One of the most important and influential modern art movements, Arts and Crafts began in the British Isles in about 1880 and quickly gained a lot of popularity and success, being enthusiastically adopted both in the US and in Asia. And despite the fact that over the next decades this enthusiams gradually declined (as it always happens) the echoes of Arts and Crafts, not to mention the influence, would go on until the 1930s, which was in itself a true record. Appearing as a counter-reaction to the Victorian traditions and especially artistic and decorative customs and tastes, Arts and Crafts was a mix of the ideas and ideals of Walter Canre and John Ruskin, mixed with the plans and creations of William Morris, an inspired and original designer who would simply change everything. Maybe it is safe to see Arts and Crafts as a romantic reaction to the Industrial Revolution when it came to design. What was the purpose of the furniture factories who made the same model again and again, several hundred or even more copies of the same design, and often a not very inspired one. Everyone would end up having the same furniture, the same type of decorative arts, the same interiors, and Arts and Crafts wanted something different. Radically different. You had to go back to the basics, to the furniture made by a manufacturer in his working shed, in his own style and own rhytm.
Arts and Crafts wanted furniture and design to be simpler, inspired by the models from the Middle Ages or the Romantic period, drawing it's ideas also from folk art and traditional decorations, a back to the roots movement that not only promoted a change in the field of art, but also wanted to provoke and complete serious economical and social changes. Not the same furniture, but one made by hand, slowly, more resistant and more beautiful, art that was personal and with a vintage character that was impossible to obtain in a factory.
Later the new movement would "borrow" the name by which is still known today from the Arts and Crafts Society, established in 1887, and every country and region which adopted the new movement and ideas would often modify them to the regional specifics, and even if the end result would be different, the principles were still the same.
Photo; monnik.org
June 2016
