LITERATURE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICAReview by: Raymond L. WilsonARLIS/NA Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 1 (DECEMBER 1979), pp. 29-30Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27946238 .

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A R LI S, A Newsletter; December 1979 29

written by Jessie J. Poesch who also worked on the selection committee for the exhibition.

Miss Poesch points out in her introduction that as a "pioneer study. ..the exhibition may suffer from the pitfalls of first exploration." There is little exact information proving that the pieces were made in the lower Mississippi Valley for the period covered. Style, methods of construction, woods, and the

history of the piece were the criteria for selection. The catalog is divided into two periods: Colonial, c. 1750

1803 and The Early Republic, 1803 to c. 1830. Sixty-one pieces were exhibited and each is represented by a photograph, dimen

sions, provenance, and annotation which includes wood and sty listic analyses. There are footnotes, but no bibliography or

index.

Raissa Fomerand

Sleepy Hollow Restorations

PUBLICATIONS DISCUSSED: Books

Burton, E. Milby. Charleston Furniture, ?700-1825. 2nd. ed.

(Orig. title: Contributions from the Charleston Museum: XII) Columbia, S.C., U. of South Carolina Press, 1971. 150 p. illus. index, biblio. ISBN 0-87249-198-6. LC 73-120917. $14.95.

Gusler, Wallace B. Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern

Virginia, 1710-1790. Richmond, Virginia Museum, 1979. 194 p. 126 illus. index, biblio. ISBN 0-917046-05-6. LC 78-27282.

$24.00.

Exhibition Catalogs

Green, Henry D. Furniture of the Georgia Piedmont Before 1830. Exhib.: Sept. 11-Oct. 31, 1976. Atlanta, GA, High Mu seum of Art, 1976. 143 p. 185 fig. LC 76-20949, $5.00.

Gusler, Wallace B. Furniture of Eastern Virginia, the Product

of Mind and Hand. Exhib.: March 14-April 30, 1978. Richmond, Virginia Museum, 1978. 30 p. 12 illus. ISBN 0-917046-04-8 pbk. LC 78-3499. $2.00.

Poesch, Jesse J. Early Furniture of Louisiana, 1750-1830. Exhib.: Feb. 27- Julv 31, 1972. New Orleans, Louisiana State Museum, 1972. 85 p. 61 illus. LC 76-177927. $5.00.

Winters, Robert E., Jr. ed. North Carolina Furniture, 1700 1900. Exhib.: Oct. 17-Dec. 31, 1977. Raleigh, North Carolina

Museum of History, 1977. 77 p. 71 illus. glossary. LC 77 14718. $4.95.

LITERATURE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICA

At one time Arts and Crafts constituted the most popular and influential arts movement in America, with over 2,000 guilds, societies and associations in existence across the coun try. Now there are none. Of the dozens of journals and news letters spawned and sponsored by the movement, only two survive?House Beautiful and House and Garden; and of the numberless carvers, weavers, potters, and typographers, only one name remains familiar and that is Louis C. Tiffany, imi tations of whose work are still reproduced. Far better known and far more widely disseminated in its time than Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Aestheticism, or the work of the American Pre Raphaelites, the American Arts and Crafts movement had a

major impact upon modern American architectural and in dustrial design.

The idea of Arts and Crafts was conceived, though, not in the United States, but in England and by William Morris, later to become its chief spokesman and most famous practitioner,

who owed his own inspiration in large part to John Ruskin, and perhaps even to A.W.N. Pugin and Thomas Carlyle. At any rate, among the welter of styles which characterized English art towards the end of the nineteenth century, Arts and Crafts was distinguished as much and perhaps more so by its ideals as by the appearance of its products. In one sense, it was a

reaction against machine manufactured materials, and in anoth er, it was a revolt against the traditional academic conception of the fine arts as painting and sculpture with its attendant select group of executors and appreciators. Rather, Morris conceived of the arts as embracing the handicrafts metal

working, furniture-making, pottery, carving, embroidery, and printing, and the decorative arts?glass, tapestry-making, and wall-papers. Furthermore, he envisioned each of these as being part of a whole, itself unified by the principles of de sign and by accessibility to anyone and everyone. This latter

property was central to Morris' overall conception of the coincidence of art and life, which he summarized by terming art "the expression by man of his pleasure in labor." The Arts and Crafts idea flourished with the first organization de voted to promoting its aims, The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1888.

Like many another English fashion of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement was transmitted to America by visiting lecturers. Important among these were Oscar Wilde, who though no disciple of Morris, nonetheless observed dur

ing his lecture tour of 1882-83 that "I find what your people need is not so much high imaginative art, but that which hal lows the vessels of everyday use;" and Walter Crane, an apos tle and student of Morris, who arrived in America in the fall of 1891. In due course the first American journal dedicated to spreading the word of Arts and Crafts, House Beautiful, was

published in Chicago in 1896, and the first American Arts and Crafts Society was founded in Boston in 1897. The formation of other societies and journals followed shortly, with the first major Arts and Crafts exhibition held in Boston the same year. For a short period the Arts and Crafts movement was

pervasive, numbering among its supporters the painter John La Farge, and architects Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other members of the Prairie School.

Among the more important expressions of the American movement were the organization of Arts and Crafts communi ties such as the Bohemia Guild of the Industrial Art League at Chicago, the Roycrofters of East Aurora, New York, and the Rose Valley Association outside Philadelphia. These programs were designed, as in the case of the Roycrofters, to stimulate the production of Arts and Crafts wares, and in the case of the Bohemia Guild and the Rose Valley Association, merely to pro vide a stimulating environment in which craftsmen and women

might work.

The pace of the formation of new societies, and publications and the production of finished goods accelerated through the first decade of the new century. Yet by the beginning of World War I the drive was starting to wane and by the end of the war the movement was moribund. What remains today of this vast,

though short-lived, phenomenon are a large number of arti

facts, an extensive contemporary literature, and a compara tively meager group of modern book-length inquiries. The

Garland Publishing Company of New York has issued a series of reprints of the works of the most important contemporary English participants, and while America produced nothing like a Morris or a Crane or a CR. Ashbee, it did produce an Ernest Batchelder, whose Principles of Design affected many contemporaries, and an Oscar Lovell Triggs, whose

Chapters in The History of The Arts and Crafts Move ment, reprinted by Benjamin Blom in 1971, chronicled the experience of a generation. The periodical literature produced by the movement is of fundamental importance for the illumina tion it sheds on the theoretical sources of the American Arts and Crafts ideal, and on the sources of modern American ar chitectural and industrial design. Of particular importance in this area are The Craftsman, a journal published by Gustav Stickley from 1901 to 1916, and The Artsman, the organ of the Rose Valley Association, published from 1903 to 1907. Hap pily, this latter document has recently been collected and re

printed in three sturdily-bound volumes by the Kraus-Thom son Organization. The Rose Valley Association itself was formed not with the

object of producing anything in particular, nor of sponsoring anyone, but simply to provide shops and living quarters for workers in wood, metal, cloth, and so on. Initiated two years after the formation of the Association, The Artsman was in

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30 AR LIS NA Newsletter; December 1979

tended by its editors, the architect William Price, his partner Hawley McLanahan, and Horace Tr?ubel, Walt Whitman's amanuensis during his last years, to be a kind of forum, and as the editors noted, "a parish record."

Issued at first on a monthly basis and towards the end on a more irregular schedule, a typical number of The Artsman included signed and unsigned articles, often by notables in the American movement, and frequently by the editors them selves. Included as well were line drawings of Rose Valley buildings and products, often drawn by William Price, and usu

ally several aphorisms by illuminati such as Ruskin, Morris, Whitman, and Emerson. Thus, for example, volume 1, number

I, leads off with articles on the motivation for, and the nature

of, Rose Valley by Will Price, Hawley McLanahan and Horace Tr?ubel, and includes illustrations of Rose Valley furniture, with "scriptures" by Peter Burrowes, Hanford Henderson, Walt Whitman, and John Ruskin spaced throughout. The term

"scriptures" is not misplaced, however, as many of the con tributors summarize, codify, or otherwise iterate statements

made by the prophets Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris. Still, there are many occasions in which contributions to The Artsman make it a major primary source for any study of the American Arts and Crafts movement.

Price, for instance, was a prominent Philadelphia architect and one thoroughly aware of contemporary trends and develop ments in architecture. He regarded his profession as not one of merely knowing when and where to apply Classical and Gothic forms and details, nor one of making architectural draw

ings, but one including all aspects involved in producing the finished product: "The architect's work is incomplete without the work of the mason, the joiner, the cellar-digger, and the carver." Architecture, for Price, meant an activity embrac

ing all of life and especially its conduct. Less than a year before, in a lecture delivered at the Chicago Women's Club, Frank Lloyd Wright, a charter member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, observed that "An American home will be the product of our own time, spiritually as well as physically." The tenet of simplicity so ardently held by Wright was also shared by Price and expressed in an article entitled "Sim

plicity in Arts and Crafts," which appeared in the December, 1904 issue of The Artsman. Yet in spite of the enthusiasm and

often seminal thought and action of its founders and editors, the Rose Valley Association and The Artsman expired, like so

many others, from lack of participants and declining patronage.

Present-day commentaries on the American Arts and Crafts

phenomenon, apart from specialist contributions on glass, furniture and pottery, as John Crosby Freeman's The

Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and His Craftsman Mission Furniture (Watkins Glen, New York, 1966), and Robert Koch's Louis C Tiffany: Rebel in Glass (New York, 1974), are few, encompassing an exhibition catalog here, a journal article there, and a monograph or two. Of surveys there is really only one

and that is a catalog for an American Arts and Crafts exhibi tion held at the Princeton University Art Museum and else where in 1972, prepared by Robert Judson Clark and others, but which includes an extensive bibliography. Arts and Crafts in Britain and America by Isabelle Anscombe and Charlotte

Gere, published in the United States by Rizzoli in 1978, covers much the same ground for America. Of journal articles, per

haps one of the best and most thoughtful is H. Allen Brooks'

"Chicago Architecture: Its Debts to the Arts and Crafts," which appeared in the December, 1971 issue of the Journal of The Society of Architectural Historians. Another important and recent source of articles on American Arts and Crafts products, bibliographic references, and its role as a social movement, is the Princeton University Art Museum Record, volume 34, number 2, published in 1975, which entire issue is devoted to the subject.

A recent book-length effort, however, which attempts to sur

vey the whole field of a particular product of the movement is Susan Otis Thompson's American Book Design and William

Morris. Feeling that the story of Arts and Crafts-inspired book design in America has been neglected when furniture, glass, ceramics, and others have been given their due, she has set out?in her own words?to show the real influence of

Morris on American book design, to delineate Arts and Crafts

from various other styles, movements and revivals, and to show how book design in those years evolved from three sep arate and distinct styles: Arts and Crafts, Aestheticism, and Art Nouveau. William Morris's own interest in typography and printing came late in his life with the establishment of the Kelmscott Press in 1891. His rules for typographic design are consistent with those he outlined for his other works: "The

question is.. .whether we are to have books in which type, paper, woodcuts, and the due arrangement of all these are to be con

sidered, and which are so treated as to produce a harmonious

whole?"Thompson argues that the potential market for fine printing in America was already in place and simply wait ing for someone to step forward from the confusion of styles that was Victorian book-design. While suggesting that the emergence of fine printing, printers,

and book-designers in the last decades of the nineteenth cen

tury was more of a revolution than a revival, one of her two main objects is to separate out by style-characteristics the

principal typographic styles ot the period, that is, Art Nouveau from Arts and Crafts, and the latter from Aestheticism. She

suggests, therefore, that "Nineteenth-century styles of book

making fall into two main lines of classicism (Neo-Classical and Aesthetic), and romanticism (Romantic, Gothic Revival,

Antique, Artistic, Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau)" and does so with the aid of numerous and apposite illustrations. Thus, Arts and Crafts book models tended to resemble the hand written prototypes of the Middle Ages, while Aesthetic-style books more closely resembled the light and open pages of fif teenth-century works.

Her second main object is to survey the principal lines of development of fine printing in America and the work of some leading printers and typographers in the decades just before and after the turn of the century, a survey also recently con ducted by Joseph Blumenthal in his The Printed Book in Amer ica, who calls this period a "Renaissance." Boston, the site of the first Arts and Crafts society in the country, was also the site of the first Arts and Crafts-inspired book designs, and it was a publisher, Roberts Brothers, not a printer, who brought the first fruits before the public, a photographic reproduction of a Morrisian novel published by his Kelmscott Press called The Story of The Glittering Plain.

Thompson's book is among the first to attempt an analysis of the elements of the Arts and Crafts style, if only for book design. In this she stands opposed to H. Allen Brooks, who

maintains that the Arts and Crafts movement in America did not develop a discernable style, but was a movement more so cial and intellectual in its character and content than artistic.

Whether or not, Thompson's book is a welcome introduction to a heretofore obscure aspect of a fine art/craft.

Besides this work and those already noted, there is a special desideratum for a general survey of the American Arts and Crafts movement as well as studies of its role as a social move ment and as a source of modern American design. Especially needed are studies which make use of magazines such as House

Beautiful, House and Garden, The Ladies' Home Journal, and others. Not until these investigations are carried out can the

place of the Arts and Crafts movement in the shaping of mod ern American architecture, industrial design, and the decorative arts be properly assessed and appreciated.

Raymond L. Wilson Ohio University

PUBLICATIONS REVIEWED:

The Artsman: The Art That Is Life. Millwood, New York, Kraus Reprint Co., 1979. Vols. 1-4, ISBN 0-527-03680-3.

Thompson, Susan Otis. American Book Design and William Morris. New York, R. R. Bowker Company, 1977. 258 pp., illus., index, bibliography. LC 77-8783, ISBN 0-8352-0984-9.

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