Arts and Crafts began as a revolt against factory glitter
British reformers in the 1880s blamed machines and showy factory goods for ugly design and degraded labor. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson named the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887; by about 1920 the UK wave had largely run its course, though Japan later echoed it as Mingei.
The spark was disgust at the Great Exhibition of 1851, whose goods struck critics as fussy, fake and blind to their materials. Its own organisers, including Henry Cole, Owen Jones and Richard Redgrave, led the backlash. Jones argued that ornament should serve the object and that carpets and wallpaper should look flat rather than sprout lifelike flowers; his Grammar of Ornament of 1856 was handed out as a student prize and reprinted nine times by 1910. Redgrave insisted that sound construction must come before decoration.
Those reformers still accepted factories. The Arts and Crafts generation went further, treating design and social justice as one cause. Augustus Pugin had pointed the way: his 1836 book Contrasts set shoddy modern streets beside medieval ones, and the plain rush chairs and oak tables he specified in 1841 have been called the movement's interior in embryo. John Ruskin, steeped in Thomas Carlyle, condemned divided factory work as servile and argued that a moral society needs workers who design what they make.
William Morris, born in 1834, became the towering figure. At Oxford in the 1850s he and Edward Burne-Jones belonged to the Birmingham Set, reading Carlyle and Malory and vowing holy war against their age. Morris's handicraft meant work without division of labour rather than work without machines, and he cared little for easel painting. Ruskin in turn rejected what became house orthodoxy, the rule that decoration must stay flat, and he urged pupils to learn French to read Viollet-le-Duc.
Historians still argue whether the movement fathered British Art Nouveau, embodied it or opposed it; its members certainly scorned Art Nouveau's industrial iron. Charles Rennie Mackintosh carried the ideas in Scotland, and the approach spread through the empire, Europe and North America.
Source: Arts and Crafts movement
