"Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean."

he main figure associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement is William Morris -designer, writer and poet. A Victorian, also a Romantic, he was a man idealising the traditional life of England while all around him raged the Industrial Revolution; a totally new phenomenon, his being the first nation to experience rapid industrialization.

1851 was the year of the Great Exhibition a celebration of the product of the Industrial Revolution in England. Sponsored by Prince Albert and held in the Crystal Palace, a huge building of iron and glass built especially for the occasion, this exhibition was a stylistic anarchy, with most objects displaying ornament for ornaments’ sake. Ornament was seen as exotic, giving an object status, making it look more expensive than it was, and disguising its often banal function as well as poor construction. Handmade decorated objects were expensive so new machining and casting processes simulated these. But ornament was often arbitrary,
drawn from ornamental pattern books of the period, which were collections of engravings illustrating decorative forms.

In 1861, William Morris formed the Arts and Crafts company, The Firm (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), to create a new aesthetic for design, substituting well-made, well-designed products for the mass-produced goods of the factories. They described themselves as 'fine art workmen in painting, carving, furniture and metals'.

In industry, the intensive use of machines and breaking up of the production of goods into specialised factory areas led to a fragmentation of the design and fabrication activities.
This separated design from the making of the product and meant that the skilled artisan no longer created and designed the product as a craftsman. With industrialisation, skilled jobs
were replaced by semi- and unskilled machine operators.

William Morris saw the over-ornamentation of mass produced goods as symptomatic of the alienation of workers from the products they made. In the factories, designs were drawn from pattern books and workers and designers had no individual control over the finished article, so quality suffered The answer, Morris believed, lay in a return to the crafts traditions of old England. He wanted to return to the mediaeval tradition of the Guild, the association of craftsmen working together.

He was influenced in this belief by John Ruskin, whose book The Stones of Venice had a profound influence on him. In this book, Ruskin viewed the development of Gothic architecture and its beauty in terms of the simple moral virtues of mediaeval society that produced it. Ruskin despised the new industrial era pioneered in England and in his writings pushed the concept that decoration had to be based on stylised natural forms. He declared the Gothic style was the model to follow, designers needing to re-establish the forms indigenous to Britain. Rejecting what he saw as the ‘fatal newness of the furniture’ displayed at the Great Exhibition, he saw it all as ‘machine-made ornament’. To him, true design lay in making things by hand, and this gave joy in work to the craftsman.

While he didn’t want to do away with machines, in his printing activities William Morris followed a policy of excluding all machinery in favour of tools immediately controlled by hand. Seeking a new aesthetic based on handcraft but using machines to assist its production, he said:

"It is not this or that tangible steel or brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of us all."

His greatest achievement, apart from an enduring influence on designers was in the field of wallpapers, book design and textile design; which were influenced by his knowledge of Mediaeval works and observation of forms in nature.

His legacy lay in his idea that any design for living -a chair, wallpapers, book or building should be an artistic product- an object designed, not merely a manufactured one. For as he said:

"If you want a golden rule..this is it: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. "

Morris and his followers in the Arts and Crafts movement believed that each material incorporated its own value (eg: the natural colour and pattern of the grain in wood). And the first principle of good design was to respect the properties of the materials used. This respect also was transferred to the workers producing the goods; craftsmanship and pride in work leading to the survival of humanism and high standards.

While William Morris is the figure we most associate with the Arts and Crafts Movement, this movement was in fact a collection of craft societies or guilds, whose members followed to a large extent the design theories of Morris.

Other significant designers associated with the Arts and Crafts movement at this time were: Philip Webb; Walter Crane; W R Lethaby; Charles Voysey; William Benson; A H Mackmurdo; Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

"art may be beautiful but art for the sake of progress is even more beautiful"

rt Nouveau is French for new art. The term was originally used in various articles published throughout 1884 to 1890 in the Belgian avant-garde publication Art Moderne.

The term was familiarised in France by the opening of a furnishing and novelty shop in Paris in 1895 by the dealer Siegfried Bing, named Maison Art Nouveau, which displayed furniture and new designs for interiors such as glassware by Tiffany and Emile Gallé, and exotic imported goods. Known also in Europe as Jugendstil or ‘youth style’, the art form began in the 1880s as a result of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which rejected the mass-produced techniques of industrialization. Art Nouveau developed a new style of exuberant curving lines, assymetrical design and elements of fantasy. It took on a wealth of different and at times conflicting orientations, spreading to varying degrees to a number of major European cities, such as Brussels, Glasgow, Munich, Nancy, Barcelona, and Vienna.

The sources of Art Nouveau were diverse. Although the movement sought to create new decoration and designs and reject the backward looking trends of the past generation with its reliance on historical design forms, it embraced traditional themes as well as a broad mix of foreign and other exotic arts; also incorporating designers continuing the Arts and Crafts objectives of reconciling fine handcraft with industrial production.

The practitioners of Art Nouveau borrowed motifs from Japanese wood prints, which had an angular, linear look, incorporating the grids and parallel lines of Japanese interior design depicted in these images, as well as the sinuous, flowing lines of the kimono.

The Arts and Crafts movement returned designers to the concepts of craftsmanship, simplicity of decoration, and forms derived from nature.

The heritage of the Arts and Crafts movement influenced two directions: design simplicity, removing unnecessary decoration; and form -particularly of plants and flowers- derived from nature. Its principles of simple and functional construction led to The Modern Movement of the 1920’s, but the principles of nature as ornament inspired Art Nouveau.

Ignoring the social theories behind Arts and Crafts style, the Art Nouveau movement increasingly viewed finely crafted objects as things of beauty in themselves. Art Nouveau took
the Arts and Crafts ‘unity across disciplines’ ideal of unity and harmony across the various fine arts and crafts media and effectively made it happen as the style was adopted throughout the visual and applied arts. But while it created a new sense of unity across the arts, it removed itself from the Arts and Crafts principle of beautiful things created for all people, and remained in its pure form exclusive and expensive, with its emphasis on finely hand-worked production.

Originating in France as a decorative art movement in the 1880s and evolving to different forms up to 1914, it is remembered mainly for its richly ornamental, and assymetrical use of of whiplash lines reminiscent of twining plants and organic forms. It reached its highpoint at the 1900 trade fair, the Paris Exposition Universelle.

"Lean upon the staff of line - line determinative, line emphatic, line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting."

These words are from Walter Crane, the British book designer, whose style was an early manifestation and inspiration for the twining, plant-like forms of Art Nouveau, but who rejected
this stylistic exuberance that soon began to dominate. Familiar motifs of the style included curvilinear elements, sinuous contours, use of tendrils and floral arabesques, whiplash lines, and later, exaggerated embellishment. Art Nouveau, with its emphasis on decoration, responded well to inlaid wood veneers, wrought iron and exquisitely coloured glass. Its themes, particularly in France were symbolic and sensual, "from the darkness into the light" a theme often recurring, with its associations of plants, movement and regeneration.

The reason for the development of the Art Nouveau movement was also the cause of its demise. By the turn of the century the costs involved in producing Art Nouveau pieces were very high.
The craftsmanship needed to create intricately constructed pieces was prohibitive and the designs were unsuited to manufacture on a large scale.

Art Nouveau in France flourished between 1895 and 1905. The Paris Great Exhibition of 1900 marked both the movement's peak (1900 style) and the first signs of decline which would later
be confirmed at the Turin Exhibition in 1902. While the movement began in Paris, within a short time under the guidance of Emile Gallé, Nancy became the home of French Art Nouveau. Thanks to his growing reputation and his enthusiasm for communication, he soon drew followers among the artists and young industrialists of Nancy and in 1901 founded the École de Nancy, a school of art whose aims were 'to revive the artistic professions that have died out and become forgotten trades...and to encourage their revival everywhere.'

"Industrial design, as I know it, ‘delivers the goods’. It is a serious profession which combines good taste, technical knowledge, and common sense..."

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