COURSE DESCRIPTION:

All too often we think of the Arts and Crafts movement as a relatively isolated phenomenon of well-meaning idealists whose rejection of modernity led them back to a fictitious past they were ultimately incapable of re-creating.  As a result, we miss the much larger impact the movement had on the rehabilitation and promotion of craft in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  For while we can easily recognize and embrace the importance of Ruskin and Morris to the Arts and Crafts movement, we tend not to understand how essential they were to the development of Art Nouveau, Secessionist design, and modernism throughout Europe and the United States.  Despite distinctive national styles we will identify an underlying Englishness that permeated the period through Van de Velde in Belgium to Bing in Paris to Ernest Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse in Germany, and Jan Veth in Holland amongst others.  These are the long shadows that Ruskin and Morris cast over craft that shaped its rehabilitation in the Western world.

Comprised of six sessions, this series argues that to restrict the Arts and Crafts movement exclusively to aesthetic boundaries is to ultimately rob it of its transformational power.  As a result, we will consider how Morris’s and Ruskin’s example became the vehicle for creating a number of different styles and how–even as designers advanced towards new visual languages–they became models for thinking about craft’s place in the modern world.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

Dr. Jonathan Clancy has been the Director of Collections and Preservation at the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms since 2020. Those interested in the Arts and Crafts field will know his publications including: The First Metal—Arts