News from Arcadia

“Morris” by Charlotte and Peter Fiell is a book in the Taschen Basic Art series. It deals with William Morris (1834-1896), the famous British designer. The book nicely complements the other book about Morris I reviewed earlier, “William Morris: Artist, Craftsman, Pioneer” by Ormiston and Wells. Strictly speaking, both books are introductory in character. The Taschen book shows Morris´ art in context (as in showing the entire rooms or churches where he designed some of the decorations), while Ormiston-Wells are more into showing the details of Morris´ tapestries, wall-papers and so on.

Morris was something of a paradox: a successful “capitalist” in Victorian England with an upper middle class background who was simultaneously a revolutionary socialist, an anti-modernist believer in a rural Utopia whose artwork catered to the tastes of the bourgeois upper class, an elitist craftsman who believed that art must be democratized and reach the broad masses, etc.

Despite all this, there is nevertheless a continuity in Morris´ thinking, from his “conservative” period when he was influenced by Anglo-Catholicism and John Ruskin to his socialist ditto, when he was originally an anarchist but at the very end of his life seems to have come around to a more reformist position. That continuity is the criticism of industrialism and capitalism, its degradation of the laborer, and the utopian dream to liberate society from alienation through the creation of true communities on a decentralized basis, dominated by artisans and farmers.

I don´t think Morris ever developed a real political strategy for accomplishing this, however, but that´s probably because it couldn´t be accomplished in the first place. Social Democratic reform of capitalism, rather than High Tory or anarchist dreams of everyone living in an idealized rural commune, was the only way forward from the Victorian situation. Note also the irony that Morris´ designs, and the medieval romance art of his associates in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, has become almost emblematic of the Victorian period they loved to hate!

I admit that I like some of Morris´ art, though.