Do William Morris Ideas, and Influences on Arts Crafts Have Any Relevance Today - Essay Example

148959 William Morris (1834 – 1896), the British craftsman, designer, typographer, and socialist, born in Walthamstow, was a businessman’s son, Morris was educated at Oxford, met Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and as they were all artists, they formed a group called Brotherhood, and he even thought of participating in a crusade against then existing art and culture, which nauseated them all. At that moment they were influenced by John Ruskin, who had on many occasions, praised the art and craft of medieval craftsmen, sculptures, and carvers who according to him exhibited their intense individualism through their art. The real origins of Victorian art revival is believed to have started in the late eighteenth century and when Morris came to the scene, the revival was already in motion and he was not the originator of it. In the post-Napoleonic period, there was unrest in the European air and the younger people lived in expectation of another revolution. Things were fairly unsettled when the Victorian revival was initiated. Morris wrote The Defence of Guinevere and other poems while painting frescoes for the Oxford Union. The pre-Raphaelite group and their company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. brought revolution in designs, carpets, wall papers, furniture, tapestries etc. there was a complete revolution in public taste. Morris also wrote prose like the Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise, Volksunga Saga, political writings like Death Song, Chants for Socialists, The Pilgrims of Hope, Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere. Later, he was more dedicated to Socialism and wrote Socialism, its growth and outcome, Manifesto of English Socialists, The Wood beyond the World, Well at the World’s End. “Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life” said William Morris, The Beauty of Life, 1880 http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/Morris2003/Morris2003.html Considered to be the most creative artist Britain had ever produced he pervaded all the fields including weaving, embroidering, dyeing, calligraphy, translating, preserving architecture and even working as a businessman. His legacy has lived on after his death and his protégé Henry Dearle carried on his work influencing artists and designers with Morris’s ideals. Morris was supposed to have expressed the fear that his work would not leave any future impact. It was not so and has proved many times that the art and craft induced by Morris did not die with him and has relevance even today. “…..Morriss various endeavours in stained glass, pattern-designing, and book printing, and his philosophies of art have endured in the visionary transformation of interior design to an art. In changing the way we look at our homes, Morris changed the way we look at the world” http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/Morris2003/Morris2003.html His collections, designs of wall paper, cartoons, drawings, textiles, carpets, are stored in Huntington William Morris collection. Related exhibitions, tours, special events, lectures, conferences, concerts, curator tours, stained glass tours, children’s workshops, adult embroidery workshops, film screening, lectures and William Morris family festival go on throughout the year influencing artists, designers and craftsmen. He is regarded as the father of Arts and Crafts movement and his ideas, ideals and even the lifestyle are relevant today. He defined art as “the expression of man of his pleasure in labour”. Morrisian artefacts are respected as art of Socialism. “Indeed, in recent years, writers and politicians sympathetic to Morriss socialism have tended to defend the relevance of his political thought by passing over the details of his vision and translating his ideas to a set of familiar values or ideas: freedom, equality, fraternity, ecology, environmentalism” http://www.gwales.com/goto/review/cy/9780708315828/ He could be talking of any century, of any time when he says “Let us grant first, that the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree,” Briggs (1973, p.117). Throughout his life Morris gave great importance to worker and his craft. His art was not an independent, exalted entity, but an expression of a worker, who found happiness in creating such an art. Talking about worker’s share of art, he says: “Art is man’s embodies expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man’s pleasure in his life; pleasure we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals; and as it is the expression of pleasure in life generally, in the memory of the deeds of the past and the hope of the future, so it is especially the expression of man’s pleasure in the deeds of the present, in his work,” (Briggs, 140) and there is no question of such a statement going out of date at any time. Though he doubted occasionally about the relevance of his various arts and crafts forms, he was also secure in the knowledge that he had started many unending movements. He did not have great illusions about himself, but was very aware of his own usefulness and mission in life. “He himself would have argued that his work had relevance outside the century against which he was rebelling. Before listening to a sermon from John Ball in his vision of the lost past, he pondered “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”. (Briggs, p. 20). Morris not only stood for creation, but also for revival; revival of arts and crafts of medieval age, revival of medieval churches, because there is no other way of preserving those fantastic monuments and architecture. He knew that an extensive restoration was the only way of saving them from destruction. Preservation of the craft imbibed in these different architectural styles was very important to him. He had a great sense of history, politics and continuity of human culture and this is not an idea that would ever go out of relevance in human society. He also realised that these churches and monuments would not be the focal points of present day society, because they should be preserved for the talents that created them, and nothing more as the world has moved on. Conceding that the times are forever changing, he says: “The workman of today is not an artist as his forefather was; it is impossible, under his circumstances, that he could translate the work of the ancient handicraftsmen,” (Bradley, 1978, p.70) and this shows that Morris was never impervious to the changes of society, but knew how to adapt his ideas to those changes. His ideals were never static, but always evolving according to the needs of times and this freshness, innovation and originality in him makes him ever-relevant. It is believed that Morris could not completely influence his own times. He could definitely do so with his crafts, but not with his social utopia. But in the process, he has convinced many succeeding generations. He was forever worried about the state of crafts and their originators and attacked modern industry incessantly for not elevating the craftsmen to nobility. “Civilisation has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread” (Bradley, 1978, p. 116) and he tried to live out that ideal throughout. The fruitfulness with which Morris lived his life became a model for all times to come. He himself once famously remarked “I am an artist and literary man, pretty well known, I think throughout Europe.” He was a radical thinker and was contemptuous of much traditional baggage that his times represented. When he said he was born out of his due time, he was criticising the time, as well as himself. He tried to usher in simplicity and candour in arts and crafts with more of mental and original creativity. He deplored the ‘indifference to beauty’ as unpardonable. He argued that a man should be free to exercise his fancy and make his own choices. “For it is fancy rather than intellect which devises his ubiquitous, luxuriant beauty, the common product of a race of craftsmen. Beauty, intellectually conceived, is a rarity which can be made common by mechanical reproduction,” (Crow, 1934, pp. 111-112). Under his special influence, rigid tradition got severed from the crafts of modernism and since then, crafts and arts never returned to unbending traditional boundary; but always strived forward, imbibing the best of traditional values and talent. One could say that Morris set the ball of unlimited arena rolling towards eternity. “Nevertheless, while his influence upon contemporary design is small, the impulse of his example animates all that is best in modern craftsmanship, wherever men execute their own designs. Everyone arriving to produce lastingly beautiful work which demands the best of his capacity, and finding happiness in so doing, must recognise in Morris a kinsman, if not a leader,” (Crow, p.115). Morris disliked any kind of mass production that would, according to him, eventually kill the fancy, imagination and creative art of heart. His life itself is a criticism of two aspects of modern civilization, its tameness and its specialisation. The enjoyment of security under law and order beyond a certain limit never failed to enrage him. He admired great energy, industry and endurance; definitely not placid resignation. He appreciated the pouring out of creativity and never the resignation and acceptance of limitation. He was a rebellious person, who could never endure compulsions of any kind. He had no illusions of leadership or being a role model. “He regarded his own leadership as provisional, believing that the people must produce their real leaders from along themselves, when his own ambitions would be merged to the equal contentment of ordinary men. His life was dedicated to this vision of the common man of the future. He remains, in effect, that almost mystical figure, the precursor who must decrease as the foretold increases, the fore-runner of “Everyman” of the “Man in the Street,” (Crow, p.117). Morris brought art and divine crafts into the lives of ordinary people and there is absolutely no two opinions about this statement. “We owe it to William Morris that an ordinary man’s dwelling house has once more become a worthy object of the architect’s thought, and a chair, a wallpaper, or a vase a worthy object of the artist’s imagination,” (Nikolaus Peusner, from William Morris, An Illustrrated Life, P. 1). His idea of art and craft was focussed on creating an earthly paradise for every man. He was influenced by Romanticism, even though his reaction to Nature was very different from that of William Wordsworth. Being a practical man, he had no hesitation in using the nature for good of mankind to a certain extent. He was never as purely ecological as the Lake Poets and here, he was different from Ruskin too, though Ruskin had been his inspiration for his involvement in arts and crafts of medieval era and its revival. This does not mean that he had no regard for environmentalism. As a matter of fact, he was one of the forerunners of environmental preservation. He had built himself into the society and wanted to overthrow the very society, to his own financial downfall. He wanted to establish, in Thomas Hardy’s words ‘a pure delight, a beauty spot, where all is gentle, true, and just, and darkness is unknown’ and even though the pessimist in Hardy could not believe that such a place could exist, Morris did. “For after the unlamented death of the deformed, Stalinist socialism that prevailed so long in eastern Europe, the ideas of such men as Morris still provide the humanity and moral insight that should re-establish the good name of an essentially decent and idealistic creed,” (Harvey and Press, 1996, p. 233). His approach to the area of crafts was more passionate and more traditional. This is one region where he wants the history and convention to prevail, as he wanted the craft to come out of difficulties with its historical base intact. He said in News from Nowhere ‘it was mostly in periods of turmoil and strife and confusion that people cared much about history’ and while creating his designs, he always referred to its history, and sifted through historical materials to make the creation more authentic and acceptable. Even though a highly radical revolting spirit, he knew the importance of history in art and craft, and he thought it was impossible and unwise to negate man’s advancement through centuries. “Undoubtedly, Morris’s textile designs have been influential, as have his theories about pattern and colour. Morris was not so intent on reinstating the ideal of the medieval craftsman that he became blind to the world about him – quite the contrary. One must also consider the extent to which Morris assimilated contemporary influences of fashion and taste as well as the historical precedents for his patterns,” (The Design Council, 1981, p. 123). There cannot be a better tribute to Morris than that. His had always been an enduring legacy and will remain so, with his relevance unfading. The weaving of past and present could be witnessed in his craft easily while his stained glasses still are considered to be ‘an art of the Middle Ages’. They do not lack any popular appeal even today, is yet another matter. This did not prevent him to oppose conventionalism in many other ways. “Morris was thus opposing himself to much that his society most cherished: the complacent materialism of Victorian values. Though it was to take many forms and many years fully to mature, that opposition was to shape Morris’s life and he the foundation of the staggering range of his achievements,” (Coote, 1995, p.13). There had been criticisms that he was a mere utopian dreamer, which would be rather childish, looking at his immense range of achievements. There is no doubt that some of his crafts like embroidery, wall paper designs, and tapestries do create a cherished idea of utopia, one could never forget the practical side of his endeavours and ideals. He lived under no illusion. The Arts and Crafts movement remains particularly indebted to him even today. The movement created harmonious and integrated interiors in America by producing domestic schemes of great interest. American Prairie School imbibed oriental influence and the movement has achieved worldwide implication today. English Arts and Crafts Movement gave rise to many guilds and communities and today in the name of interior designing and decorations, the movement is a flourishing field of study and application. BIBIOGRAPHY: 1. Briggs, Asa (1973), William Morris, Selected Wrtings and Designs, Penguin books, London. 2. Bradley, Ian (1978), William Morris and his world, Thames and Hudson, London. 3. Banham, Joanna and Harris, Jennifer (1984) ed., William Morris and the Middle Ages, Manchester University Press. 4. Coote, Stephen (1998), William Morris, His life and work, Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, Surrey. 5. Crow, Gerald H. (1934), William Morris Designer, The Studio Ltd., London. 6. Harvey, Charles and Press, Jon (1996), Art, Enterprise and Ethics, Frank Cass, London. 7. William Morris & Kelmscott, (1981), The Design Council, London. 8. William Morris, The Pitkin Guide, Huntarian Art Gallery, Glasgow. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/Morris2003/Morris2003.html 2. http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/Morris2003/Morris2003.html 3. http://www.gwales.com/goto/review/cy/9780708315828/ Read More