Arts and Crafts
In 1861, William Morris started a company with a circle of friends, among them the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Burne-Jones. It was a movement against the shoddy mass production the Industrial Revolution was churning out — an attempt to reclaim the beauty of handwork and the dignity of everyday objects. Wallpaper, textiles, furniture, books: not paintings in frames, but the things people touch every day, made beautiful. They moved art's main battlefield from the frame to daily life. But Morris was aware, more than anyone, of his own contradiction. Handwork cost too much to reach the ordinary people he wanted to reach — only the wealthy could afford it. He said as much himself, with some bite: his work, he wrote, was "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich." When he died in 1896, one magazine called him "the earthly paradox." Torn between his ideals and the market, he kept making things anyway — and I think that contradiction is part of what made him honest. The idea traveled through the Deutscher Werkbund to the Bauhaus, and across the sea to Japan's mingei movement (though the straight line from Morris to Bauhaus is also a later construction, drawn by the historian Nikolaus Pevsner in 1936. The people involved never called themselves his successors).