Arts and crafts perspectives - Arts and Crafts von Moris bis Mackintosh exhibition

Architectural Review, The, March, 1995 by Peter Davey

The exhibition Arts and Crafts von Morris bis Mackintosh at the Institut Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt (until 17 April) offers an opportunity to examine the British movement in Continental perspective. Darmstadt is a particularly appropriate place for such a reconsideration, for the last Grand Duke of Hesse, Ernst Ludwig, was a great admirer of the English and in 1898, he asked Baillie Scott and C.R.Ashbee to design two rooms in his Neuer Palais. (The building was destroyed by British bombs in 1944, but some of the furniture remains and a few pieces are shown in the exhibition.)

At the same time, he started to encourage the German speaking countries to make a response to the English work and in 1899, he founded a colony of artists on Mathildenhohe, a hill overlooking the city. In 1901, there was the first celebration of their work, with a studio block (the Ernst Ludwig Haus) and six artists' houses designed by the Viennese architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, and one house designed for himself by the painter and graphic artist Peter Behrens (the first building of his vastly influential and successful architectural career).

Other exhibitions were held, notably in 1908, when Olbrich completed the Mathildenhohe gallery building and the Hochzeitsturm. This wonderfully strange tower was a wedding present by his grateful subjects to the Grand Duke from which he could contemplate the city and his Rhineland territories. It has just been splendidly restored, and though its roof with five tall thin vaults (meant to be seen from the city as an abstracted hand of blessing) is completely un-English, the handling of exposed brickwork, the strips of stone framed, small-paned windows and the inclusion of rather stiff hieratic relief and mosaic panels all have an echo of contemporary English and Scottish work. Olbrich's other buildings on the site have a much wilder mixture of ingredients: Austrian Sezession is blended with Belgian and French Art Nouveau and made occasionally astringent by the odd dash of the Arts and Crafts to form one of the strangest of early twentieth-century architectural experiments. It is in the furniture, ceramics, glass and metalwork (now shown in the Ernst Ludwig Haus which has been turned into a museum) that the relationship between the Darmstadt group and their British contemporaries is most clear.

The exhibition in Olbrich's 1908 galleries does not set out to draw comparisons, but to tell the story of the British movement. Excellently curated by Gerda Breuer, it starts not with Morris but Pugin and Ruskin, and so grapples from the first with some of the movement's paradoxes, for instance the strange social idealism that looked to a Gothic past as a model to contrast with the squalor of the Industrial Revolution, and the way in which Pugin was perfectly prepared to use industrial techniques to achieve his make-believe medieval world. The Pre-Raphaelites and Morris (with his paradox of being a revolutionary socialist while having to design for the rich) follow as introductions to the great range of Arts and Crafts activity between 1880 and 1910. Everything from book design to tapestries is covered, as are most of the main branches of the movement (there is even an excursion into the Aesthetic Movement and Christopher Dresser). Though there is a good deal from British museums, cost has caused Breuer to rely extensively on items from German collections, which sometimes gives quite new perspectives; for example-there is a splendid Merton tapestry from Munich of a scene from Mallory by Burne-Jones which makes clear the link between Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts love of nature and the medieval sources for simplicity of much of the movement's furniture.

Unfortunately, architecture has been a casualty of the restricted budget - a great pity because Arts and Crafts people thought of architecture as the mother of the arts. Even Voysey appears (interestingly) solely as a graphic artist. But there is an ingenious slide show of Webb's Red House (done for Morris in 1859) and, right at the end of the exhibition, the two most famous entries for the Hans eines Kunstfreundes ideas competition organised by the Darmstadt magazine Innendekoration in 1901. Baillie Scott won, but his entry has been looked down on since because his outsides were relatively conventional. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald produced the entry that appears in all the history books but it was only in this exhibition that I was finally able to fully understand it, for all the Baillie Scott and the Mackintosh and Macdonald drawings are displayed as magnificent lithographs produced in 1902 by Alexander Koch, the publisher of Innendekoration, and there is a specially built model of the Glasgow entry, which with the drawings, shows that it would have been a masterpiece of Arts and Crafts sublety and complexity.

The Art Lover's House programme was huge - bigger than most of the commissions for private houses then offered in Germany and Britain, and enormous compared to almost anything since. The trouble with so much of the Arts and Crafts movement was that for all its social idealism, it could not get much beyond making very expensive things by hand for clients who paradoxically had often made their money in industry.