The arts & crafts movement is the reaction to the poor quality design during the industrial revolution.

It emerged in the United Kingdom around 1860, at roughly the same time as the closely
related Aesthetic Movement, but the spread of the Arts & Crafts across the Atlantic to the United
States in the 1890s, enabled it to last longer - at least into the 1920s. The Arts and Crafts movement
emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the
world at that time. Due to anxieties about industrial life, fueled a positive revolution of hand
craftsmanship & forms of culture & society. The arts & crafts movement improved the standards of
decorative designs, which were believed to be compromised due to mechanization, during industrial
revolution.
Industrialization moved large number of working class laborers into the cities, crowding them into
the housing & subjecting them to the dangerous jobs with long hours & low pay. Cities were heavily
polluted with the groups of new factories.

THE GREAT EXHIBITION -

The great exhibition or the crystal palace exhibition, was an international exhibition which took
place in London, from 1 May to 15 October in 1951. It was organized by Prince Albert (Queen
Victoria’s husband) & Henry cole, who has lots of interest in writing, editing & publishing journals.
The main purpose of the exhibition was to create the greatest collection of arts in industry, for all
the nations. The temporary crystal palace was built in Hyde park, London & the exhibition opened
on 1st May, 1851. The exhibits included almost every marvel of the Victorian age, including pottery,
porcelain, ironwork, furniture, perfumes, pianos, firearms, fabrics, steam hammers, hydraulic presses
and even the odd house or two.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 ran from May to October and during this time six million people
passed through those crystal doors. The event proved to be the most successful ever staged and
became one of the defining points of the nineteenth century.

THE GENESIS : WILLIAM MORRIS -

One of the most influential figures during this time was William Morris, who actively promoted
the joy of craftsmanship and the beauty of the nature. William Morris believed that industrialization
alienated labour & created a dehumanizing distance between designer & manufacturer. Morris
strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and
simplicity of form.
William Morris believed people should be surrounded by beautiful, well-made things. This
vision inspired the emergence of the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s. Morris was also
fascinated by mediaeval art & nature. In 1861, Morris founded the decorative arts firm Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner & Co., along with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Philip Webb, Ford Madox Brown,
Charles Faulkner, and Peter Paul Marshall, which specialized in wallpaper designs featuring natural
imagery.

Morri’s firm grew in 1860s & 1870s.  It also expanded in terms of the range of items that it
manufactured, including furniture, such as the famous "Morris chair," textiles, and eventually stained
glass. Morris’ firm emphasized on the use of handcraft, rather than machine production. Morris
himself became involved in every step of production of the company's items, thus reviving the idea
that the designer or artist should guide the entire creative process as opposed to the mechanical
division of labor that was increasingly used in most factories. He also revived the use of organic
natural dyes. Other creatives such as architects, painters, sculptors and designers began to take up his
ideas. They began a unified art and craft approach to design, which soon spread across Europe and
America, and eventually Japan, emerging as its own folk crafts movement called Mingei.

SOCITIES, COMMUNITIES & EXHIBITIONS -

 Morris' success and his emphasis on vernacular and rural imagery inspired many others to create
collective associations where groups of artists and artisans collaborated on designs in a wide variety
of media. In 1882 Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo founded The Century Guild, a group aimed at
preserving handcraft and the authenticity of the artist, whose work included furniture, stained glass,
metalwork, decorative painting, and architectural design. In 1887, the Arts & Crafts Exhibition
Society, which gave the movement its name, was formed in London, with Walter Crane as its first
president. The aim were to allow the “workers to earn the title of artists”. The Society's exhibitions
served to keep the Arts & Crafts movement in the public eye and proved to be critical successes into
the new century - though by the 1920s persistent organizational problems and the organization's
antipathy towards machine production ultimately doomed its original mission.

ARCHITECTURE -
In architecture the Arts & Crafts movement did not develop into one particular building style,
but could be seen in a multitude of strains. In both Britain and the United States, the simplicity,
unvarnished, and rough-hewn aesthetic of the Arts & Crafts could be seen mixed in with a variety of
stylistic preferences - Queen Anne, Eastlake, Tudor Revival, Stick Style, Spanish Colonial Revival,
and Gothic Revival being the most prominent.

ARTWORKS OF THE ARTS & CRAFTS MOVEMENT -

1. RED HOUSE ( 1859-60) -
ARTIST : Philip Webb & William Morris
Often called as first Arts & Crafts Movement building, The red house was named after the deep
colour of the bricks used in the structure. It was a family house commissioned to Webb by Morris, in
London. Its steep roofs, L-shaped asymmetrical plan, and overhanging eaves recall the Gothic style,
with the brick introducing a simple, pedestrian touch, which contribute to its general recognition as
the first Arts & Crafts building. Built in 1860, it became known as the Red House, and is now one of
the most significant buildings of the Arts and Crafts era.

2. TULIP & ROSE (1876) -

ARTIST : William & Co.
The Tulip and Rose curtain exemplifies the kinds of textiles and wallpaper designs produced by
Morris' firm beginning in the 1860s. The dense, precisely interlocking pattern of the wool fabric,
using curved and exaggerated forms of plants, flora (and sometimes fauna) became a hallmark of
Morris & Company's fabric and wallpaper products in the 1870s and '80s. Unlike Morris' earlier
designs, which featured more naturalistic imagery, this textile demonstrates his move beyond
emulation towards a sense of abstraction during his mature career. The flattened forms and the
emphasis on line anticipate the stylization of nature later used by Art Nouveau, and calls attention to
the nature of the wool's rough surface texture, thereby revealing the honesty in materials.

3. BEAVER (1904) -
ARTIST : Grueby Faience Company
The subway tile here represents the way mass production became a hallmark of the Arts &
Crafts movement in the United States and ultimately put an end to the large-scale use of handcraft by
most design firms. Grueby, founded in 1894 in Revere, Massachusetts, was known primarily for its
production of art pottery vases. The tile is significant for the Arts & Crafts in many respects. The
beaver, like most of the other stations' tiles produced by Grueby, recalls the naturalistic or rural
imagery characteristic of the movement and provides a softer antidote to the otherwise industrial
character of the stations (emphasized by the natural colors). Here, the beaver has a double meaning,
as Astor Place was named for the Astor family, who had built their fortune in part through fur
trapping of beavers in the Pacific Northwest; on the other hand, "Astor" itself is nearly synonymous
with the Latin word for beaver, "castor." A simple frame with a geometric design and low garland
relief surrounds the beaver, emphasizing the flatness of the surface.

4. GAMBLE HOUSE (1908-09) -

ARTIST : Greene & Greene
Designed by the architectural firm of the brothers Greene & Greene, Massachusetts transplants
to southern California, for the eponymous executive of Procter & Gamble, the house demonstrates
the way that the movement's notions of simplicity and homeliness were transformed into the
preserves of the upper classes. It remains the best example of the Greenes' architectural work and is
sometimes described as an exemplar of the Western Stick Style.
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 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. 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.

5. SIDEBOARD (1897) -
ARTIST : Charles F. A. Voysey
Voysey's sideboard illustrates well many of the tenets of Arts & Crafts furniture. The
straightforward design appears so homely that one might almost mistake it for a piece of folk art. The
sideboard rests on four posts that a3ppear almost to be too thin to carry its mass. The wood, fittingly,
is oak, a very common selection for Arts & Crafts furniture, which has been hewn in order to expose
the grain, and stained to visually emphasize the material's texture. The organization of the
sideboard's storage is honest and simplistic: a cabinet containing possibly a shelf, a counter, and a
shelf above attached to the back. Virtually nothing about the piece is hidden or complicated.
The only ornament attached to the sideboard consists of the prominent dark brass hinges on the
cabinet doors, which terminate in heart-shaped cutouts. The hinges appear almost as if they were
stolen from a Gothic cathedral door and repurposed, giving the sideboard a deceptive air that it is
older than it really is and underscoring the connection with the Middle Ages, from whose aesthetics
the Arts & Crafts was derived.

CONTROVERSY -
The main controversy raised by the movement was its practicality in the modern world. The
progressives claimed that the movement was trying to turn back the clock and that it could not be
done, that the Arts and Crafts movement could not be taken as practical in mass urban and
industrialized society. On the other hand, a reviewer who criticized an 1893 exhibition as “the work
of a few for the few” also realized that it represented a graphic protest against design as “a
marketable affair, controlled by the salesmen and the advertiser, and at the mercy of every passing
fashion.”
In the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts movement widened, and the movement became
diffused and less specifically identified with a small group of people. Its ideas spread to other
countries and became identified with the growing international interest in design, specifically
with Art Nouveau.
Several factors contributed to the Arts & Crafts movement's demise in the 20th century.
Fundamental to its decline was the inherent problem of handcraft - which is labor-intensive - to be
easily produced in great quantities and cheaply enough to reach a mass audience. Pockets of the Arts
& Crafts Movement managed to survive among individuals and collective artistic enterprises well
into the middle of the 20th century. The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society still exists in modified
form as the Society of Designer Craftsmen and holds periodic exhibitions.

INFLUENCE OF ARTS & CRAFTS MOVEMENT -

as the Arts & Crafts Movement encouraged, proved inspirational for many different artists,
designers, and collective movements in Europe and North America, often at the same time as the
Arts & Crafts itself flourished. In Scotland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School are
sometimes grouped in with other Arts & Crafts designers. Many proponents of Art Nouveau cited
William Morris as a major influence on their work, and the movement was especially admired in
Austria and Germany, where design schools based in handcraft, artists' colonies like that at
Darmstadt, and planned garden cities echoed the tenets of the Arts & Crafts and claimed it as their
direct ancestor. Such was the case with the Bauhaus as founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, which
perhaps went further and exhibited distinctly socialist tendencies that forced the school to relocate
multiple times before its closure in 1933.