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The Arts-Crafts Movement Essay
The Arts-Crafts Movement Essay
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.