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DEFINITION
Arts and Crafts Movement was a movement in architecture and the decorative arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that championed the values of individual handicraft during an era of increasing mass production. The movement originated in Britain and had its richest expression there, but it also made a significant impact in continental Europe and in the United States.
The movement takes its name from the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1888, but its origins go back to the middle of the 19th century. It was a very loosely ordered movement, embracing many different strands of thought, practice, and style. To some adherents it was a deeply serious matter, involving fundamental concerns about human society, but to others it was more superficial, even playful, expressing the same kind of "back to nature" ethos that has influenced many fads of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The movement officially began in 1860 when William Morris built his Red house, designed by Philip Webb, on the outskirts of London and served his apprenticeship to the industrial arts by executing and designing the decorations and furniture of his home. Theoretically though, the movement is much older, its development as an idea being measured by the lives of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris.
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HISTORY & ORIGIN
The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th. This movement, which challenged the tastes of the Victorian era, was inspired by the social reform concerns of thinkers such as Walter Crane and John Ruskin, together with the ideals of reformer and designer, William Morris. Other major designers associated with the movement were A. H. Mackmurdo, Lewis F. Day, C. R. Ashbee, C. F. Voysey and the architect and designer Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-52). Ruskin's major books The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-3) equate the quality of design with the quality of the society that produced it, drawing analogies between the decline and fall of the Venetian Empire and social and aesthetic change in Victorian Britain. He called for a rejection of the increasing material preoccupations of contemporary society and a return to the dignity of labour enjoyed in pre-industrial times.
Their notions of good design were linked to their notions of a good society. This was a vision of a society in which the worker was not brutalized by the working conditions found in factories, but rather could take pride in his craftsmanship and skill. The rise of a consumer class coincided with the rise of manufactured consumer goods. In this period, manufactured goods were often poor in design and quality. Ruskin, Morris, and others proposed that it would be better for all if individual craftsmanship could be revived-the worker could then produce beautiful objects that exhibited the result of fine craftsmanship, as opposed to the shoddy products of mass production. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. Thus the goal was to create design that was "...for the people and by the people, and a source of pleasure to the maker and the user." Workers could produce beautiful objects that would enhance the lives of ordinary people, and at the same time provide decent employment for the craftsman.
The movement was criticized and dubbed elitist and impartial to the industrial era-the hand crafted goods were only affordable to the wealthy in society as opposed to the Victorian style which utilized mass production to create ornamentation affordable by the middle class. Despite this, the movement gained popularity in the northern European countries in the 1890s and spread across the Atlantic to the U.S.A. where it was named craftsman style or mission style. But in those times many reform movements came to being such as the garden city movement, vegetarianism and the folksong revival. These movements set the romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life.
