Arts & Craftsart

Arts & Craftsart grand

 The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles[1] and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.[2]

Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced,[3] the movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920. In Japan it emerged in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and was anti-industrial in its orientation.[3][4] It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s,[1] and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards.[5]

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The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887,[6] although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least 20 years. It was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin, writer John Ruskin, and designer William Morris.[7] In Scotland it is associated with key figures such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh.[8]

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface", as well as displaying "vulgarity in detail".[9] Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888),[10] all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly made things.[11] The organizers were "unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits."[12] Owen Jones, for example, complained that "the architect, the upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter" produced "novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence."[12] From these criticisms of manufactured goods emerged several publications which set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analyzed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for "more logic in the application of decoration."[11] Other works followed in a similar vein, such as Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), Gottfried Semper's Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ("Science, Industry and Art") (1852), Ralph Wornum's Analysis of Ornament (1856), Redgrave's Manual of Design (1876), and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856).[11] The Grammar of Ornament was particularly influential, liberally distributed as a student prize and running into nine reprints by 1910.[11]

Jones declared that ornament "must be secondary to the thing decorated", that there must be "fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented", and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain".[13] A fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, whereas these writers advocated flat and simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that "style" demanded sound construction before ornamentation, and a proper awareness of the quality of materials used. "Utility must have precedence over ornamentation."[14]

The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in 1892 in his Golden Type inspired by 15th century printer Nicolas Jenson. This chapter from The Stones of Venice was a sort of manifesto for the Arts and Crafts movement.

However, the design reformers of the mid-19th century did not go as far as the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. They were more concerned with ornamentation than construction, they had an incomplete understanding of methods of manufacture,[14] and they did not criticize industrial methods as such. By contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.

A. W. N. Pugin

Pugin's house "The Grange" in Ramsgate, 1843. Its simplified Gothic style, adapted to domestic building, helped shape the architecture of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic revival in architecture. For example, he advocated truth to material, structure, and function, as did the Arts and Crafts artists.[15] Pugin articulated the tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society with the Middle Ages,[16] such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor—a tendency that became routine with Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. His book Contrasts (1836) drew examples of bad modern buildings and town planning in contrast with good medieval examples, and his biographer Rosemary Hill notes that he "reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmanship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail." She describes the spare furnishings which he specified for a building in 1841, "rush chairs, oak tables", as "the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo."[16]