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Arts and Crafts is the movement that, from about 1880 to 1920, starting in England, championed the value of craftsmanship against the mass-produced objects of the industrial revolution's factories, often ugly and of poor quality. For its protagonists there was no difference between fine and applied arts: a fabric, a piece of furniture or a book deserved the same care as a painting.
Ruskin and Morris
The ideas came from the critic John Ruskin, who saw mechanised labour as a form of servitude and industrial objects as "dishonest". The man who put them into practice was William Morris (1834-1896), designer, poet and later socialist activist. For him the architect Philip Webb built the Red House (1859-1860), where Morris lived until 1865 and which he furnished with his artist friends.
In 1861 Morris founded, with Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Webb and other partners, a decorative arts firm that from 1875 was called Morris & Co.: wallpapers, fabrics, stained glass, furniture. His plant patterns, starting with the 1862 Trellis wallpaper, are still reproduced today. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press, to print books as works of art. His most famous advice sums up the movement: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
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The name and the guilds
The name was born in 1887, when the bookbinder T. J. Cobden-Sanderson used it at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, chaired by Walter Crane, which held its first exhibition the following year. Modelled on medieval corporations, guilds of designers and craftsmen were formed: Arthur Mackmurdo's Century Guild (1882), the Art Workers' Guild (1884) and Charles Robert Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft (1888).
A contradiction
Morris dreamed of an art for everyone, but handmade objects were expensive: they ended up furnishing mostly the homes of the well-off middle class. This is the movement's limit, and the reason why the next generation would try instead to bring quality into industrial production.
In America and Europe
In the United States Arts and Crafts ideas spread with Gustav Stickley and his magazine The Craftsman, with the community of the Roycrofters founded by Elbert Hubbard in East Aurora, New York, and with the "American Craftsman" style. In Europe they inspired Art Nouveau and the Glasgow School, workshops such as the Vereinigte Werkstätten in Munich (1898) and the Wiener Werkstätte of the Vienna Secession (1903).
In England the movement faded around 1920. Its legacy passed to the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to bring artists and industry together, and then to the Bauhaus: modern design was born precisely from Morris's idea that everyday objects deserve the care of a work of art.
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