Chapter 1 Foundation and Fun Stories

In my personal introduction, I explained how I love how art fits into a time and a community.   It  is so interesting how cultural and literature, and music, and politics and natural disasters all come together to create art in a particular time period.

Some of this history might be of interest. 

I call it- Tabloid Art History- the stuff that ties making art to real living breathing people.

I have just given little bits that I think are fun. For example, there is the story of  how mathematicians caused the fire that made way for Pugin's Houses of Parliament.

The arts and crafts movement is super influential. To the world of making things as big an explosions as a super volcano. It was felt across the globe.  It changed the way things were made. It change how homes looked inside and out. It change what society wanted for the people who make things-fair trade- we hear it still today.

So my response is in little articles with pictures.  It starts with what is considered to be one of the first steps that lead to the Industrial Revolution and subsequently the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Change from family crafts to Industrial Revolution.

The beginning of the craft movement:

Melvin Bragg in his 2006 book, Twelve Books that Changed the World, lists the Patent Specifications for Arkwright's Spinning Machine  among the 12 most influential books of all time.  This 1769 Patent for the first time used power machinery, skilled laborers with new material--cotton.  Creating the first modern factory, this ushered in the Industrial  Revolution.   Arkwright  thought the factory town would be kinder. It was a large move away from the craft of the home--spinning and making garments in the cottage for family use. 

This is one of this first shifts  away from the family and into the factory.

Good design, morality and social reform

Pugin and the Gothic or how Mathematicians led to the Burning of Parliament 

Pugin is best known for designing, along with Sir Charles Barry, the British Houses of Parliament which had been destroyed by the most fantastic fire since London's burning in the 1666. As mathematicians skills improved, the treasury found it no longer needed tally sticks to aid at the counting house. The Treasury stored the disused wooden sticks. A bureaucratic decision had been made to destroy these tally sticks on site rather than distribute the wood to the needy neighborhoods around Westminster.  The fire started when a vast collection of disused tally sticks were  burned at Westminster. A maid kept warning the workers that the fire was too hot.  The bond fire in the chimneys caught the paneling on fire and then Parliament.  

Charles Dickens, social reformer and writer was scandalized both by the foolishness in not disrupting the wood to the poor and the cost of Pugin's building.

Not only did the fire, Nero-like make way for new buildings which conveyed the ideas of Pugin, one of the Founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement but it offered Turner a view of the drama and light he loved.

Turner actually got on a boat in the middle of the Thames to paint while London burned. This watercolor was one of the images he painted while watching the buildings burn.

 These two paintings, one a studio piece and one a watercolor sketch are by

by J. M. W. Turner.

The book focuses mostly on England and America but the Arts and Crafts was really a super Movement.

In Scotland, Charles Macintosh, architect, worked with his wife, Margaret MacDonald. The Glasgow School of Design was very influential on American Arts and Crafts  Frank Lloyd Wright studied Macintosh's Tea Rooms--his introduction of Japanese design.  Macintosh's interest in designing everything that played a part of an environment-from architecture to silverware, influenced Wright.

Meanwhile on the Continent

 In Paris, Haussmann designed a new city. While England looks back to the Gothic, He moved Paris from its medieval warren of tiny winding streets to the modern boulevards painted by the Impressionist. Even Les Halles, the market place that had been functioning since medieval time, was repurposed.  The Metro commissioned entry ways in the art nouveau, arts and craft's baby sister. In Belgium, Victor Horta designed buildings with an organic feel--looking to nature a fundamental of the arts and crafts.

In Vienna,

advocate of the Vienna Secession, Klimt argued for good design and innovative artists. Like the PRB, Klimt studied  craft and work before the Renaissance. He went to Ravenna, one of the four seats of the early Byzantine government to study to mosaics.

Later the Wiener Werkstätte, formed a craft guild.

Arts and Crafts and Americans

Although Ruskin, contributed greatly on the Arts and Crafts in America, In his later years, he began losing his mind.

He attacked American, James Whistler for "Nocturne in Black and Gold:  Falling Rockets" as an  ."The ill-educated conceit of the artist... for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."

 When Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, Ruskin was ill and asked Burne-Jones to represent him in court--a witness for the defense.  Although Burne-Jones was deeply uncomfortable with the attack on another artist and a new style Burne-Jones appeared in court  a debt of years of friendship with Ruskin.  This ended the friendship between Ruskin and Burne-Jones. Whistler won a token farthing but sinks into financial ruin.   "The 10 o'clock Lecture" documented the experience. Whistler added a stinger to his butterfly signature.

 

And ironically, Whistler pulled himself out of bankruptcy by doing the engravings for a new addition of "Stones of Venice", Ruskin's book.

Burne-Jones Gets Around

John La Farge, another friend of PRB's Edward Burne-Jones, changes his art each time he meets with Burne-Jones.

 

 

Our book mentions H H Richarson's Trinity Church in Boston, as one of the few extant Aesthetic movement works.  
It's interior program was done by John La Farge and includes a small stained glass window from Burne-Jones. La Farge won the Legion of Honor in France for his stained glass which was one of the most important prizes in the world. Yes, Tiffany stole La Farge’s process. 

Art Pottery--women craftsmen

My last story is more personal and regional.

Women in the Arts and Crafts

There were always women in the Arts and Crafts  movement from the very beginning Dante Gabriel Rossetti AND his sister, poet, Christina worked to express the ideals of craft.  From the PRB's redheads to designer Margaret MacDonald, women were partners in the Arts and Crafts movement.  (Embroidered panels -MacDonald)

Surprisingly, Newcomb pottery is not listed among the American art pottery in this

chapter.

Associated with Newcomb’s women’s college in New Orleans, Newcomb pottery embodies the Arts and Crafts. The pottery program was to
instruct southern women in liberal arts. Just as ancient greek vases have two marks, the “x made this” and the “x painted this”, at Newcomb one artisan threw the pots and someone else decorated it . Women decorated the pottery. Newcomb Pottery looks to nature with very regional motifs: moonlight, Spanish moss, giant oaks. It is highly collectible today. It's my favorite. So I tuck it in as my last image.