Pleasure In Creation (July/August 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 5)

Pleasure In Creation

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Authors: Fred Strebeigh

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July/August 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 5

THROUGHOUT AMERICA GRADE SCHOOLS AND summer camps teach “arts and crafts.” In my rural school we mitered wooden boxes, hammered decorative copper, and crackle-glazed clay pots—all under the gaze of a man who wore a dirty smock and a white beard, marks of individuality unknown to other instructors. We worked as if within an ancient order (or, in our case, youthful disorder) of craftsmen. But no one ever explained why we undertook such labors—so unlike the multiplication tables for future engineers, the test tubes for future doctors, the books for future teachers. Why fifty minutes in any school day went to arts and crafts puzzled me. Since then I have learned.

This year the phrase arts and crafts reaches its 100th anniversary. This year also (and next), an exhibition showing the full range of the American Arts and Crafts movement—including work in wood, metal, pottery, and other forms, all brought together by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—will reach museums in Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York City. The show casts light not just on American education, and not just on a particular direction in American art from the late nineteenth century to the First World War; it illumines also a major response of American society to the clangor and roar of the Industrial Revolution.

The Arts and Crafts movement originated not in America but in Britain. Like most movements, it had no clear birthdate. But it did have its documented christening, in May 1887, when a London bookbinder coined a name for Britain’s new Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. In its thought the society looked back more than three decades, to the writings of John Ruskin (which, in turn, looked back more than four centuries, to the Middle Ages).

The vision of Ruskin, the first professor of art history at Oxford and the most aggressive art critic of his day, defined virtually every landmark that the American Arts and Crafts movement would steer by. He praised love of natural ob- jects for their own sake and praised the wisdom that began in close attention to “the wandering tendril, and the budding of the flower.” He attacked construction techniques that obscured the maker’s choice of natural materials and applauded design that revealed the “secrets of its structure.” He attacked machine work for turning men into cogwheels and attacked the division of labor, which he insisted had divided not labor but human beings—had divided them into “small fragments and crumbs of life.” He attacked all work that forced men to perform like tools in order to make precise copies, and called, above all else, for “healthy and ennobling labor,” which would free each worker for creative invention.

The ideas of Ruskin the philosopher took shape in the workshop of William Morris the designer. Not long after Morris encountered Ruskin’s ideas at Oxford, his firm began producing its solid wooden chairs, elegant wallpapers, and, eventually, rich carpets and tapestries. With his smock tucked under his