Arts and crafts in London and Los Angeles: two ambitious exhibitions make clear the continuing relevance of the Arts and Crafts movement, writes Peyton Skipwith, but the V&A's show is a severe disappointment

Apollo, May, 2005 by Peyton Skipwith

I don't know what zeitgeist prompted the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to mount simultaneous exhibitions on the Arts and Crafts Movement, and also dictated that these should overlap with an exhibition entitled 'William Morris and the Arts & Crafts' shown in Japan and Taiwan and the Van Gogh Museum's 'L'Art Nouveau: La Maison Bing'. However, part of the impulse, intuitive rather than declared, may stem from a growing worldwide awareness that despite ever-increasing prosperity, society is being impoverished by mass consumerism and globalisation. It is, perhaps, no accident that this crop of Arts and Crafts exhibitions coincides with a spate of publications with titles such as The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook, and Richard Layard's Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Although I have only read reviews of these two works I gather they try to explain why, beyond a certain threshold, peoples and nations whilst continuing to get richer become no happier.

Max Palevsky, the founder of one of America's earliest big computer companies, in his 'sponsor's statement' in the LACMA book/catalogue writes: 'Just as the Arts and Crafts movement took issue with the alienation of people from "pleasure in labour" and the resulting Joss of human creativity, I, too, oppose the depersonalisation that comes from the hypnotic quality of computer games, the substitution of a Google search for genuine enquiry, the instant messaging that has replaced social discourse.' Are these exhibitions then indicative of a growing groundswell representing the desire of people to reconnect with the important things of life, what Ruskin described as 'Right doing' rather than 'Clever doing'?

Each exhibition is accompanied by a heavy tome seeking to define the Arts and Crafts. The movement was spawned by two contemporaneous impulses: the gothic revival and the Industrial Revolution. J.D. Sedding, the second Master of the Art Workers Guild, an architect trained, like William Morris, Philip Webb and Norman Shaw, in the office of that great Goth G.E. Street, declared at the 1888 Liverpool Arts Congress that: 'We should have bad no Morris, no Burges, no Shaw, no Webb, no Bodley, no Rossetti, no Burne-Jones, no Crane but for Pugin.' The late, and much lamented, scholar Clive Wainwright, who must be turning in his grave at the lack of rigour displayed in the V&A's exhibition and catalogue, used to define the Arts and Crafts as gothic without the crockets: I have always preferred to regard it as the secularisation of the gothic revival. Either way, there is no doubt that that is from whence it drew its aesthetic inspiration.

However, the impulse for its driving philosophy was a strong and violent reaction to the despoliation of rural England by the Industrial Revolution, which forced the rural poor to quit the land for the crowded slums of the new, burgeoning manufacturing cities. Ruskin, unlike Morris, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, had little or no first-hand experience of the worst excesses of industrial poverty; however, he was able to sympathise with ordinary people and the hopeless drudgery of their lives, and he addressed them directly through the pages of Fors Clavigera, in which he campaigned for the 'life and liberty of every workman'. Inspired by Ruskin's writings, most particularly The Stones of Venice, Morris threw himself wholeheartedly into every craft and cause that attracted him, and the Morris firm became the model for similar enterprises throughout Europe and America. In addition to this, Morris was an inspirational, if Utopian, social reformer, and it was the combination of these two outstanding characteristics that ignited the Arts and Crafts movement and led Sedding to proclaim 'Fancy what a year of grace it were for England, if our industries were placed under the guidance of "one vast Morris". Fancy a Morris installed in every factory--the Joseph of every grinding Pharaoh'. The Arts and Crafts movement was truly both English and revolutionary.

LACMA and the V&A look at the Arts and Crafts in international terms. However, Wendy Kaplan, curator of the Los Angeles exhibition, unlike her London counterparts, Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, differentiates between England, Scotland and Ireland. This was explicit in the lay out of the exhibition at LACMA, where, after a brief introductory section, with copies of important publications such as The Studio and Ver Sacrum and an instructive juxtaposition of C.R. Ashbee's writing cabinet, shown at the 1900 Vienna Secession Exhibition, and Koloman Moser's 1904 dressing table inspired by Ashbee's design, the visitor entered a large gallery filled with more works by Ashbee together with furniture, metalwork, glass, jewellery and textiles by Baillie Scott, William de Morgan, Benson, Voysey, Webb, Sidney Barnsley, Gimson and others. Leading off it was a smaller gallery devoted to Scotland and Ireland, pulsating with the glorious colour of Harry Clarke's and Wilhelmina Geddes's stained glass and Phoebe Traquair's glowing, enamelled casket Ten Virgins, from the Hunterian, which introduced the Celtic revival.