Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
Arts and Crafts: an introduction
The birth of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain in the late 19th century marked the beginning of a change in the value society placed on how things were made. This was a reaction to not only the damaging effects of industrialisation but also the relatively low status of the decorative arts. Arts and Crafts reformed the design and manufacture of everything from buildings to jewellery.
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin, ‘The Cestus of Aglaia, the Queen of the Air’, 1870
In Britain the damaging effects of machine-dominated production on both social conditions and the quality of manufactured goods had been recognised since around 1840. But it was not until the 1860s and ’70s that new approaches in architecture and design were championed in an attempt to correct the problem. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was born out of an increasing understanding that society needed to adopt a different set of priorities in relation to the manufacture of objects. Its leaders wanted to develop products that not only had more integrity but which were also made in a less dehumanising way.
Structured more by a set of ideals than a prescriptive style, the Movement took its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, a group founded in London in 1887 that had as its first president the artist and book illustrator Walter Crane. The Society’s chief aim was to assert a new public relevance for the work of decorative artists (historically they had been given far less exposure than the work of painters and sculptors). The Great Exhibition of 1851 and a few spaces such as the Refreshment Rooms of the South Kensington Museum (later known as the V&A) in the 1860s had given decorative artists the chance to show their work publicly, but without a regular showcase they were struggling to exert influence and to reach potential customers.
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society mounted its first annual exhibition in 1888, showing examples of work it hoped would help raise both the social and intellectual status of crafts including ceramics, textiles, metalwork and furniture. Its members publicly rejected the excessive ornamentation and ignorance of materials, which many objects in the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been criticised for. For many years in Britain exhibitions mounted by the Society were the only public platform for the decorative arts, and were critical in changing the way people looked at manufactured objects.
Although it was known by a single name (one that wasn’t in fact used widely until the early 20th century), the Arts and Crafts movement was in fact comprised of a number of different artistic societies, such as the Exhibition Society, the Arts Workers Guild (set up in 1884), and other craftspeople in both small workshops and large manufacturing companies.
Many of the people who became involved in the Movement were influenced by the work of the designer William Morris, who by the 1880s had become an internationally renowned and commercially successful designer and manufacturer.
Morris only became actively involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society a number of years after it was set up (between 1891 and his death in 1896), but his ideas were hugely influential to the generation of decorative artists whose work it helped publicise. Morris believed passionately in the importance of creating beautiful, well-made objects that could be used in everyday life, and that were produced in a way that allowed their makers to remain connected both with their product and with other people. Looking to the past, particularly the medieval period, for simpler and better models for both living and production, Morris argued for the return to a system of manufacture based on small-scale workshops.
Morris was not entirely against the use of machines, but felt that the division of labour – a system designed to increase efficiency, in which the manufacture of an object was broken into small, separate tasks, meaning individuals had a very weak relationship with the results of their labour – was a move in the wrong direction.
Like many idealistic, educated men of his era, he was shocked by the social and environmental impact of the factory-based system of production that Victorian Britain had so energetically embraced. He wanted to free the working classes from the frustration of a working day focused solely on repetitive tasks, and allow them the pleasure of craft-based production in which they would engage directly with the creative process from beginning to end.
Morris was himself inspired by the ideas of the Victorian era’s leading art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose work had suggested a link between a nation’s social health and the way in which its goods were produced. Ruskin argued that separating the act of designing from the act of making was both socially and aesthetically damaging. The Arts and Crafts movement was also influenced by the work of Augustus Pugin (1812–1852). An interior designer and architect, Pugin was a Gothic revivalist and a member of the Design Reform Movement. He had helped challenge the mid-Victorian fashion for ornamentation, and, like Morris, focused on the medieval period as an ideal template for both good design and good living.
In the final decade of the 19th century and into the 20th, the Arts and Crafts movement flourished in large cities throughout the UK, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. These urban centres had the infrastructure, organisations and wealthy patrons it needed to gather pace. Exhibition societies inspired by the original one in London helped establish the Movement’s public identity and gave it a forum for discussion. Members of the Arts and Crafts community felt driven to spread their message, convinced that a better system of design of manufacture could actively change people’s lives. Between 1895 and 1905 this strong sense of social purpose drove the creation of over a hundred organisations and guilds that centred on Arts and Crafts principles in Britain.
Progressive new art schools and technical colleges in London, Glasgow and Birmingham encouraged the development of both workshops and individual makers, as well as the revival of techniques, including enamelling, embroidery and calligraphy. Arts and Crafts designers also forged new relationships with manufacturers that enabled them to sell their goods through shops in London such as Morris & Co. (William Morris’s ‘all under one roof’ store on Oxford Street), Heal’s and Liberty. This commercial distribution helped the Movement’s ideas reach a much wider audience.
A particular feature of the Arts and Crafts movement was that a large proportion of its leading figures had trained as architects. This common culture helped develop a collective belief in the importance of designing objects for a ‘total’ interior: a space in which architecture, furniture, wall decoration, etc. blended in a harmonious whole. As a result, most Arts and Crafts designers worked across an unusually wide range of different disciplines. In a single career someone could apply craft-based principles to the design of things as varied as armchairs and glassware. Arts and Crafts also had a significant impact on architecture. Figures including Philip Webb, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Voysey and William Lethaby quietly revolutionised domestic space in buildings that referenced both regional and historical traditions.
Although the Arts and Crafts movement evolved in the city, at its heart was nostalgia for rural traditions and ‘the simple life’, which meant that living and working in the countryside was the ideal to which many of its artists aspired. Increasingly, many left the city to establish new ways of living and working, with workshops set up across Britain in locations including the Cotswolds, the Lake District, Sussex and Cornwall. All these places offered picturesque landscapes, an existing culture of craft skills and, importantly, rail links for access to patrons and the London market.
Arts and Crafts makers based in rural communities both revived craft traditions and created employment for local people. This kind of development meant that the Movement endured longer in the countryside than in the city, and had a more significant impact on the rural than the urban economy. Significantly, the Arts and Crafts community was open to the efforts of non-professionals, encouraging the involvement of amateurs and students through organisations such as the Home Arts and Industries Association. And it also created an environment in which, for the first time, women as well as men could begin to take an active role in developing new forms of design, both as makers and consumers.
In Europe the honesty of expression in Arts and Crafts work was a catalyst for the radical forms of Modernism, whereas in Britain the progressive impetus of the Movement began to lose momentum after the First World War. Under the control of older artists it had begun to withdraw from productive relationships with industry and into a purist celebration of the handmade. Some organisations sympathetic to Arts and Crafts ideals did survive, particularly in the countryside, and the original Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society mounted regular shows up to and beyond its 50th anniversary in 1938. In 1960, t he Society merged with the Cambridgeshire Guild of Craftsmen to form the Society of Designer Craftsmen, which is still active today.
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Pragmatic theories of art
There are theories of art that differ from one another in what they allege to be the real purpose or function of art but are at one with each other in the belief that art is a means to some end, whether that end be the titillation of the senses or the conversion of humankind to belief in God or the improved moral beliefs or moral tone of the reader or viewer. In every case, the work of art is considered as a means to some end beyond itself, and hence what counts in the final analysis is not the nature of the work of art itself but its effects upon the audience—whether those effects be primarily sensory, cognitive, moral, religious, or social.
Hedonistic theories of art
According to one kind of theory, the function of art is to produce just one kind of effect upon its audience: pleasure. It may also inform or instruct, represent or express, but first and foremost it must please. The more pleasure it gives, the better the art.
If the theory is left in this simple form, it yields the result that glossy and superficial works and those containing nothing difficult or obscure are the best works of art. Thus, on the hedonistic account, King Lear might come out far behind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, or Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” in view of the difficulty of comprehending Shakespeare by many people and the pleasant, easy lilting quality of Longfellow’s poem; similarly, a simple ditty might come out ahead of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. True, Shakespeare and Bach might produce more pleasure in the long run since their works have endured through more centuries, but, on the other hand, the simple works can be apprehended and enjoyed by vastly more people.
In any case, the theory has often been amended to read “aesthetic pleasure” rather than simply “pleasure”—thus placing great importance on exactly how the term “aesthetic” is to be defined. The definition of this troublesome term is beyond the scope of this article (see aesthetics); it will simply be said here that no quick and easy way of distinguishing aesthetic pleasures from other pleasures will suffice for the task at hand. If it is said, for example, that aesthetic pleasure consists in satisfaction taken in the contemplation of sensuous particulars (tones, colours, shapes, smells, tastes) for their own sake—that is, for no further end and without ulterior motive—then one confronts the fact that as much pleasure may be taken in single smells and tastes for their own sakes, without any reference beyond them, as may be taken in the most complex works of art. For that matter, pleasure in playing a game (one not played for money) is pleasure in doing something for its own sake, as is the pleasure of robbing a house if it is done not for money but for “kicks.” If something is found pleasurable, ordinarily the pleasure is what one wants from it, not something else beyond it.
Moreover, if it is said that a work of art should be a means toward pleasure, that is treading suspiciously near to the opposed view that art should not be a means to an end but an end in itself. If someone says, “Why do you go jogging every morning for three miles? Because you feel the exercise is good for you?” and another person answers, “No, not that at all, I just enjoy doing it,” this would ordinarily and quite sensibly be taken as saying that the person did not do exercise as a means toward an end but as an end in itself. If something is done just because it is enjoyed, in common parlance this would be taken to be “doing it as an end in itself”; if one objected, “No, I’m not doing it as an end in itself, I’m doing it as a means toward the enjoyment I’ll get out of it,” the reply would be considered sophistical, for doing it for enjoyment’s sake is precisely what is ordinarily meant (or one thing that is ordinarily meant) by the statement that a thing is being done for its own sake.
In any case, the effect of great works of art upon a reader or viewer or listener can hardly be described as merely hedonistic. No one would presumably wish to deny that art can and should give us pleasure, but few would wish to assert that pleasure is all that it should give us. If one were to ask, “How did viewing Picasso’s Guernica affect you?” and the reply was, “I found it pleasant,” we would conclude that the reaction to the painting was, to say the least, inadequate. Great art may please; it may also move, shock, challenge, or change the lives of those who experience it deeply. Pleasure is only one of many kinds of effects it produces.
