PENGUIN BOOKS

PIONEERS OF MODERN DESIGN

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was born in 1902 and educated at Leipzig. He took a Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture in 1924 and was successively connected with the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. For five years he was on the staff of the Dresden Gallery, and whilst a lecturer at Göttingen University from 1929 to 1933 he specialized in the history of art in Great Britain. From 1949 to 1955 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. In 1959 he became Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London, and he remained there until his retirement in 1969 when he became Emeritus Professor.

From its inception he edited the Pelican History of Art and Architecture and wrote most of The Buildings of England by counties, as well as editing the whole series. He was a Royal Gold Medalist of the R.I.B.A., and honorary doctor of Leicester, York, Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge, East Anglia, Zagreb, Keele, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh and Pennsylvania Universities, an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, F.S.A. and F.B.A. He was appointed C.B.E. in 1953 and received á knighthood in 1969.

His book on Italian Painting from the end of the Renaissance to the end of the Rococo is considered a standard work, and among his other publications are: An Inquiry into Industrial Art in England, German Baroque Sculpture, An Outline of European Architecture, High Victorian Design, Sources of Modern Art, The Englishness of English Art (Reith Lectures, 1955). He also wrote Studies in Art, Architecture and Design, The Anti-Rationalists, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century and A History of Building Types, which won the Wolfson Literary Award; and he is co-author of the Penguin Dictionary of Architecture.

Sir Nikolaus died on 18 August 1983. In his obituary The Times wrote: ‘He won the admiration of scholars all over the world and of all shades of opinion through the breadth of his knowledge… and the quality of his writing… He had a great capacity for getting down to essentials in any phase of art and for distinguishing between what was inevitable in the circumstances and what was likely to blow over as a passing fashion. His judgements were often refreshingly unconventional for the simple reason that they were consistent.’

Nikolaus Pevsner

PIONEERS OF MODERN DESIGN

FROM
WILLIAM MORRIS

TO
WALTER GROPIUS

image

Penguin Books

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Faber & Faber under the title Pioneers of the Modern Movement 1936

Copyright 1936 by Nikolaus Pevsner

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193232-3

To

T.B., T.B., W.B., W.A.C.,
W.G.C., J.P. and D.F., P.S.F.,
P. and E.G., H.R., F.M.W.,
the A.A.C., the C.I.

in gratitude

Contents

LIST OF PLATES

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

FOREWORD TO THE PELICAN EDITION

1 Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius

2 From Eighteen-fifty-one to Morris and the Arts and Crafts

3 Eighteen-ninety in Painting

4 Art Nouveau

5 Engineering and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century

6 England, Eighteen-ninety to Nineteen-fourteen

7 The Modern Movement before Nineteen-fourteen

NOTES

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

SECOND SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

TABLE OF NAMES AND DATES

INDEX

List of Plates

1. Carpet from the Great Exhibition of 1851

2. Shawl from the Great Exhibition of 1851

3. Silverware from the Great Exhibition of 1851

4. Owen Jones: Pattern design, from the Journal of Design and Manufactures, 1852

5. Pugin: Ornamental design, from Foliated Ornament, 1849

6. Morris: The Daisy wallpaper, 1861

7. Morris: Hammersmith carpet. The Little Tree pattern

8. Morris: The Honeysuckle chintz, 1883

9. Dresser: Cruet set and tea-kettle, 1877–8

10. De Morgan: Plate, 1880s. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

11. Webb: Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent. Built in 1859 for William Morris

12. Webb: The chimney-piece in Red House, 1859. (National Buildings Record)

13. Webb: No. 1 Palace Green, Kensington, London, 1868. (A.F. Kersting)

14. Shaw: New Zealand Chambers, Leadenhall Street, London, 1872–3. (National Buildings Record)

15. Shaw: The architect's house, Ellerdale Road, Hampstead, London, 1875. (National Buildings Record)

16. Nesfield: Kinmel Park, Abergele, Wales, 1871 or earlier. (National Buildings Record)

17. Shaw: No. 170 Queen's Gate, London, 1888

18. Godwin: The White House, Tite Street, Chelsea. Built for Whistler in 1878. (National Buildings Record)

19. Richardson: Stoughton house, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1882–3. (Henry-Russell Hitchcock)

20. White: Newport Casino, 1881. (Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White. Architectural Book Publishing Co. Inc.)

21. White: Germantown Cricket Club, Philadelphia, 1891. (Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead & White. Architectural Book Publishing Co. Inc.)

22. Renoir: The Judgement of Paris, 1908. (Mrs Louise R. Smith, New York. Photograph Knoedler Gallery, New York)

23. Cézanne: Bathers, 1895–1905. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, W.P. Wilstach Collection)

24. Van Gogh: Portrait, 1890. (Collection Mrs Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, Winterthur, Switzerland)

25. Manet: Jeanne (Springtime), 1882. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

26. Gauguin: Yellow Christ, 1889. (Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York)

27. Gauguin: Women at the River (Auti Te Pape), c. 1891–3. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Collection)

28. Vallotton: The Bath, 1890. (Collection Paul Vallotton, Lausanne, Switzerland)

29. Denis: April, 1892. (Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo)

30. Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte, 1884–6. (Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection)

31. Rousseau: Self Portrait, 1890. (Modern Gallery, Prague)

32. Ensor: Intrigue, 1890. (Royal Museum, Antwerp)

33. Khnopff: Poster, 1891

34. Toorop: Faith Giving Way, 1894. (Municipal Museum, The Hague)

35. Hodler: The Chosen One, 1893–4. (Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland; Boissonnas)

36. Munch: The Cry, 1893. (National Gallery, Oslo)

37. Mackmurdo: Title-page, 1883

38. Burne-Jones: Pelican, 1881. (William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow)

39. Burges: Chimney-piece in his own house, Melbury Road, Kensington, c. 1880. (National Buildings Record)

40. Beardsley: Siegfried, 1893

41. Toorop: The Three Brides, 1893. (Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo)

42. Munch: Madonna, 1895

43. Sullivan: Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1888. Bar. (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)

44. Horta: No. 6 rue Paul-Émile Janson, Brussels, 1893. Staircase

45. Van de Velde: Chairs for his own house at Uccle, near Brussels, 1894–5

46. Gallé: Glass vase. (Museum of Modern Art, New York; David Royter)

47. Tiffany: Glass vases. (Museum of Modern Art, New York; G. Barrows)

48. Guimard: Castel Béranger, No. 16 rue La Fontaine, Passy, Paris, 1894–8

49. Eckmann: Decoration of two pages in the magazine Pan, 1895

50. Obrist: Embroidery, 1893

51. Plumet: Interior

52. Gaudí: Crypt of Santa Coloma de Cervelló. Begun in 1898. (MAS; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

53. Gaudí: Parque Güell, Barcelona. Begun in 1900. (Amigos de Gaudí, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

54. Gaudí: Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Transept, 1903–26. (Zerkowitz, Barcelona; Amigos de Gaudí, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

55. Gaudí: Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Detail from the top of one of the transept towers. (Zerkowitz, Barcelona; Amigos de Gaudí, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

56. Gaudí: Casa Batlló, Barcelona, 1905–7. (Zerkowitz, Barcelona; Amigos de Gaudí, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

57. Gaudí: Casa Milá, Barcelona, 1905–7. (MAS; Amigos de Gaudí, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York)

58. Benyon, Bage, & Marshall's flax-spinning mill, Ditherington, Shrewsbury, 1796

59. Lorillard: Building in Gold Street, New York, 1837

60. Bogardus: Building for Harper Bros, New York, 1854. (Brown Brothers, New York)

61. Jamaica Street warehouse, Glasgow, 1855–6. (Annan, Glasgow)

62. Ellis: Oriel Chambers, Liverpool, 1864–5. (Stewart Bale)

63. G. T. Greene: Boat store at Sheerness Naval Dockyard, 1858–61. (Eric de Maré; Architectural Press)

64. Johnston and Walter: Jayne Building, Philadelphia, 1849–50. (John Maass)

65. Coalbrookdale Bridge, 1777–81. (Reece Winstone)

66. Pritchard: Design for the Coalbrookdale Bridge, 1775

67. Telford: Design for a cast-iron bridge to replace London Bridge, 1801. (Science Museum)

68. Brunel: Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol. Designed 1829–31. Begun in 1836

69. St Alkmund, Shrewsbury, 1795. Cast-iron tracery. (West Midland. Photo Services Ltd, Shrewsbury)

70. Loudon: Designs for conservatories, 1817

71. Boileau: St Eugène, Paris, 1854–5. (Roger Viollet, Paris)

72. Viollet-le-Duc: Illustration from the Entretiens, 1872

73. Dutert and Contamin: Halle des Machines, Paris International Exhibition, 1889

74. Eiffel: Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1889

75. Sullivan: Wainwright Building, St Louis, 1890–91

76. Burnham and Root: Monadnock Block, Chicago, 1890–91

77. De Baudot: St Jean de Montmartre, Paris, 1894–7 (Chevojon Frères, Paris)

78. Voysey: Design for a wallpaper, c. 1895

79. Voysey: Stags and Trees, printed linen, 1908

80. Voysey: Toast rack and cruet set

81. Voysey: The Orchard, Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, 1900

82. Gimson: Chairs, 1901

83. Heal: Wardrobe, 1900. (Heal & Son Ltd)

84. Mackmurdo: 8 Private Road, Enfield, c. 1883

85. Mackmurdo: Exhibition stand, Liverpool, 1886

86. Voysey: House in Bedford Park, near London, 1891

87. Voysey: Studio, St Dunstan's Road, West Kensington, London, 1891

88. Voysey: House at Shackleford, Surrey, 1897

89. Voysey: Perrycroft, Colwall, Malvern Hills, 1893

90. Voysey: Lodge and stables, Merlshanger, near Guildford, Surrey, 1896

91. Voysey: Broadleys on Lake Windermere, 1898

92. Smith and Brewer: Mary Ward Settlement, Tavistock Place, London, 1895

93. Townsend: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1897–9

94. Townsend: Horniman Museum, London, 1900–1902

95. Mackintosh: School of Art, Glasgow, 1896–9. (Annan, Glasgow)

96. Mackintosh: School of Art, Glasgow, 1907–9. Interior of library. (Annan, Glasgow)

97. Mackintosh: Cranston Tearoom, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, 1904. Interior. (Annan, Glasgow)

98. Mackintosh: School of Art, Glasgow, 1907–9. Library wing. (Annan, Glasgow)

99. Mackintosh: Hill House, Helensburgh, near Glasgow, 1902–1903

100. Berlage: House, 42–4 Oude Scheveningsche Weg, The Hague, 1898. Stair well. (A. Dingjan, The Hague)

101. Mackintosh: Cranston Tearoom, Buchanan Street, Glasgow, 1897–8. (Annan, Glasgow)

102. Klimt: Tragedy, 1897

103. Mackintosh: Dining-room for the House of a Connoisseur, 1901

104. Perret: Block of flats, 25 bis rue Franklin, Paris, 1902–3

105. Garnier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Administration Building

106. Gamier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Under the canopy, Administration Building

107. Gamier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Railway Station

108. Gamier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Four private houses

109. Gamier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Street

110. Garnier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Theatre

111. Gamier: Industrial City, 1901–4. Palm Court

112. Maillart: Tavenasa Bridge, 1905. (Bill, Robert Maillart, Girsberger, Zürich)

113. Sullivan: Carson Pirie Scott Store, Chicago, 1899 and 1903–4. (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)

114. Sullivan and Wright: Charnley House, Chicago, 1891. (Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.)

115. Wright: Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1893

116. Wright: Project for the Yahara Boat Club, Madison, Wisconsin, 1902

117. Wright: Heath House, Buffalo, New York, 1905. (Gilman Lane)

118. Wright: Coonley House, Riverside, Illinois, 1908. Interior. (Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation)

119. Wright: Design for a skyscraper, 1895

120. Wright: Larkin Building, Buffalo, New York, 1904. (Henry-Russell Hitchcock)

121. Wright: Larkin Building, Buffalo, New York, 1904. Interior

122. Endell: Elvira Studio, Munich, 1897–8

123. Endell: Studies in basic building proportions, 1898

124. Olbrich: The Sezession, Vienna, 1898–9

125. Olbrich: Hochzeitsturm, Darmstadt, 1907–8

126. Hoffmann: Convalescent Home, Purkersdorf, 1903–4

127. Hoffmann: Palais Stoclet, Brussels, 1905

128. Loos: Shop interior, Vienna, 1898. (Kulka, Adolf Loos, Anton Schroll & Co., Vienna)

129. Loos: Steiner House, Vienna, 1910. (Kulka, Adolf Loos, Anton Schroll & Co., Vienna)

130. Wagner: Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna, 1905. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)

131. Schröder: Apartment for A.W. von Heymel, Berlin, 1899. (Franz Stoedtner)

132. Behrens: Art Building, Oldenburg Exhibition, 1905

133. Behrens: Turbine factory, Huttenstrasse, Berlin, 1909

134. Behrens: Factory, Voltastrasse, Berlin, 1911

135. Behrens: Electric tea-kettle for the AEG, 1910

136. Behrens: Street lamps for the AEG, 1907–8

137. Berg: Centenary Hall, Breslau, 1910–12

138. Mies van der Rohe: Design for a house for Mrs Kröller-Müller, 1912

139. Poelzig: Office building, Breslau, 1911

140. Poelzig: Chemical factory, Luban, 1911–12

141, 142, 143. Sant'Elia: Sketches, 1912–14 or 1913–14

144. Chiattone: Block of flats, 1914

145. Gropius and Meyer: Fagus Factory, Alfeld-on-the-Leine, 1911

146. Gropius and Meyer: Model Factory, Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, 1914. North Side

147. Gropius and Meyer: Model Factory. Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, 1914. South Side

148. H. B. Cresswell: Queensferry Factory, near Chester, 1901

149. Signac: Two Milliners, 1885. (Rübele Collection, Zurich)

150. McKim, Mead and White: Lovely Lane Methodist Church, Baltimore, Maryland, 1883–7

Foreword to the First Edition

MOST of the preparatory work for this book was done during the years 1930–32. I held a class on the architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at Göttingen University in 1930, and then published, in the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen of 1931, a short preliminary account of the parts played by the most important architects in the development of the Modern Movement.

However, as far as books on the subject are concerned, this is, if I am not mistaken, the first to be published. I am well aware of its shortcomings, and shall be grateful to anybody who may be able to draw my attention to sins of omission or of commission.

I did not know of P. Morton Shand's excellent articles in the Architectural Review of 1933, 1934, 1935 until I had almost finished my research. The fact that our conclusions coincide in so many ways is a gratifying confirmation of the views put forward in this book.

I feel greatly indebted to Geoffrey Baker, Katharine Munro, and Alec Clifton-Taylor, who tried to eliminate from my text the worst clumsiness of a foreign style. Yet I am afraid it is still badly lacking in that supple precision which distinguishes well-written English.

I also want to place on record my gratitude to my mother, Frau Annie Pevsner, who used a time of unwelcome leisure for transforming an illegible into a readable and printable manuscript, and to Mr Richard de la Mare who with great kindness and understanding dealt with all matters of layout, printing, and illustration.

NIKOLAUS PEVSNER

London, May 1936

Foreword to the Second Edition

THE Museum of Modern Art has increased the scope of this book considerably by raising the total number of illustrations from 84 to 137; I have tried to improve the text by corrections, where I had made mistakes, and by additions which vary in length from a line to a virtual rewriting of a whole chapter. For suggestions as to what should be altered and added I wish to thank Philip Johnson, Edgar Kaufman Jr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Alfred H. Barr Jr. But my greatest gratitude is to Herwin Schaefer who has followed the book untiringly through all its stages from manuscript to printed page and never ceased to improve it by queries, checking, and research.

London, December 1948

Foreword to the Pelican Edition

THERE were twelve years between the first and the second editions of this book; there have now been twelve between that second edition and this Pelican edition. Far more research has been devoted during these twelve years to the period with which my book deals than there had been in the preceding twelve. It is gratifying to see that a subject which, when I first tackled it, was shunned by serious scholars has now become the happy hunting ground for American and German and indeed some English students busy on theses, dissertations, or otherwise. Their work, especially that of Madsen, Dr Schmutzler, and Dr Banham, has caused many additions and alterations, none, however, I am happy to say, of such a kind as to rock the structure of my argument. There were, however, places where I felt some slight shaking and had to do a securing job. On the surface it seems as if there were no more than two: Gaudí and Sant'Elia. They had both led a humble existence in the footnotes so far and the necessity was unquestionable of raising them to prominent positions in the body of the text. This resurrection is symptomatic.

When I wrote this book the architecture of reason and functionalism was in full swing in many countries, while it had just started a hopeful course in others. There was no question that Wright, Gamier, Loos, Behrens, Gropius were the initiators of the style of the century and that Gaudi and Sant'Elia were freaks and their inventions fantastical rantings Now we are surrounded once again by fantasts and freaks, and once again the validity of the style is queried to whose prehistory this book is dedicated. Historical fairness for that very reason made it imperative to show up the line which runs from Gaudí and the Art Nouveau to the present Neo-Art-Nouveau – by way of the Expressionism of the years immediately after the First World War, which in the previous editions of this book also had been mentioned only in an occasional footnote. But I am as convinced as ever that the style of the Fagus Works and the Cologne model factory is still valid, even if an evolution is unmistakable between the best of c. 1914 and the best of c. 1955. I have argued the case in another place (the last chapter of the Jubilee edition of my Outline of European Architecture, published by Penguin Books in 1960), but shall here also allude sufficiently to the way in which I now see the development between 1914 and 1955.

Apart from the changes made necessary in this context I have made some seventy or eighty others for this Pelican edition, some small and some quite extensive. The most important research which had to be taken into consideration is that of Professor Howarth on Mackintosh, of Dean Bannister and Messrs Skempton and Johnson on early iron structure, and my own on High Victorian Design and Matthew Digby Wyatt. An Italian magazine, L'Architettura, edited by Bruno Zevi, author of the most detailed history of modern architecture (1950), has also devoted much space to architects of my period, to Wright, Horta, Hoffmann, Sant'Elia, and others. However, to say it once again, the main theses of, and the principal accents in, this book did not call for recantation or revision, which is a happy thought for an author looking back over twenty-five years.

London, Summer 1960

For the reprint of 1968 I corrected a few errors and added on pp. 241–44 an annotated bibliography of literature of the last seven or eight years.

For the 1974 reprint, additions to literature and points of view will be found on pp. 245–53. This is all that seemed to me to be necessary.

London, Spring 1974

1. Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius

‘ORNAMENTATION’ says Ruskin, ‘is the principal part of architecture.’ It is that part, he says in another place, which impresses on a building ‘certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary’. Sir George Gilbert Scott amplified this surprising statement when he recommended to architects the use of the Gothic style, because its ‘great principle is to decorate construction’.1

How this basic doctrine of nineteenth-century architectural theory worked out in practice could not be shown more convincingly than by retelling the story of the new British Government offices in Whitehall, London, as erected by Scott between 1868 and 1873. The following are the facts as told by Sir George. His original plans were in the Gothic style. He writes: ‘I did not aim at making my style “Italian Gothic”; my ideas ran much more upon the French, to which for some years I had devoted my chief study. I did, however, aim at gathering a few hints from Italy… I mean a certain squareness and horizontality of outline… I combined this… with gables, high-pitched roofs and dormers. My details were excellent, and precisely suited to the purpose.’ In spite of this, Scott did not win the first prize in the competition, partly because Lord Palmerston thoroughly disliked medieval styles. Scott comments: ‘I did not fret myself at the disappointment, but when it was found, a few months later, that Lord Palmerston had coolly set aside the entire results of the competition, and was about to appoint Pennethorne, a non-competitor, I thought myself at liberty to stir.’ And stir he did, so that in the end he was appointed architect to the new building. However, he was not able to dissuade the Government from its predilection for the Italian Renaissance. What followed was described by Lord Palmerston as the battle of the Gothic and Palladian styles. He saw no insurmountable difficulty. He sent for Scott and told him ‘in a jaunty way that he could have nothing to do with the Gothic style, and that,’ continues Scott, ‘though he did not want to disturb my appointment, he must insist on my making a design in the Italian style, which he felt sure I could do quite as well as the other’. Lord Palmerston was evidently right, for, after long arguments, Scott promised ‘an Italian design’. But he still hoped that Renaissance could be avoided. He altered the front of his building, and now it was ‘in the Byzantine of the early Venetian palaces… toned into a more modern and usable form’. In vain, for the Prime Minister wanted ‘the ordinary Italian’, and he would have it. He called the new plans ‘neither one thing nor t'other – a regular mongrel affair’, and threatened to cancel Scott's appointment. After that, for the sake of his family and his reputation, Sir George ‘in sore perplexity’ decided to ‘swallow the bitter pill’. He ‘bought some costly books on Italian architecture and set vigorously to work’ to invent an Italian façade ‘beautifully got up in outline’.2

The campaign of William Morris's lifetime was directed against the complete lack of feeling for the essential unity of architecture which made this comedy possible. When his impressionable nature began to react on buildings, fine art, and industrial art, almost all contemporary building which surrounded him, as a youth in London and as a student at Oxford, and practically all industrial art was crude, vulgar, and overloaded with ornament. Examples will be given later. Responsible for this state of affairs were the Industrial Revolution and – less known but equally important – the theory of aesthetics created since 1800. The part played by the Industrial Revolution is to be discussed in Chapter 2. It is sufficient here to say that manufacturers were, by means of new machinery, enabled to turn out thousands of cheap articles in the same time and at the same cost as were formerly required for the production of one well-made object. Sham materials and sham techniques were dominant all through industry. Skilled craftsmanship, still so admirable when Chippendale and Wedgwood were at work, was replaced by mechanical routine. Demand was increasing from year to year, but demand from an uneducated public, a public with either too much money and no time or with no money and no time.

The artist withdrew in disgust from such philistinism or squalor. It was not for him to condescend to the taste of the majority of his fellowmen, to meddle with the ‘Arts Not Fine’. During the Renaissance, artists had first learned to consider themselves superior beings, bearers of a great message. Leonardo da Vinci wanted the artist to be a scientist and a humanist, but by no means a craftsman. When Michelangelo was asked why he had portrayed one of the Medicis in the Medici Chapel beardless, though he had worn a beard in life, he answered: ‘Who, in a thousand years, will know what he looked like?’ However, this attitude of artistic presumption remained exceptional until the end of the eighteenth century. Schiller was the first to form a philosophy of art which made the artist the high priest in a secularized society. Schelling took this up, and Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats followed. Poets, according to Shelley, are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The artist is no longer a craftsman, no longer a servant, he is now a priest. Humanity may be his gospel, or beauty, a beauty identical with truth (Keats), a beauty that is ‘the completest conceivable unity of life and form’ (Schiller). In creating, the artist makes conscious ‘the essential, the universal, the aspect and expression of the in-dwelling spirit of Nature’ (Schelling). Schiller assures him: ‘The dignity of Mankind is laid into thy hands’, and compares him to a king – ‘both living on the summits of mankind’. The inevitable consequence of such adulation became more and more visible as the nineteenth century unfolded. The artist began to despise utility and the public (Keats: ‘Oh sweet fancy! let her loose; Everything is spoilt by use’). He shut himself off from the real life of his time, withdrawing into his sacred circle and creating art for art's, art for the artist's, sake. Concurrently the public lost understanding of his personal, outwardly useless utterances. Whether he lived like a priest or lived a vie de Bohème, he was ridiculed by most of his contemporaries, and extolled by only a small set of critics and connoisseurs.

But there had been a time when nothing of all that existed. In the Middle Ages the artist was a craftsman, proud of executing any commission to the best of his ability. Morris was the first artist (not the first thinker, for Ruskin had preceded him) to realize how precarious and decayed the social foundations of art had become during the centuries since the Renaissance, and especially during the years since the Industrial Revolution. He had been trained as an architect and as a painter, first in the Gothic studio of Street, and then in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites. But when, in 1857, he had to furnish his first studio in London, the thought struck him that before one can settle down to paint elevating pictures, one must be able to live in congenial surroundings, must have a decent house, and decent chairs and tables. Nothing was obtainable that could possibly satisfy him. This was the situation which all of a sudden awakened his own personal genius: if we cannot buy solid and honest furniture, let us make it ourselves. So he and his friends set out to build chairs ‘such as Barbarossa might have sat in’ and a table ‘as heavy as a rock’ (Rossetti). The same experiment was repeated when Morris had a house built for his wife and himself, the famous Red House at Bexleyheath. Ultimately, in 1861, instead of forming a new exclusive brotherhood of artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been, and such as he had wished to found when he was studying at Oxford, Morris made up his mind to open a firm, the firm of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner, Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals. This event marks the beginning of a new era in Western Art.

The fundamental meaning of Morris's firm and Morris's doctrine is clearly expressed in the thirty-five lectures which he delivered between 1877 and 1894 on artistic and social questions.3 His point of departure is the social condition of art which he saw around him. Art ‘has no longer any root’.4 The artists, out of touch with everyday life, ‘wrap themselves up in dreams of Greece and Italy… which only a very few people even pretend to understand or be moved by’.5 This situation must seem exceedingly dangerous to anyone concerned with art. Morris preaches: ‘I don't want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few’,6 and he asks that great question which will decide the fate of art in our century: ‘What business have we with art at all unless all can share it?’7 So far Morris is the true prophet of the twentieth century. We owe it to him that an ordinary man's dwelling-house has once more become a worthy object of the architect's thought, and a chair, a wallpaper, or a vase a worthy object of the artist's imagination.

However, this is only one half of Morris's doctrine. The other half remained committed to nineteenth-century style and nineteenth-century prejudices. Morris's notion of art derives from his knowledge of medieval conditions of work, and is part and parcel of nineteenth-century ‘historicism’. Proceeding from Gothic handicraft, he defined art simply as ‘the expression by man of his pleasure in labour’.8 Real art must be ‘made by the people and for the people, as a happiness for the maker and the user’.9 The pride in artistic genius and some special form of inspiration, which he saw in all the art of his time, was therefore abhorrent to him. ‘That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense’ he said; ‘there is no such thing: it is a mere matter of craftsmanship.’10

It is obvious that such a definition of art removes the problem from aesthetics into the wider field of social science. In Morris's mind, ‘it is not possible to dissociate art from morality, politics and religion’.11 Here, above all, he proves a faithful follower of Ruskin who in his turn owed a debt, just a little too emphatically denied, to Pugin, that brilliant designer and pamphleteer who in the years between 1836 and 1851 had fought violently and relentlessly for Catholicism, for Gothic forms as the only Christian forms, and also for honesty and truthfulness in design and manufacturing. Ruskin took up the latter causes but not the former. Among the Seven Lamps of Architecture, his book of 1849, the first is the lamp of sacrifice, that is the dedication of a man's craft to God, and the second the lamp of truth. Truth in making is to Ruskin making by hand, and making by hand is making with joy. Ruskin also recognized that here lay the two great secrets of the Middle Ages and preached the superiority of the Middle Ages over the Renaissance.

In all this Morris followed him, and both were led to forms of Socialism along this path. If Morris denounced the social structure of his time so eloquently, his main reason was that it is evidently fatal to art. ‘Art… will die out of civilization, if the system lasts. That in itself does to me carry with it the condemnation of the whole system.’12 Thus Morris's Socialism is far from correct according to the standards established in the later nineteenth century: there is more in it of More than of Marx. His main question is: how can we recover a state of things in which all work would be ‘worth doing’ and at the same time ‘of itself pleasant to do’?13 He looked backward, not forward, backward into the times of the Icelandic sagas, of cathedral building, of craft guilds. One cannot, from his lectures, obtain a clear view of what he imagined the future to be. ‘The whole basis of Society… is incurably vicious,’ he wrote.14 Hence it was sometimes his only hope ‘to think of barbarism once more flooding the world… that it may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal’.15 And yet when, partly as a consequence of his own Socialist propaganda, riots began in London and revolution seemed for a moment not unlikely, he recoiled and gradually withdrew back into his world of poetry and beauty.

This is the decisive antagonism in Morris's life and teaching. His work, the revival of handicraft, is constructive; the essence of his teaching is destructive. Pleading for handicraft alone means pleading for conditions of medieval primitiveness, and first of all for the destruction of all the devices of civilization which were introduced during the Renaissance. This he did not want; and since, on the other hand, he was unwilling to use any post-medieval methods of production in his workshops, the consequence was that all his work was expensive work. In an age when practically all objects of everyday use are manufactured with the aid of machinery, the products of the artist-craftsman will be bought by a narrow circle only. While Morris wanted an art ‘by the people and for the people’, he had to admit that cheap art is impossible because ‘all art costs time, trouble and thought’.16 He thus created art – though now applied art, and no longer the nineteenth-century art of the easel-picture – which was also accessible to a few connoisseurs only, or, as he once expressed it himself, art for ‘the swinish luxury of the rich’.17 No doubt Morris's art has in the end beneficially affected commercial production in many trades, but that is precisely what he would have hated, because the diffusion of his style on a large scale involved reintroducing the machine, and thereby expelling once more the ‘joy of the maker’. The machine was Morris's arch-enemy: ‘As a condition of life, production by machinery is altogether an evil.’18 Looking forward to barbarism, he certainly hoped for machine-breaking, though in his late speeches he was careful (and inconsistent) enough to admit that we ought to try to become ‘the masters of our machines’ and use them ‘as an instrument for forcing on us better conditions of life’.19

Morris's attitude of hatred towards modern methods of production remained unchanged with most of his followers. The Arts and Crafts Movement brought a revival of artistic craftsmanship not of industrial art. Walter Crane (1845–1915) and C.R.Ashbee (1863–1942) may be taken as representatives of this. Walter Crane, the most popular of the disciples of Morris, did not go one step beyond the doctrine of his master. To him, as to Morris, ‘the true root and basis of all Art lies in the handicrafts’.20 His aim, therefore, just like Morris's, was ‘to turn our artists into craftsmen and our craftsmen into artists’.21 Moreover, he agreed with Morris in the conviction that ‘genuine and spontaneous art… is a pleasurable exercise’,22 and was led by such premises to a romantic Socialism identical with that of Morris. The same conflict which was pointed out in Morris's doctrine is to be found in Crane. He too was compelled to admit that ‘cheapness in art and handicraft is well-nigh impossible’, because ‘cheapness as a rule… can only be obtained at the cost of the… cheapening of human life and labour’.23 Crane's attitude towards machine production also corresponds to Morris's. His dislike of ‘the monsters of our time clad in plate-glass [and] cast-iron’24 – Ruskin had been the first to inveigh against railway stations and the Crystal Palace – is tempered only by the consideration that machinery may be necessary and useful as ‘the servant and labour-saver of man’ for a ‘real saving of labour, heavy and exhausting labour’. 25

Ashbee was certainly a more original thinker and more energetic reformer than Crane.26 Proceeding also from Ruskin and Morris in his belief that ‘the constructive and decorative arts are the real backbone’ of any artistic culture, that every object ought to be ‘produced under pleasurable conditions’,27 and that therefore art for workaday use cannot be cheap, he surpasses Morris in that he links up the problems of workshop-reconstruction and of small-holdings. His Guild and School of Handicraft, founded in 1888, was removed in 1902 from the East End of London to Chipping Campden in the Cots wolds. While this aspect of his work and doctrine is even more ‘medievalist’ than the teaching of Morris, there is another side to his doctrine which seems genuinely progressive. At the time of the Guild his attitude towards machine production was still almost that of Morris and Crane. ‘We do not reject the machine’, he wrote; ‘we welcome it. But we desire to see it mastered.’28 Within the next few years, partly perhaps as a consequence of the hopeless struggle of the Guild against modern methods of manufacturing, he broke away from what he now called Ruskin's and Morris's ‘intellectual Ludditism’,29 and the first axiom of his last two books on art, published after 1910, is that ‘Modern civilization rests on machinery, and no system for the encouragement or the endowment of the teaching of the arts can be sound that does not recognize this.’30

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