The Hand-Made’s Tale: William Morris at Christchurch Art Gallery, 14 March – 29 June 2008
June 9, 2008 – 5:30 pm by Andrew Paul Wood
Of all Eminent Victorians, William Morris, a bushy stockbroker’s son from Walthamstow, perhaps comes closest to fulfilling the ideal of a Man for All Seasons. His position in British art is set in concrete and armour-plated. He was a superbly gifted author and only his proto-socialist beliefs caused him to decline the socially highly desirable post of Poet Laureate after the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Morris translated Icelandic sagas into English, invented social Science Fiction, and was a charter member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In company with paedophilic old misery John Ruskin, he was an influential protector of the architectural past with his Society for the Protection of Ancient buildings – which he referred to as the Anti-Scrape.
It seems appropriate that Christchurch Art Gallery should hold an exhibition of his work given that Canterbury University’s School of Fine Arts was founded on the South Kensington Arts and Crafts model, which Morris was instrumental in inspiring. He was, without hyperbole, one the greatest designers of the Victorian age in terms of his philosophy that all manufactured objects be both useful and beautiful. He was also a genius at flat decorative pattern in sinuous anticipation of Art Nouveau, realising, as he put it, “every line in a pattern should have its due growth”, resulting in perfectly balanced overall pattern that romances the eye with its details without distracting or deluging it in a tsunami of fuss.
Morris’s workshops at Red House and Kelmscott provided a challenge to English mass fabrication and Victorian kitsch, with its textiles, furniture and printed papers as radical as that which would come 70 years later when the Bauhaus offered its alternative to industrial manufacture in the 20th century along similar principles – indeed, Walter Gropius spoke of the Bauhaus’ debt to Morris. Morris himself, whenever possible, tried to master the traditional techniques, barely changed since Chaucer’s day, and frequently turned up at High Society functions with his hands stained indigo. Unfortunately, Morris’s romantic obsession with all things medieval also set back British taste by a century, something that wouldn’t come right until the Festival of Britain in 1951. His other main flaw was that, in the old adage, he was both good and original, but what was good was not original, and what was original was not good.
Within a scant half-century of his death in 1896, Morris’s reputation had withered away to a dozen crumpled metres of flowery, bird-infested chintz and wallpaper lost in a dank, murky bower of “ivy never sere” and willow gloom where insubstantial Pre-Raphaelite shades sighed ineffectually. He came to be posthumously seen as a sort of beardy-weirdy anachronistic utopian fantasist, a daffy quixotic loon, a quaint Victorian period piece like his furniture. The great radical socialist was forgotten, and yet that was the one thing he was most passionate about, as when he wrote in 1887 (20 years before the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar), “There is no salvation for the unemployed,” he wrote in 1887, “but in the general combination of the workers for the freedom of labour – for the REVOLUTION.” He was also something of a radical greenie, once declaring, “we should do without coal”. So he would have quite happily stuffed the post-Industrial Revolution (an evil thing in his mind) British economy, but think about those British winters. Brrr.
William Morris was the scion of a very wealthy family and lived a comfortable bourgeois life – making him seem something of a prototype Chardonnay Socialist, writing from a cosy drawing-room of unassailable sincerity, but from his adolescence he burned with a fervid aesthetic revulsion against the vulgar clutter of capitalist production stuffing every middleclass Victorian parlour. He would have sooner run naked around the Reading Room of the British Museum than swerve from the path of the heartfelt and didactic. “Was it all to end,” he demanded, “in a counting-house on top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap’s drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley?”
The alternative, for Morris at Exeter College, nestled beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford, was an escapist fantasia of medieval anachronism. At Oxford Morris became influenced by Ruskin, and met his life-long friends and collaborators, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb. He also met his wife, Jane Burden, a working-class woman whose deathly-pale skin, willowy and slightly consumptive figure, and abundant dark Titian hair, was considered by Morris and his friends the very epitome of feminine beauty – the sort of look masocho-bestialist and sometime homosexual poet Algernon Swinburne described as “death taken seasick”.
Together these friends formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They eschewed the tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative arts and favoured a return to hand-craftsmanship and painting as practiced in Florence prior to the time of Raphael (hence the name). Morris in particular espoused the heart-felt philosophy that art should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy of artistic mediums.
Arthurian idylls, oriflammes, cavalcades and chivalrous jousts in flowery meads – no program of social reform and human dignity could ever be sustained in such a rarefied atmosphere. No theory of art, Morris realised, could be effective without a corresponding theory of society. Ever the pragmatic aesthete, Morris felt the harmonies between craft practice and socialist thought, and he soon escaped the Pre-Raphaelites’ damascened clutches.
Morris left the hallowed cloisters and swarded quads of Oxford to join an architecture firm, but soon found himself drawn increasingly to the seductive realm of the decorative arts. He and Webb built Red House at Bexleyheath in Kent, Morris’s grand wedding gift to Jane.
In 1861, he founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Maddox Brown and Webb, though in 1874 Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown decided to leave the firm. In its most famous incarnation as Morris and Company, the firm set about reviving the traditional crafts of stained glass painting, and tapestry weaving in Britain. Morris’ designs are still sold today under license to Sanderson and Sons and Liberty of London.
Political feelings came to a head in 1876 when Morris, the man who had decorated such icons of the Royal establishment as the Armour and Tapestry Room at St. James’s Palace (sumptuous blue and gold wallpaper and rose silk curtains) and the dining hall at the Victoria and Albert Museum, made his triumphal and irreversible gran rifiuto of his bourgeois status. He resigned his family directorship of the Devon Great Consols Company. Then, in an act the full impact and weight of can only be made sense of in the context of Victorian England, he placed his silk top hat (a well understood symbol of Capitalism since Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus in 1834) on a chair, and sat on it. Not until 1883 did Morris read Karl Marx. All Morris’ arguments about the alienation of workers came directly from his compassion and his own experiences.
Morris’ maxim “no room of the richest man should look grand enough to make a simple man shrink in it” sits uneasily with the triffid-like growths of honeysuckle, tudor rose, fleur-de-lys, strawberries, pomegranates, grapevines, apple trees and small English birds that crowd the Morris-decorated room – things only the rich could afford.
Morris and his daughter May were amongst Britain’s pioneer Socialists, working directly with Eleanor Marx and Engels to initiate the socialist movement in England. In 1883, Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1884 organised the breakaway Socialist League. Morris found himself balancing rather awkwardly on a delicate diplomatic tightrope as a mediator (essentially herding cats) between the antagonistic Marxist and anarchist factions of the movement. It was the incessant bickering between the two sides which eventually ripped the Socialist League apart at the seams.
It was during this period that Morris wrote his best-known prose works, creating archetypal futurist fantasies for 20th century Science Fiction, in particular A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere. The latter tells the story of a man who falls asleep after an evening at a Socialist League meeting. He wakes in the future to find England transformed into a communist paradise where men and women are free, healthy, and equal. At the close of the book, the man has returned to the present, but has been inspired by what he has seen and his determined to work for a socialist future.
In these ways the instinctive heart-felt socialism of Morris’ early lectures and craft practice, and his Ruskinian ideals of the dignity of the working man, flowered fully into what he called “a matter of religion.”
Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire, as a summer retreat, but it soon became a nest of sin for Rossetti and Jane Morris’s long-running affair. After his departure from the Socialist League, Morris divided his time between the Company, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, the Kelmscott Press, and Kelmscott Manor.
In January 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith, London, to produce printing and book design in line with the Arts and Crafts movement, in response to the prevalence of lithographic prints designed to look like woodcut prints. He designed clear, straightforward typefaces, such as his Roman ‘golden’ type, inspired by the early Venetian printer Nicolaus Jenson, and medievalised decorative borders for books suggested by the illuminated and wood-cut illustrated incunabula of the 15th century.
That year Morris became seriously ill with kidney disease. He continued to write on socialism and occasionally was healthy enough to give speeches at public meetings. Morris political views were influenced by the anarchist theories of Peter Kropotkin and syndicalism of Tom Mann. Although Morris supported trustworthy socialist politicians such as George Lansbury and Keir Hardie, he believed that socialism would be achieved through trade union activity rather than by getting socialists elected to the House of Commons.
At his death in 1896 Morris was interred in the Kelmscott village churchyard.
Morris was not, as his detractors often suggest, a nutty Luddite with eotechnic visions of a feudal society without the unpleasantries of baronial authority. “It is not this or that tangible steam or brass machine which we want to get rid of,” he remarked, “but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us …I demand a free and unfettered animal life for man first of all: I demand the utter extinction of all asceticism. If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals, and therefore miserable men.”
In the last nine years of his life, Morris wrote a series of fantasy novels in imitation of the medieval romances, which were to be a powerful influence on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. In many respects, Morris should be regarded as the father of fantasy fiction in the modern sense, because whereas other writers set their narratives in far-off foreign lands, dream worlds and places out of myth, Morris’ works were among the first to be set in an entirely invented, logically consistent fantasy world. There would be no Lord of the Rings without him.
This exhibition comes to Christchurch from the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide. Ironically, when the Victoria and Albert museum in London sent some Morris material there for a PreRaphaelite exhibition in 1962, there were at least four intact Morris interiors close-by: the town house of Sir James and Lady Gosse (described by contemporaries as “a sight to behold … the entire effect overwhelming”); on fashionable Fitzroy Terrace the Bakewell and Rymill residences; and Springfield house – not to mention the stained glass of the Stock Exchange, or the carpets in the Adelaide Club.
Adelaide in the late nineteenth century was gagging for it from the Arts and Crafts movement through to Bloomsbury, perhaps explaining why the city has the largest Morris holdings outside of Old Blighty. Much of this obsession can be traced to fifty years of patronage from the Barr-Smith family – three generations of which decorated seven houses, financed by one of the largest fortunes in Australasia. Apocryphally the relationship began when Mabel Barr-Smith, daughter of Robert and Johanna, became friends with Morris’ daughter May Morris when the Barr-Smiths lived in London in the 1870s.
The Christchurch incarnation will combine key works from the Adelaide collection, including many many carpets and curtains, tiles, firescreens and the exquisite tapestry Adoration of the Magi (designed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1887, made in 1900) with New Zealand sourced items including the beautiful Burne-Jones painting Spes or Hope (1871) from Dunedin Public Art Gallery, a Dante Gabriel Rossetti stained glass design from Te Papa and a number of Kelmscott books from the Alexander Turnbull Library
Morris should be considered the hero of both craftsmen and communards. He is one of those rare individuals who truly deserve the fame history attributes them – and as a scary footnote, the biggest market for Morris designs in New Zealand today is Timaru. Go figure.
