Inspiring Reform: Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement. - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, August, 1997 by Alfred Mayor

The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston

The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston was formed one hundred years ago, the first such society in America and the only one still extant. In celebration, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center of Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has assembled a traveling exhibition of some 150 objects created by more than 100 Massachusetts artists in the arts and crafts tradition between the 1890s and the 1930s. The accompanying catalogue, however, stands stoutly on its own as a remarkably informed source of information about the Boston movement and its nationwide influence.

The secret to the Boston society's success was its high moral ground, led by what Edward S. Cooke Jr. calls the city's "cultural capitalists, linked by common backgrounds, Harvard educations, intermarriage, and board memberships.... To counter what they viewed as popular vulgarities, these Boston Brahmins built institutions that defined visual culture and set the parameters of public discourse about such art. The value put on culture - and control of culture - and the social distinction between mind and muscle provided the defining framework for Boston's acceptance and adaptation of Arts and Crafts principles."

The society was made up of masters, patrons, and craftsmen, with the craftsmen comprising the largest group and having the least say in decisions. The Council, which administered the society, and the Jury, which passed judgment on objects submitted, were composed of a small elite, the majority of whom were architects. The oligarchy was an influential group with links to arts and crafts enthusiasts in England and on the Continent. This too contributed to the preponderant influence of the Boston society and the fact that it was the model for all other American arts and crafts societies.

The catalogue of the exhibition examines in detail each of the arts and crafts disciplines as practiced in Boston. These are furniture, pottery, metalwork, jewelry, textiles, bookmaking, photography, and color-relief print making. As befits the first thorough consideration of the Boston society, the book has been as carefully fashioned as a Grueby pot. The typeface used, Quadraat, was created by a twentieth-century Dutch typographer based on a sixteenth-century prototype. The result is a dose and soothing imitation of the intense blacks and well-spaced letters characteristic of the hot-metal type in which books were printed before the offset press and the computer. The proportions of the book fourteen inches tall by eight and a half inches wide - cry out for a lectern on which to place it - like the Bible.