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97-659: The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America. Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced, the movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920. Some consider that it

194-486: A 'lesser art' was formally challenged in the 1970s by writers and art historians like Amy Goldin and Anne Swartz. The argument for a singular narrative in art had lost traction by the close of the 20th century through post-modernist irony and increasing curatorial interest in street art and in ethnic decorative traditions. The Pattern and Decoration movement in New York galleries in the 1980s, though short-lived, opened

291-656: A conceptual design for a theatre dedicated to the work of Richard Wagner to be built in Munich. The project, developed from 1864 to 1866, was never realized, although Wagner 'borrowed' many of its features for his own later theatre at Bayreuth . Already in 1833, there were first plans in Vienna for the public presentation of the Imperial Art Collections. With the planning of the Vienna Ring Road ,

388-493: A lack of interest in easel painting as such. On his side, Ruskin dissented firmly from the idea that became Arts-and-Crafts orthodoxy, that decoration should be flat and should not represent three-dimensional forms. William Morris (1834–1896) was the towering figure in late 19th-century design and the main influence on the Arts and Crafts movement. The aesthetic and social vision of the movement grew out of ideas that he developed in

485-549: A powerful denunciation of modern industrialism to which Arts and Crafts designers returned again and again. Distrust for the machine lay behind the many little workshops that turned their backs on the industrial world around 1900, using preindustrial techniques to create what they called 'crafts.' — Alan Crawford, " W. A. S. Benson , Machinery, and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain" William Morris shared Ruskin's critique of industrial society and at one time or another attacked

582-424: A proper awareness of the quality of materials used. " Utility must have precedence over ornamentation." However, the design reformers of the mid-19th century did not go as far as the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. They were more concerned with ornamentation than construction, they had an incomplete understanding of methods of manufacture, and they did not criticise industrial methods as such. By contrast,

679-536: A prototype of German villa architecture. On September 1, 1835, Semper married Bertha Thimmig . The marriage ultimately produced six children. A convinced Republican, Semper took a leading role, along with his friend Richard Wagner , in the May 1849 uprising which swept over the city. He was a member of the Civic Guard (Kommunalgarde) and helped to erect barricades in the streets. When the rebellion collapsed, Semper

776-735: A school for apprentices. The idea was greeted with enthusiasm by almost everyone except Morris, who was by now involved with promoting socialism and thought Ashbee's scheme trivial. From 1888 to 1902 the guild prospered, employing about 50 men. In 1902 Ashbee relocated the guild out of London to begin an experimental community in Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds . The guild's work is characterised by plain surfaces of hammered silver, flowing wirework and colored stones in simple settings. Ashbee designed jewellery and silver tableware. The guild flourished at Chipping Camden but did not prosper and

873-524: A strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s, and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards. The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least 20 years. It

970-785: A strong position in favor of polychromy - supported by his investigation of pigments on the Trajan's column in Rome - brought him sudden recognition in architectural and aesthetic circles across Europe. [1] On September 30, 1834, Semper obtained a post as Professor of Architecture at the Königlichen Akademie der bildenden Künste (today called the Hochschule) in Dresden thanks largely to the efforts and support of his former teacher Franz Christian Gau and swore an oath of allegiance to

1067-646: A student prize and running into nine reprints by 1910. Jones declared that ornament "must be secondary to the thing decorated", that there must be "fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented", and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns "suggestive of anything but a level or plain". A fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, whereas these writers advocated flat and simplified natural motifs. Redgrave insisted that "style" demanded sound construction before ornamentation, and

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1164-467: A terrace overlooking the core of Zürich , the new school became a symbol of a new epoch. The building (1853–1864), which despite frequent remodeling continues to evoke Semper's concept, was initially required to accommodate not only the new school (known today as the ETH Zurich ), but the existing University of Zurich , as well. In 1855, Semper became a professor of architecture at the new school and

1261-629: Is done by selecting goods with specific intentions in mind to alter them. Instead of accepting a foreign object for what it is, the foreign object is incorporated and changed to fit one's lifestyle and choices, or customized . One way to achieve a customized look and feel to common objects is to change their external appearance by applying decorative techniques, as in decoupage , art cars , truck art in South Asia and IKEA hacking. Gottfried Semper Gottfried Semper ( German: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈzɛmpɐ] ; 29 November 1803 – 15 May 1879)

1358-530: Is the root of the Modern Style , a British expression of what later came to be called the Art Nouveau movement. Others consider that it is the incarnation of Art Nouveau in England. Others consider Art and Crafts to be in opposition to Art Nouveau. Arts and Crafts indeed criticized Art Nouveau for its use of industrial materials such as iron. And as for Art Nouveau artists, the Arts and Crafts utopia

1455-945: The Acropolis in Athens . During this period he became very interested in the Biedermeier -inspired polychromy debate, which centered on the question whether buildings in Ancient Greece and Rome had been colorfully painted or not. The drawn reconstructions of the painterly decorations of ancient villas he created in Athens inspired his later designs for the painted decorations in Dresden and Vienna. His 1834 publication Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten ( Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity ), in which he took

1552-520: The Art Workers Guild was initiated by five young architects, William Lethaby , Edward Prior , Ernest Newton , Mervyn Macartney and Gerald C. Horsley , with the goal of bringing together fine and applied arts and raising the status of the latter. It was directed originally by George Blackall Simonds . By 1890 the Guild had 150 members, representing the increasing number of practitioners of

1649-677: The Baptism of Christ in Paisley Abbey , (c. 1880). His followers included Stephen Adam and his son of the same name. The Glasgow-born designer and theorist Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) was one of the first, and most important, independent designers, a pivotal figure in the Aesthetic Movement and a major contributor to the allied Anglo-Japanese movement. The movement had an "extraordinary flowering" in Scotland where it

1746-601: The Bauhaus style. Pevsner regarded the style as a prelude to Modernism , which used simple forms without ornamentation. Decorative arts Applied arts largely overlap with the decorative arts, and in modern parlance they are both often placed under the umbrella category of design . The decorative arts are often categorized in distinction to the " fine arts ", namely painting , drawing , photography , and large-scale sculpture , which generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate

1843-819: The Bayreuth Festspielhaus . Semper was born into a well-to-do industrialist family in Hamburg in 1803. When French troops occupied the city in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars , the family moved to nearby Altona , at the time part of Denmark . The fifth of eight children, he attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg before starting his university education at Göttingen in 1823, where he studied historiography and mathematics . He subsequently studied architecture in 1825 at

1940-643: The Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin) and Frederick 'Pa' Hicks ( Malahide Castle estate buildings and round tower). Irish Celtic motifs were popular with the movement in silvercraft, carpet design, book illustrations, and hand-carved furniture. In continental Europe, the revival and preservation of national styles was an important motive of Arts and Crafts designers; for example, in Germany, after unification in 1871 under

2037-673: The New Gallery , London, in November 1888. It was the first show of contemporary decorative arts in London since the Grosvenor Gallery 's Winter Exhibition of 1881. Morris & Co. was well represented in the exhibition with furniture, fabrics, carpets and embroideries. Edward Burne-Jones observed, "here for the first time one can measure a bit the change that has happened in the last twenty years". The society still exists as

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2134-540: The South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). Later his work became popular with the middle and upper classes, despite his wish to create a democratic art, and by the end of the 19th century, Arts and Crafts design in houses and domestic interiors was the dominant style in Britain, copied in products made by conventional industrial methods. The spread of Arts and Crafts ideas during

2231-532: The University of Munich under Friedrich von Gärtner . In 1826, Semper travelled to Paris in order to work for the architect Franz Christian Gau , and he was present when the July Revolution of 1830 broke out. Between 1830 and 1833 he travelled to Italy and Greece in order to study the architecture and designs of antiquity . In 1832, he participated for four months in archaeological research at

2328-1025: The Zwinger Palace complex. He designed the Dresden Hoftheater in 1841, which burned down in 1869. It was rebuilt in 1878 by his son to Semper's plans and today is called the Semperoper . Other buildings also remain indelibly attached to his name, such as the Maternity Hospital, the Synagogue (destroyed during the Third Reich), the Oppenheim Palace, and the Villa Rosa built for the banker Martin Wilhelm Oppenheim. This last construction stands as

2425-443: The distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc . By the end of the nineteenth century, Arts and Crafts ideals had influenced architecture, painting, sculpture, graphics, illustration, book making and photography, domestic design and the decorative arts, including furniture and woodwork, stained glass, leatherwork, lacemaking, embroidery, rug making and weaving, jewelry and metalwork, enameling and ceramics. By 1910, there

2522-495: The intellect . The distinction between the decorative and fine arts essentially arose from the post- renaissance art of the West, where the distinction is for the most part meaningful. This distinction is much less meaningful when considering the art of other cultures and periods, where the most valued works, or even all works, include those in decorative media. For example, Islamic art in many periods and places consists entirely of

2619-618: The 1848 Revolutions (such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne ). In the fall of 1850, he travelled to London, England. But while he was able to pick up occasional contracts — including participation in the design of the funeral carriage for the Duke of Wellington and the designs of the Canadian, Danish, Swedish, and Ottoman sections of the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace — he found no steady employment. If his stay in London

2716-465: The 1850s with the Birmingham Set – a group of students at the University of Oxford including Edward Burne-Jones , who combined a love of Romantic literature with a commitment to social reform. John William Mackail notes that "Carlyle's Past and Present stood alongside of [Ruskin's] Modern Painters as inspired and absolute truth." The medievalism of Malory 's Morte d'Arthur set

2813-594: The Arts and Crafts Movement brought new appreciation to their work. Horace W Elliot, an English gallerist, visited the Ewenny Pottery (which dated back to the 17th century) in 1885, to both find local pieces and encourage a style compatible with the movement. The pieces he brought back to London for the next twenty years revivified interest in Welsh pottery work. A key promoter of the Arts and Crafts movement in Wales

2910-469: The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland were in the stained glass revival of the 1850s, pioneered by James Ballantine (1806–1877). His major works included the great west window of Dunfermline Abbey and the scheme for St. Giles Cathedral , Edinburgh. In Glasgow it was pioneered by Daniel Cottier (1838–1891), who had probably studied with Ballantine, and was directly influenced by William Morris , Ford Madox Brown and John Ruskin . His key works included

3007-465: The Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners did not separate the two. Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), a leader in the Gothic Revival in architecture . For example, he advocated truth to material, structure, and function, as did the Arts and Crafts artists. Pugin articulated

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3104-522: The Arts and Crafts philosophy was perpetuated among British craft workers in the 1950s and 1960s, long after the demise of the Arts and Crafts movement and at the high tide of Modernism. British Utility furniture of the 1940s also derived from Arts and Crafts principles. One of its main promoters, Gordon Russell , chairman of the Utility Furniture Design Panel, was imbued with Arts and Crafts ideas. He manufactured furniture in

3201-409: The Arts and Crafts style. It still exists. The London department store Liberty & Co. , founded in 1875, was a prominent retailer of goods in the style and of the " artistic dress " favoured by followers of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1887 the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society , which gave its name to the movement, was formed with Walter Crane as president, holding its first exhibition in

3298-488: The Century Guild for craftsmen in 1882, championing the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement. The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement led to the decorative arts being given a greater appreciation and status in society and this

3395-606: The Cotswold Hills, a region of Arts and Crafts furniture-making since Ashbee, and he was a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. William Morris's biographer, Fiona MacCarthy , detected the Arts and Crafts philosophy even behind the Festival of Britain (1951), the work of the designer Terence Conran (1931–2020) and the founding of the British Crafts Council in the 1970s. The beginnings of

3492-604: The King (formerly Elector) of Saxony, Anthony Clement . The flourishing growth of Dresden during this period provided the young architect with considerable creative opportunities. In 1838–1840 a synagogue was built in Dresden to Semper's design, it was ever afterward called the Semper Synagogue and is noted for its Moorish Revival interior style. The Synagogue's exterior was built in romanesque style so as not to call attention to itself. The interior design included not only

3589-528: The Middle Ages. "Because craftsmen took pleasure in their work", he wrote, "the Middle Ages was a period of greatness in the art of the common people. ... The treasures in our museums now are only the common utensils used in households of that age, when hundreds of medieval churches – each one a masterpiece – were built by unsophisticated peasants." Medieval art was the model for much of Arts and Crafts design, and medieval life, literature and building

3686-527: The Moorish inspired wall decorations but furnishings: specifically, a silver lamp of eternal light, which caught Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima's fancy. They gave a great deal of effort to have a copy of this lamp. Semper's student, Otto Simonson would construct the magnificent Moorish Revival Leipzig synagogue in 1855. Certain civic structures remain today, such as the Elbe-facing gallery of

3783-515: The Palace according to his plan, as was the Burgtheater. In 1871, Semper moved to Vienna to undertake the projects. During construction, repeated disagreements with his appointed associate architect ( Karl Freiherr von Hasenauer ), led Semper to resign from the project in 1876. In the following year, his health began to deteriorate. He died two years later while on a visit to Italy and is buried in

3880-595: The Society of Designer Craftsmen. In 1888, C.R. Ashbee , a major late practitioner of the style in England, founded the Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End of London. The guild was a craft co-operative modelled on the medieval guilds and intended to give working men satisfaction in their craftsmanship. Skilled craftsmen, working on the principles of Ruskin and Morris, were to produce hand-crafted goods and manage

3977-654: The Swiss municipality of Affoltern am Albis in return for the planning and construction of their main church's bell-tower. This citizenship was later confirmed by the Zürich cantonal government in December 1861 and with these new Swiss passports in hand, Semper was once again able to travel and finally also visit Germany, after the warrant for his arrest had been cancelled in May 1863. Semper provided Bavaria 's King Ludwig II with

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4074-514: The application of decoration." Other works followed in a similar vein, such as Wyatt's Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853), Gottfried Semper 's Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ("Science, Industry and Art") (1852), Ralph Wornum 's Analysis of Ornament (1856), Redgrave's Manual of Design (1876), and Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856). The Grammar of Ornament was particularly influential, liberally distributed as

4171-472: The applied arts, domestic design and costume. Morris's designs quickly became popular, attracting interest when his company's work was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. Much of this work is directly inspired from the Dictionnaire of Viollet le Duc. Most of Morris & Co's early work was for churches and Morris won important interior design commissions at St James's Palace and

4268-549: The artistic side Ruskin was influenced by his contemporary Viollet le Duc whom he taught to all of his pupils. In a letter to one of his pupils Ruskin writes : "There is only one book of any value and that is the Dictionnary of Viollet le Duc. Everyone should learn French". And according to some Ruskin's influence on Arts and Crafts was supplanted in 1860 by that of Viollet le Duc. His followers favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about

4365-508: The assertion of national pride and the striving for independence, and, whereas for Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain the ideal style was to be found in the medieval, in central Europe it was sought in remote peasant villages. Widely exhibited in Europe, the Arts and Crafts style's simplicity inspired designers like Henry van de Velde and styles such as Art Nouveau , the Dutch De Stijl group, Vienna Secession , and eventually

4462-622: The control of an old guard, was withdrawing from commerce and collaboration with manufacturers into purist handwork and what Tania Harrod describes as "decommoditisation" Its rejection of a commercial role has been seen as a turning point in its fortunes. Nikolaus Pevsner in his book Pioneers of Modern Design presents the Arts and Crafts movement as design radicals who influenced the modern movement, but failed to change and were eventually superseded by it. The British artist potter Bernard Leach brought to England many ideas he had developed in Japan with

4559-660: The cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo , Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci , reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity. Most European art during the Middle Ages had been produced under a very different set of values, where both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued. In China both approaches had co-existed for many centuries: ink wash painting , mostly of landscapes ,

4656-778: The decorative arts, often using geometric and plant forms , as does the art of many traditional cultures. The distinction between decorative and fine arts is not very useful for appreciating Chinese art , and neither is it for understanding early Medieval art in Europe . During that period in Europe, fine arts such as manuscript illumination and monumental sculpture existed, but the most prestigious works tended to be in goldsmith work, in cast metals such as bronze, or in other techniques such as ivory carving . Large-scale wall-paintings were much less regarded, crudely executed, and rarely mentioned in contemporary sources. They were probably seen as an inferior substitute for mosaic , which for

4753-430: The deleterious effects of what he called "mechanism", saying that "the production of certain mechanical commodities is as bad for the national health as is the production of slave-grown cane or child-sweated wares." William Arthur Smith Benson , on the other hand, had no qualms about adapting the Arts and Crafts style to metalwork produced under industrial conditions. (See quotation box.) Morris and his followers believed

4850-426: The designer derived "not from Morris or early Arts and Crafts teaching, but rather from the second-generation elaboration doctrine worked out in the first decade of [the twentieth] century by men such as W. R. Lethaby ". Many of the Arts and Crafts movement designers were socialists , including Morris, T. J. Cobden Sanderson , Walter Crane , C.R. Ashbee , Philip Webb , Charles Faulkner , and A. H. Mackmurdo . In

4947-401: The designer should also be the maker, although they considered it important that the maker should be credited, which was the practice in the catalogues of their exhibitions. Peter Floud, writing in the 1950s, said that "The founders of the Society ... never executed their own designs, but invariably turned them over to commercial firms." The idea that the designer should be the maker and the maker

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5044-401: The division of labour on which modern industry depended was undesirable, but the extent to which every design should be carried out by the designer was a matter for debate and disagreement. Not all Arts and Crafts artists carried out every stage in the making of goods themselves, and it was only in the twentieth century that that became essential to the definition of craftsmanship. Although Morris

5141-405: The early 1880s, Morris was spending more of his time on promoting socialism than on designing and making. Ashbee established a community of craftsmen called the Guild of Handicraft in east London, later moving to Chipping Campden . Those adherents who were not socialists, such as Alfred Hoare Powell , advocated a more humane and personal relationship between employer and employee. Lewis Foreman Day

5238-597: The encouragement of the Bund für Heimatschutz (1897) and the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk founded in 1898 by Karl Schmidt; and in Hungary Károly Kós revived the vernacular style of Transylvanian building. In central Europe, where several diverse nationalities lived under powerful empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia), the discovery of the vernacular was associated with

5335-415: The hours of labor. The cultural historian Fiona McCarthy said of Morris that "unlike later zealots like Gandhi , William Morris had no practical objections to the use of machinery per se so long as the machines produced the quality he needed." Morris insisted that the artist should be a craftsman-designer working by hand and advocated a society of free craftspeople, such as he believed had existed during

5432-447: The importance of craftsmanship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail." She describes the spare furnishings which he specified for a building in 1841, "rush chairs, oak tables", as "the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo." The Arts and Crafts philosophy was derived in large measure from John Ruskin 's social criticism, deeply influenced by

5529-455: The integrity of the surface", as well as displaying "vulgarity in detail". Design reform began with Exhibition organizers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly-made things. The organizers were "unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits." Owen Jones, for example, complained that "the architect,

5626-449: The late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the establishment of many associations and craft communities, although Morris had little to do with them because of his preoccupation with socialism at the time. A hundred and thirty Arts and Crafts organisations were formed in Britain, most between 1895 and 1905. In 1881, Eglantyne Louisa Jebb , Mary Fraser Tytler and others initiated the Home Arts and Industries Association to encourage

5723-475: The loss of traditional skills, but they were more troubled by the effects of the factory system than by machinery itself. William Morris's idea of "handicraft" was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery. Morris admired Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice and had read Modern Painters , but he did not share Ruskin's admiration for J. M. W. Turner and his writings on art indicate

5820-513: The modern factory, the use of machinery, the division of labor, capitalism and the loss of traditional craft methods. But his attitude to machinery was inconsistent. He said at one point that production by machinery was "altogether an evil", but at others times, he was willing to commission work from manufacturers who were able to meet his standards with the aid of machines. Morris said that in a "true society", where neither luxuries nor cheap trash were made, machinery could be improved and used to reduce

5917-427: The museum question became pressing again. Works forming the imperial art collection were scattered among several buildings. Semper was assigned to submit a proposal for locating new buildings in conjunction with redevelopment of the Ring Road. In 1869, he designed a gigantic 'Imperial Forum' which was not realized. The National Museum of Art History and the National Museum of Natural History were erected, however, opposite

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6014-523: The nation's cultural development, a visual counterpart to the literary revival of the same time and was a publication of Irish nationalism. The Arts and Crafts use of stained glass was popular in Ireland, with Harry Clarke the best-known artist and also with Evie Hone . The architecture of the style is represented by the Honan Chapel (1916) in Cork city in the grounds of University College Cork . Other architects practicing in Ireland included Sir Edwin Lutyens (Heywood House in Co. Laois, Lambay Island and

6111-470: The origins of architecture, especially in his book The Four Elements of Architecture (1851), and was one of the major figures in the controversy surrounding the polychrome architectural style of ancient Greece . He designed works at all scales—from major urban interventions such as the redesign of the Ringstraße in Vienna , to a baton for Richard Wagner . His unrealised design for an opera house in Munich was, without permission, adapted by Wagner for

6208-434: The outbreak of war in 1914 it was in decline and faced a crisis. Its 1912 exhibition had been a financial failure. While designers in continental Europe were making innovations in design and alliances with industry through initiatives such as the Deutsche Werkbund and new initiatives were being taken in Britain by the Omega Workshops and the Design in Industries Association , the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, now under

6305-511: The period must be considered a fine art, though in recent centuries mosaics have tended to be considered decorative. A similar fate has befallen tapestry , which late medieval and Renaissance royalty regarded as the most magnificent artform, and was certainly the most expensive. The term "ars sacra" ("sacred arts") is sometimes used for medieval christian art executed in metal, ivory, textiles, and other more valuable materials but not for rare secular works from that period. The view of decoration as

6402-460: The rise of the Arts and Crafts movement . This aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was born in England and inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle , John Ruskin and William Morris . The movement represented the beginning of a greater appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. The appeal of the Arts and Crafts movement to a new generation led the English architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo to organize

6499-432: The same hand. Lewis Foreman Day, a friend and contemporary of Crane's, as unstinting as Crane in his admiration of Morris, disagreed strongly with Crane. He thought that the separation of design and execution was not only inevitable in the modern world, but also that only that sort of specialisation allowed the best in design and the best in making. Few of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society insisted that

6596-409: The social critic Yanagi Soetsu about the moral and social value of simple crafts; both were enthusiastic readers of Ruskin. Leach was an active propagandist for these ideas, which struck a chord with practitioners of the crafts in the inter-war years, and he expounded them in A Potter's Book , published in 1940, which denounced industrial society in terms as vehement as those of Ruskin and Morris. Thus

6693-430: The standard for their early style. In Burne-Jones' words, they intended to "wage Holy warfare against the age". Morris began experimenting with various crafts and designing furniture and interiors. He was personally involved in manufacture as well as design, which was the hallmark of the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin had argued that the separation of the intellectual act of design from the manual act of physical creation

6790-417: The success of many of his students who attained success and renown served to ensure his legacy. The Swiss architect Emil Schmid was one such student. With his income as a professor, Semper was able to reunite his family, bringing them to Zürich from Saxony. The City Hall in Winterthur is among other buildings designed by Semper in Switzerland. In 1861, Semper and his family were awarded Swiss citizenship by

6887-470: The tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society with the Middle Ages, such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor – a tendency that became routine with Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. His book Contrasts (1836) drew examples of bad modern buildings and town planning in contrast with good medieval examples, and his biographer Rosemary Hill notes that he "reached conclusions, almost in passing, about

6984-441: The upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter" produced "novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence." From these criticisms of manufactured goods emerged several publications that set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave's Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analysed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for "more logic in

7081-615: The urging of the citizenry, commissioned Semper to build a new one. Semper produced the plans but left the actual construction to his son, Manfred. "What must I have done in 48, that one persecutes me forever? One single barricade did I construct - it held, because it was practical, and as it was practical, it was beautiful", wrote Semper in dismay. After stays in Zwickau , Hof , Karlsruhe and Strasbourg , Semper eventually ended up back in Paris, like many other disillusioned Republicans from

7178-889: The vernacular or domestic traditions of the British countryside. Some were deliberately left unfinished in order to display the beauty of the materials and the work of the craftsman, thus creating a rustic appearance. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, most Arts and Crafts practitioners in Britain had strong, slightly incoherent, negative feelings about machinery. They thought of 'the craftsman' as free, creative, and working with his hands, 'the machine' as soulless, repetitive, and inhuman. These contrasting images derive in part from John Ruskin's (1819–1900) The Stones of Venice , an architectural history of Venice that contains

7275-482: The way to a more inclusive evaluation of the value of art objects. Modern understanding of the art of many cultures tends to be distorted by the modern privileging of fine visual arts media over others, as well as the very different survival rates of works in different media. Works in metal, above all in precious metals, are liable to be "recycled" as soon as they fall from fashion, and were often used by owners as repositories of wealth, to be melted down when extra money

7372-541: The work of Thomas Carlyle . Ruskin related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of its work. Ruskin considered the sort of mechanized production and division of labour that had been created in the industrial revolution to be "servile labour", and he thought that a healthy and moral society required independent workers who designed the things that they made. He believed factory-made works to be "dishonest," and that handwork and craftsmanship merged dignity with labour. On

7469-559: The working classes, especially those in rural areas, to take up handicrafts under supervision, not for profit, but in order to provide them with useful occupations and to improve their taste. By 1889 it had 450 classes, 1,000 teachers and 5,000 students. In 1882, architect A.H.Mackmurdo formed the Century Guild , a partnership of designers including Selwyn Image , Herbert Horne , Clement Heaton and Benjamin Creswick . In 1884,

7566-580: Was Owen Morgan Edwards . Edwards was a reforming politician dedicated to renewing Welsh pride by exposing its people to their own language and history. For Edwards, "There is nothing that Wales requires more than an education in the arts and crafts." – though Edwards was more inclined to resurrecting Welsh Nationalism than admiring glazes or rustic integrity. In architecture, Clough Williams-Ellis sought to renew interest in ancient building, reviving "rammed earth" or pisé construction in Britain. The movement spread to Ireland, representing an important time for

7663-589: Was a German architect, art critic , and professor of architecture who designed and built the Semper Opera House in Dresden between 1838 and 1841. In 1849 he took part in the May Uprising in Dresden and was put on the government's wanted list. He fled first to Zürich and later to London. He returned to Germany after the 1862 amnesty granted to the revolutionaries. Semper wrote extensively on

7760-406: Was a fashion for "Arts and Crafts" and all things hand-made. There was a proliferation of amateur handicrafts of variable quality and of incompetent imitators who caused the public to regard Arts and Crafts as "something less, instead of more, competent and fit for purpose than an ordinary mass produced article." The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society held eleven exhibitions between 1888 and 1916. By

7857-447: Was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851 , which they considered to be excessively ornate , artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed "ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns,

7954-495: Was another successful and influential Arts and Crafts designer who was not a socialist, despite his long friendship with Crane. In Britain, the movement was associated with dress reform , ruralism , the garden city movement and the folk-song revival . All were linked, in some degree, by the ideal of "the Simple Life". In continental Europe the movement was associated with the preservation of national traditions in building,

8051-555: Was both socially and aesthetically damaging. Morris further developed this idea, insisting that no work should be carried out in his workshops before he had personally mastered the appropriate techniques and materials, arguing that "without dignified, creative human occupation people became disconnected from life". In 1861, Morris began making furniture and decorative objects commercially, modelling his designs on medieval styles and using bold forms and strong colours. His patterns were based on flora and fauna, and his products were inspired by

8148-511: Was concerned, Arts and Crafts was a revivalist campaign. But in Wales, at least until World War I , a genuine craft tradition still existed. Local materials, stone or clay, continued to be used as a matter of course. Scotland become known in the Arts and Crafts movement for its stained glass; Wales would become known for its pottery. By the mid 19th century, the heavy, salt glazes used for generations by local craftsmen had gone out of fashion, not least as mass-produced ceramics undercut prices. But

8245-498: Was considered a leading agitator for democratic change and a ringleader against government authority and he was forced to flee the city. He was destined never to return to the city that would, ironically, become most associated with his architectural (and political) legacy. The Saxon government maintained a warrant for his arrest until 1863. When the Semper-designed Hoftheater burnt down in 1869, King John , on

8342-484: Was disappointing professionally, however, it proved a fertile period for Semper's theoretical, creative and academic development. He published Die vier Elemente der Baukunst ( The Four Elements of Architecture ) in 1851 and Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst ( Science, Industry and Art ) in 1852. These works would ultimately provide the groundwork for his most widely regarded publication, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik, which

8439-431: Was famous for getting hands-on experience himself of many crafts (including weaving, dying, printing, calligraphy and embroidery), he did not regard the separation of designer and executant in his factory as problematic. Walter Crane, a close political associate of Morris's, took an unsympathetic view of the division of labour on both moral and artistic grounds, and strongly advocated that designing and making should come from

8536-509: Was idealized by the movement. Morris's followers also had differing views about machinery and the factory system. For example, C. R. Ashbee , a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, said in 1888, that, "We do not reject the machine, we welcome it. But we would desire to see it mastered." After unsuccessfully pitting his Guild and School of Handicraft guild against modern methods of manufacture, he acknowledged that "Modern civilisation rests on machinery", but he continued to criticise

8633-445: Was inspired by the ideas of historian Thomas Carlyle , art critic John Ruskin , and designer William Morris . In Scotland, it is associated with key figures such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh . Viollet le Duc's books on nature and Gothique art also play an essential part in the esthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It

8730-411: Was intrinsically contradictory: "the paradoxical confinement of the Arts & Crafts movement in an artisanal practice was completely out of step with the evolution of the status of the artist-decorator, but also with the democratic will of an art 'for the people and by the people' proclaimed by William Morris". For example, while Henry van de Velde understood the social discourse of Arts and Crafts, he

8827-449: Was liquidated in 1908. Some craftsmen stayed, contributing to the tradition of modern craftsmanship in the area. C.F.A. Voysey (1857–1941) was an Arts and Crafts architect who also designed fabrics, tiles, ceramics, furniture and metalwork. His style combined simplicity with sophistication. His wallpapers and textiles, featuring stylised bird and plant forms in bold outlines with flat colors, were used widely. Morris's thought influenced

8924-627: Was needed. Illuminated manuscripts have a much higher survival rate, especially in the hands of the church, as there was little value in the materials and they were easy to store. The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance , that placed little value on

9021-461: Was not an unconditional disciple of the movement and ended up turning away from it, considering it as anachronistic and tinged with quixotism . In Japan, it emerged in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship, and often used medieval , romantic , or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and was anti-industrial in its orientation. It had

9118-512: Was published in two volumes in 1861 and 1863. Concurrently with the onset of the industrial revolution, the Swiss Federation planned to establish a polytechnical school. As the principal judge for the competition held to select a design for the new building, Semper deemed the submitted entries unsatisfactory and, ultimately, designed the building himself. Proudly situated (where fortified walls once stood), visible from all sides on

9215-635: Was represented by the development of the ' Glasgow Style ' which was based on the talent of the Glasgow School of Art . Celtic revival took hold here, and motifs such as the Glasgow rose became popularised. Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and the Glasgow School of Art were to influence others worldwide. The situation in Wales was different from elsewhere in the UK. Insofar as craftsmanship

9312-678: Was soon reflected by changes in the law. Until the enactment of the Copyright Act 1911 only works of fine art had been protected from unauthorized copying. The 1911 Act extended the definition of an "artistic work" to include works of "artistic craftsmanship". In the context of mass production and consumerism some individuals will attempt to create or maintain their lifestyle or to construct their identity when forced to accept mass-produced identical objects in their life. According to Colin Campbell in his piece “The Craft Consumer”, this

9409-448: Was to a large extent produced by and for the scholar-bureaucrats or "literati", and was intended as an expression of the artist's imagination above all, while other major fields of art, including the very important Chinese ceramics produced in effectively industrial conditions, were produced according to a completely different set of artistic values. The lower status given to works of decorative art in contrast to fine art narrowed with

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