So when my favorite new weekly magazine, "The Economist,”
commented on how the Brits were honoring Morris as part of London
post- Olympic hoopla (“More than just a pretty swatch”,9/22/2012,
p.84), I had to take a closer look at Morris. I loved his mostly rural
villas, and the interior decorations that made their interiors
dazzle. But I falsely suspected that his influential medievalist
ideas exacerbated the visual mess that was nineteenth century England,
not to mention twentieth century America.
Alas,
could it be Morris speaking: “I do not want art for a few, any more
than education for a few, or freedom for a few,” he said bitterly
in 1873, a decade before Walter Gropius was born, as he decorated
still another villa interior. It dawned on him painfully that he had
been spending his esthetic career “ministering to the swinish
luxury of the rich.” Wow. He could very well be the idealistic
voice of Cameron Sinclair, that Brit who over a century later came to
America to organize a global fraternity, Architecture for Humanity,
with its down to earth secular bible, “Design As If You Give a
Damn.”
Like
the later Sinclair, Morris thought himself In the late 70’S into a
radical stance :the great expensive objects he and his associates
created “were completely unaffordable for the people he wanted to
help.” (How would he have loved the Swede who created IKEA.) Alone
of his Pre-Raphaelite fellows, he crossed what he called “the river
of fire” and joined the Socialist cause.
The Morris devotees who
have turned his teenage residence in Walthamstow into a Morris museum
tells the whole story of his career, first the stuffy Shop of
gew-gaws for the wealthy, followed by his political phase of activism
in socialism, environmentalism and preservationism. Political
pamphlets, Utopian novels, the excellent printing of his Kelmscott
Press as well as reports of his campaigns to protect the Thames,
Epping Forest, and London’s historic buildings. His teenage home
turned Morris Museum is conveniently at the end of the Victoria
underground subway line.
The Tate Britain complements the new museum
with a Morris show through January 13,2013, “Pre-Raphaelites :
Victorian Avant-garde”. His 1860s aphorism is up-to-date! “It is
the allowing of
machines to be our masters, and not our servants, that so injures the
beauty of life nowadays.”
Strangely,
the German Foreign Office sent a leading German architect, Herman
Multhesius, to spy on British superiority in industrialization in the
late nineteenth century. He was a leader in the Deutsche
Werkbund,(1909) which wanted its designers to learn how to catch up
with the industrial leader Britain. Alas, he was so beguiled by
Morris’s villas that he missed his innovations that the
Bauhaus(1919-32) would try to improve upon.
Alas, he missed entirely
the first great British industrial designer, Christopher Dresser, who
graduated from mere Victorian decorator at Glasgow University to
lead British industry to its eminence.The Friedrich Schiller
University even gave him an honorary doctorate for his first book in
1859. He gave a series of lectures at the Philadelphia Academy of
Fine Arts during our Centennial world’s fair. Then he went off to
Japan to study their folk arts, forerunners of industrial design. He
declaimed on his return: “I went to Japan a mere decorator and
returned an industrial designer!” It would take Germany and America
several decades to catch up.
In an
America rattled by art auctions that allow billionaires to show off
their illth. Where our everyday environments grow more and more
squalid, the more we build expensive museums, the mature William
Morris is an idealist worthy of emulation.
This essay is also published in Broad Street Review.
This essay is also published in Broad Street Review.
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