BARC 505- Humanities 5 Grading - 10 Marks

Assignment Title - Essays on Arts-Crafts and Art Nouveau Movements

Class Coordinator: Ar. Niroppama S Sawant.
Class In-charges – Ar. Mugdha Bakde Deshpande & Ar. Charvi Kamat
Elective Faculty - Ar. Swanand M. and1 Ar. Mildred Jose

The art and craft movement was a social yet artistic movement of modern art, which
began in Britain spreading to continental Europe and the USA. It was started by John
Ruskin and William Morris. This movement began by exposing the effects of
industrialization on both art and the lives of the workers. This movement began as a
rebellion against industrialization and mass production by machines. It believed in
restoration power of craftsmanship. The main aim of the movement was to bridge the
traditional divisions between artists, architects, designers and craftsmen. The main
motive was the art is or should be an agent in production of noble life.
Principles of arts and crafts movement:
 There should be Unity in design, as all the people engaged in art fields should
get together and should design a prominent element which represents as
inclusion of details and artwork forms.
 The labour should enjoy his work and not just work for the sake of production,
whether it be industrial works or hand made craft the labour should enjoy the
learning of new skills and applying them in their works.
 Though the production requires labour work there should be inclusion of
individualistic ideas in their works. They should try hands on new techniques
and enhance their skills in the product in which they are engaged.
 Regionalism, they should make products using artworks which will reflect in the
history of their own country.
 Truth to materials: emphasizing on the natural qualities of materials to make the
objects.
 The vernacular: the vernacular traditions of British countryside provided the
main insipiration. Many of their workshops were set up in rural areas and taught
old techniques.
 Natural motifs: nature was considered as a source of idea for the patterns which
were to be designed.
 Simplistic forms: combination of simple and good design in art and craft works
was involved.
Influences of art and crafts movement:
Art and crafts movements made a closer relationship between designer, maker and the
object. The integration of art got very much involved into the life. Objects and furnitures
involved ornamentations and details. Furnitures were made in native woods with
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traditionally woven rush seats. Joineries and hammer marks were exposed to show the
craftsmanships. On the exterior of the houses built the features of arts and crafts were
added which were:
 Porch with thick square or round columns
 Stone porch supports
 Sliding low pitched roof, wide eaves with triangular brackets
 Exposed roof rafters
On the interiors of the house there were built in cabinets, shelves and seatings. The
windows were with stained glass or leaded glass. The ceilings were painted with proper
patterns.
Some of the known structures built up in this era which gives us the perfect gist of how
the art works were implemented architecturally.

RED HOUSE (1859-60)

(Philip Webb and William Morris)

Often called the first Arts & Crafts building, Red House was appropriately the residence
of William Morris and his family, built within commuting distance of central London but at
the time still in the countryside. It was the first house designed by Webb as an
independent architect, and the only house that Morris built for himself. Its asymmetrical,
L-shaped plan, pointed arches and picturesque set of masses with steep rooflines recall
the Gothic style, while its tile roof and brick construction, largely devoid of ornament
speak to the simplicity that Morris preached and its function as a mere residence,
though the interiors were in places richly decorated with murals by Edward Burne-
Jones. The house represented a sharp contrast to suburban or country Victorian
residences, most of which were elaborately and pretentiously decorated. Its location
allowed Morris to remain in touch with nature, away from London's dirty, polluted core.
The design, which included unusually large servants' quarters, spoke to Morris and
Webb's budding Socialist inclinations towards erasing class distinctions. Unfortunately,
the long hours that Morris spent commuting proved too burdensome for his productivity,
and after only five years in the house he sold it and moved his family into London above
the shop for his firm.
Materials used: Red Brick, Wood, and Glass - Bexleyheath, London

GAMBLE HOUSE (1908-09)

(Greene and Greene)

The Gamble house exhibits consonance with nature in nearly every respect. Its low,
horizontal profile is exemplified by the covered second-floor porch and wraparound
terrace extending from the front entrance to the back garden. The painted olive hue of
the shingle siding almost seems to blend with the verdant trees and is offset by the
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stained wood of the frames for the doors and windows. This brown hue extends to the
interior and multiplies with inlays in various surfaces, thus creating a sense of continuity
between outside and inside. Such harmony is finally reinforced by the stained glass of
the front door, which features imagery of a Japanese black pine, acknowledging the
house's location on the Pacific Rim. The interior, meanwhile, exudes a gentle warmth
and sense of informal comfort despite not being brightly lit, a quality highly desired in an
Arts & Crafts residence. Finally, the Greenes designed the house with a painstaking
attention to structural honesty, extending the rafters underneath the roof to the ends of
the eaves and exposing the joinery on staircases, beams, and posts on the interior.
Pasadena, California

Decline of Art and Craft movement

Several factors contributed to the Arts & Crafts movement's demise in the 20 th century.
Fundamental to its decline was the inherent problem of handcraft - which is labour-
intensive - to be easily produced in great quantities and cheaply enough to reach a
mass audience. Morris was never able to solve this paradox, since his goal was to
create a democratic art for the masses, and as time went on, he grumbled frequently
that his firm catered to wealthy clients almost exclusively. The problems were not
unique to his company, as many other Arts & Crafts practitioners on both sides of the
Atlantic were forced to adopt machine production, often with a decrease in quality in
order to stay afloat, and several simply went out of business. Many cooperative art
colonies, particularly in the USA, discovered that such a collective enterprise built on
handcraft was no longer sustainable on a long-term basis. Finally, like many other
movements, the Arts & Crafts fell victim to changing tastes: at the dawn of the new
century, a newfound respect for a traditional Neoclassicism emerged - the Edwardian
Baroque Revival in Britain and the City Beautiful Movement in the USA - both of which
largely spelled the end of the Arts & Crafts Movement as a mainstream phenomenon
after World War I.
Pockets of the Arts & Crafts Movement managed to survive among individuals and
collective artistic enterprises well into the middle of the 20 th century. The Eagle Pottery
that produced Bybee potteries in the American South enjoyed their best years during
the 1930s, and the Newcomb College and Teco potteries continued production into the
early 1940s. The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society still exists in modified form as the
Society of Designer Craftsmen and holds periodic exhibitions. As with many movements
of design and architecture - and even more so than most - the Arts & Crafts aesthetic
continues to influence cheap, highly commercialized lines of products - particularly
using faux and synthetic materials - frequently marketed today in department stores and
by other retailers.
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ART NOUVEAU

Art Nouveau, ornamental style of art that flourished between about 1890 and 1910
throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is characterized by its use of a
long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior
design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt to
create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that dominated much of 19th-century
art and design.

The distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art Nouveau is its undulating

asymmetrical line, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils,
insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be
elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force. In
the graphic arts the line subordinates all other pictorial elements—form, texture, space,
and colour—to its own decorative effect. In architecture and the other plastic arts, the
whole of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the organic, linear rhythm,
creating a fusion between structure and ornament. Architecture particularly shows this
synthesis of ornament and structure; a liberal combination of materials—ironwork,
glass, ceramic, and brickwork—was employed, for example, in the creation of unified
interiors in which columns and beams became thick vines with spreading tendrils and
windows became both openings for light and air and membranous outgrowths of the
organic whole. This approach was directly opposed to the traditional architectural values
of reason and clarity of structure.

Pierre Francastel divided art nouveau into two parts named as ORGANIC and
RATIONALISTS. Rationalists basically included only straight line in their design, more
of a simplistic form whereas, organic designers gave rise to organic, curvy shapes and
floral patterns in their designs.The American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, who used
plant like Art Nouveau ironwork to decorate his traditionally structured buildings; and the
Spanish architect and sculptor Antonio Gaudí, perhaps the most original artist of the
movement, who went beyond dependence on line to transform buildings into curving,
bulbous, brightly coloured, organic construction. Many more architects were included in
the era and applied the characteristics in in the structure.
Few examples of the structures took place in art nouveau movement were:

WAINWRIGHT BUILDING
(Louis Sullivan)

The 10-story Wainwright Building in St. Louis is the most important skyscraper designed
by Sullivan. The exterior walls of which are solid masonry and load bearing, it is of steel

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frame throughout. He gave his building a two-story base, above which the vertical
elements are stressed and the horizontals, being recessed, are minimized. These
vertical rhythms are capped by a deep decorative frieze and a projecting cornice. The
first two floors are faced in brown sandstone, the next seven stories rise in continuous
brick piers. Terra cotta panels of ornate foliage relief's decorate the each floor. The
tenth story is a frieze of intertwined leaf scrolls framing circular windows, and is capped
with Sullivan's characteristic overhanging roof slab. The building became a City
Landmark in 1972.

CASA LA BATTLO
(Antoni Gaudi)

The inspiring imagination of Antoni Gaudí undoubtedly reveals itself in one of his most
poetic and artistic designs for a building, Casa Batlló. His synthesis of animal shapes,
vine-like curves, hints of bone and skeleton, and his use of lustrous colored bits of
glazed ceramic and glass create a masterpiece that will forever astonish its observers.
His style encompasses all that defines the Art Nouveau, a School of French decorative
artists from the 1890s who took influence from sinuous shapes in plants and nature. He
explored his interests in flowing shapes, patterns and colors in the Casa Batlló, The
front facade reveals striking textures, colors, and imagery that work together to conjure
thoughts of fairytales and phantasmal dreams. The larger sculptural pieces that create
the boundaries of the balconies and that frame the entrance resemble bones,
suggesting a septum, eyebrows or clavicles, which keep to the anthropomorphic tone.
The spine is dotted with bulbous green and blue vertebrae, suggesting that these might
be organisms in themselves, while the flowing lines where roof meets facade are edged
with other armatures of saurian bone and joint. As can always be anticipated in the
works of Gaudí, there is a recurring religious imagery which is achieved almost
subliminally. There are embedded and semi-concealed religious images and texts
planted in the upper levels of the building, as well as in the small details around the
facade. Gaudí's state of the art use of central heating, uncommon in the time and place
of Barcelona, made air vents and chimneys necessary. He took this as yet another
place to expand his talents and imaginations, adding to the fairytale structure and
appearance of Casa Batlló. One of the most intriguing aspects of these chimneys are
their 45-degree angle departure from the roof before they become vertical.

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