A truly British movement: to introduce Apollo's special number devoted to the Arts and Crafts, Peter Cormack explores the movement's national identity and questions the internationalism of the exhibitions currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Apollo, April, 2005 by Peter Cormack

In December 2004, a major exhibition celebrating the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe and America opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (1) The Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition 'International Arts and Crafts', covering similar ground but with an additional section on Japan, opened on 17 March. (2) It is good to see the Arts and Crafts movement receiving such high-profile attention, but many will regret that the V&A, in particular, has missed the opportunity to present, for the first time ever, a comprehensive and in-depth survey of the only significant art movement to be wholly initiated in Britain.

Naturally, both the LACMA and V&A exhibitions do begin their stories with Britain, each featuring a range of artefacts by 'representative' designers and craftworkers, seventy seven in the LACMA show and 116 in the V&A's. But these selections are drastically circumscribed when compared with the 517 objects included in the first exhibition of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in London in 1888, and the 1,625 in the exhibition of British and Irish Arts & Crafts held at the Louvre in 1914. With their focus preponderantly on well-known names--Morris, De Morgan, Ashbee, Baillie Scott, Voysey and so on--neither of the current exhibitions can hope to capture the rich diversity of the movement as manifested in its country of origin.

In fact, the V&A has unwisely chosen to model the new exhibition on its recent 'Art Nouveau' and 'Art Deco' retrospectives (which in each case did represent genuinely international movements) instead of treating it more appropriately and usefully as a 'sequel' to its 'Pugin' (1994) and 'William Morris' (1996) exhibitions. Surely a similar 'blockbuster' devoted exclusively to the British Arts and Crafts movement would have been of no less interest as a marketable commodity to overseas venues (a factor one recognises as essential in today's museum realities)? And without a detailed study of the origins and development of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, any assessment of its influence abroad remains flawed and problematic. More importantly, a nationally-focussed exhibition would have been--and would still be--invaluable as an exploration of Britain's cultural history from the 1880s to the 1940s, for the Arts and Crafts had a gently pervasive and long-term impact on that country far beyond the realm of decorative and applied arts.

So, what are some of the themes and areas of activity in the British Arts and Crafts movement that any future exhibition will need to represent and examine in detail? Most importantly, the idealism of this most idealistic of art movements would have to be powerfully evoked, something only achievable by giving as much prominence to people as to artefacts. For although the latter can eloquently embody the imagination and aspirations of their designers and makers, much of the Arts and Crafts 'philosophy' is best understood by absorbing, as far as possible, something of the life-experience of its many adherents. The best Arts and Crafts exhibition so far, Boston's 'The Art that is Life' (which was wholly about the American movement), managed to convey the complex dynamic of intellectually--and manually-engaged individuals and groups particularly well. (3)

In addressing the question of the Arts and Crafts as a 'social movement', one is immediately confronted by the seemingly paradoxical position of William Morris, who while being its chief progenitor was also unexpectedly sceptical about its aims. He was a somewhat disengaged Brother--and Master in 1892--of the Art Workers Guild and, although he lectured and wrote for the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, he was never a wholly committed exhibitor. To Morris the revolutionary Marxist, the movement could too readily be characterised as one of 'the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root' (4) and at best 'a feeble protest' which was only 'noteworthy and encouraging' (5) in the context of a much wider rejection of dehumanising commercial values. (6)

If the movement could not--or would not--live up to Morris's revolutionary expectations, it did nonetheless have an important social dimension in Britain, not least because it actively involved large numbers of people--probably far more than any art movement before or since. Indeed, one might reasonably claim that it has been the only 'mass movement' in the visual arts, with people of all ages and from a wide spread of social backgrounds learning and practising handicraft skills, whether professionally as individuals or in small 'guild' organisations, or in amateur classes run by organisations such as the Home Arts & Industries Association, or in art education. Most significantly of all, this was the first time that large numbers of women gained public recognition as designers and craftworkers and, in several fields, achieved some kind of equal status alongside their male counterparts (Fig. 1). Unquestionably, many did achieve equal, and sometimes greater, distinction in their work. A typical 'New Woman' of the 1890s and 1900s might well make her career in the crafts, and it is no coincidence that many Arts and Crafts women, most notably the stained glass artist Mary Lowndes (1856-1929; Fig. 3), made important contributions to the Suffrage campaign of the pre-1914 years. (7) One of the more bizarre omissions in the V&A's 'International Arts and Crafts' catalogue is the absence of any specific comment on the whole phenomenon of Arts and Crafts feminism.