Arts and Crafts paradoxes

Architectural Review, The, April, 2005 by Peter Davey

In mounting an exhibition on International Arts and Crafts, the V & A has been very ambitious. (1) The Arts and Crafts was virtually the only British visual arts movement to have had notable authority overseas, and the show sets out to cover its vast area of influence, from Russia to the US, Scandinavia to Central Europe, and even Japan. (It's a pity the Empire was not covered too--there is some excellent work in South Africa and the Antipodes, and effects were felt even in India.) (2)

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The movement started in the 1880s and was initially focused on two organisations, the Art Workers' Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. The Guild was set up by young assistants (3) of the immensely successful architect Norman Shaw, and architecture was always seen by the Guild as the mother of the arts. Others were quickly attracted to the organisation, and soon membership included painters, illustrators, designers, potters and workers in metals, wood, stone and glass. Their output covered a huge range of artefacts from books to jewellery, furniture to fabrics, stained glass to silverware.

There was no clear Arts and Crafts style, nor a single manifesto for the movement, but practitioners were all more or less influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris who opposed the reduction of workmen to tools of Victorian capitalist industry. (4) They had looked back to an idealised Middle Ages, in which individual craftsmen were free and joyfully created their wares. And they looked out to the countryside, where they found people still practising crafts, almost in medieval ways. Some Guild and Exhibition Society members (who were almost all middle class) did take the big leap and become practical craftsmen in the countryside.

But the majority, even the brilliant and idealistic C. R. Ashbee, who took a group of poor families from the East End of London to set up a workshop at Chipping Campden, remained designers and had most of the work executed by craftsmen many of whom, apart from having more agreeable surroundings, were little better off than they had been. Indeed, in some cases, conditions were worse, for instance when architects demanded that beams and planks be cut using traditional backbreaking and blinding manual techniques rather than machines.

Paradoxical though methods and ideals may have been, the products of the Movement (at least in the two decades of its apogee, 1885-1905) were exquisitely made and designed with freshness, simplicity and clarity, showing deep understanding of materials and craftsmanship. They became models for the world. The notion of the simple life was popular from east to west of an America in which memories of frontier and wild nature were still fresh (though in the US most of the products of the Movement were to be found in rapidly expanding suburbs, just as they were elsewhere--another paradox). In Scandinavia and eastern parts of the Habsburg empire, each nation was searching for cultural identity, and the Arts and Crafts reverence for the past seemed important in relating tradition to modernity. In Germany and Austria, the clarity of the Movement's designs was seen as key to simplifying excessively ornate and fussy products of newly booming industry.

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The V & A bravely sets out to cover the whole field geographically, and at the same time, it attempts to show the Arts and Crafts scope of production. There is a great range of beautifully made objects from people as different as Wright and Mackintosh, Olbrich and Voysey. But without having a vast acreage of galleries and huge resources, parts of the exhibition are inevitably thin. Some countries are sadly under-represented; some aspects of the movement's history, such as the origin of ideals and inspiration in parts of the Gothic Revival, have had to be ignored. I question the inclusion of a room from a 1928 demonstration pavilion in Tokyo that clumsily blends Japanese and Arts and Crafts motifs. It must have seemed an exciting discovery, but it tends to reinforce the impression that by the '20s the Arts and Crafts had run out of steam everywhere. It would have been more interesting (and economical) to have shown the influence of Japanese artefacts on the Movement in Europe and America.

The other complete room is created from drawings by Gustav Stickley, the American who brought the Arts and Crafts Movement to the masses with mail order and pattern books. It has been realised with great fidelity by Allies & Morrison. They have designed the whole exhibition with sympathy surely derived from their restoration of Baillie Scott's domestic masterpiece, Blackwell in the Lake District, a slide show of which is one of the most moving items in the exhibition. It rivals one of Hvittrask, the house that grows out of the raw granite near Helsinki, designed for themselves by Saarinen, Lindgren and Gesellius.

Only with the rooms and slide shows does the V & A's exhibition really come alive--a final paradox of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which always aspired to creation of Gesamtkunstwerken, yet very rarely achieved them, though they did at Blackwell and Hvittrask.