New England, this seventeenth-century style evoked missionary intensity, simplicity, and sincerity - qualities that were at once consistent with the nostalgic view of the "Pilgrim century" and the new-age sentiments of the Arts and Crafts movement. Examples of ancestral cabinetry, textiles, silverware, and books were available for study in late nineteenth-century Boston, more so than elsewhere in the nation. Artists could study original objects in the private collections of wealthy Boston patrons and later in the galleries of the museums those patrons helped to establish.
Boston's potters, printers, and photographers were less encumbered by colonial revivalism, no doubt because their crafts had virtually no precedent in Colonial America. Other than strictly utilitarian red- and stoneware, little pottery was produced here until the early nineteenth century, freeing SACB's potters to seek inspiration elsewhere in time and place. Woodblock printing for art's sake was unknown in the West until the late nineteenth century, and the Arts and Crafts examples by Arthur Wesley Dow were heavily influenced by Japanese prints; later work shows Dow's own influence. Although art photography was a late-nineteenth-century development, some Boston-influenced photographers produced costumed "colonial" domestic scenes suggestive of theatrical tableaux. Others worked in the more timely Photo-Secession format.
