Arts and Crafts Movement Explored at LACMA

The exhibition surveys the ways in which the Arts and Crafts movement's ideas were disseminated and adapted according to the economic, social and political conditions at play in each country. Its determining themes are art and industry, design and national identity, and art and life.

The Arts and Crafts movement was alive and well internationally from roughly the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Because England was the most advanced industrially, it was at the center of reaction to the standardization inherent in the mechanical age.

Practitioners of Arts and Crafts began examining the manufacturing process and determined that there was little value and even less merit without joy in work. Objects were meant to be pleasing as well as affordable and useful.

Despite its early roots, the term Arts and Crafts only began to be used in 1887 when a group of designers met in London to found an organization that would place equal value on fine art and applied art. The result was the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which had its first show the following year. It is generally regarded as the first Arts and Crafts entity, although precursors, such as the Century Guild and the Art Workers' Guild, were earlier. Art colonies, patterned after guilds, sprung up in town and county.

The new Arts and Crafts objects were perceived as stunningly simple after the more lurid excesses of the Victorian age. The attention to detail and line was confounding after the coarseness of much of the mass-production of the time. The homely objects were met initially with skepticism, then acceptance and finally great enthusiasm. The movement promulgated a unity of the arts, integrating social and industrial reform, rebirth of handcrafts, simplicity and the application of art to daily life. The focus was on free-flowing naturalism, a welcome relief after the mechanism of much of the previous century.

Handcrafted articles, even those with only the appearance of being so constructed, underwent a revival. Indigenous materials and native traditions prevailed in each country, lending distinctive regional identities to the art and craft of each. In England, William Morris exhorted followers to "have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

By 1900, the Arts and Crafts movement had spread across Europe and to America. Objects on view showcase the external and internal influences at work in each nation. Nature, pattern and ornament may have varied according to geography, but not remarkably. What is remarkable is the consistency of themes.

In Germany, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig embraced Arts and Crafts wholeheartedly. Ludwig had a slight leg up on Arts and Crafts - although he was German, he had spent considerable time with his grandmother, Queen Victoria, after the early death of his mother. In England, he absorbed the tenets of Morris. Once back in Germany, he became a patron of some of the most important architects, artists, sculptors and designers of the Twentieth Century. He commissioned the English architects Charles Robert Ashbee and MacKay Hugh Baillie Scott to design two rooms at his palace at Darmstadt, where two years later an art colony was established and where he installed seven prominent artists, each in his own house on the site.

Darmstadt quickly became the center of the Jugendstil or Art Nouveau movement. Among the seven artists was Peter Behrens, whose own house at Darmstadt was a Gesamtkunstwerk, "a total work of art integrated with its surroundings." Behrens designed the house - although he was not trained as an architect - and all the furnishings, giving them the same linear elements throughout the house. For example, in the entirely white dining room, the decorative linear arches and lancet ovals on the tableware were repeated in the ceiling.

Germany was in a slightly different position than England as it had only been recently unified. There the original artists' guilds evolved into workshops with highly developed production technology, and handcrafted objects were supplanted by a more industrial slant. Objects were well designed and functional, affordable and suitable for export.

Climbing aboard the bandwagon in 1902, the Wertheim department store in Berlin commissioned Behrens, among other leading lights, to design model rooms. Behrens gave the dining room darker and sturdier pieces, but again the design elements incorporated into the construction of the furniture were repeated throughout the room - floors, walls and ceiling - along with tableware and glassware. That room has been recreated exactly and is on view in the exhibit.

The Vienna Secession, led by Gustav Klimt, established itself as a progressive entity in 1897. By 1903, its members set up the Wiener Werkstätte under the direction of Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, two other major figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. While the Arts and Crafts movement in Austria was distinctly indigenous in character, the English influences were strong. The country was far more agrarian than many others where the movement was strong, although Vienna itself was wealthy and sophisticated. Hoffmann and Moser strove to impose artistic unity in design. Examples of their work on view exhibit a crispness and strength of form and line far more urbane than seen elsewhere.

The Scandinavian countries embraced the Arts and Crafts movement eagerly. Each was engaged in its own search for a national identity, and the Arts and Crafts movement's focus on handcraft and regionalism provided a perfect vehicle in which to reclaim, or rewrite as needed, its aesthetic and cultural history.

An 1897 covered urn on view by Swedish painter Alf Wallander tells a lot about its country of origin. The body is a luminous sea green with starfish across it and the lid. Swedish Prince Eugen's silver bowl with molded rowanberries is a patriotic piece. In Finland, the Arabia pottery used old peasant patterns in their production lines. Danish porcelain and silver, particularly by Georg Jensen, was and still is much in demand.

When the Arts and Crafts movement first arrived in the United States, it was hailed as "democratic design." Its products were seen as simple objects of good quality made for a wide audience. America provided a ready audience for Arts and Crafts with the largest middle class in the world and ample leisure time to pursue the arts.

Gustav Stickley, influenced dramatically by the writings of Morris and Ruskin, and on the strength of his publication, The Craftsman, was the undisputed leader of the American Arts and Crafts movement. No fool, he introduced his simple and sturdy New Furniture line in 1900 at the furniture fair in Grand Rapids, Mich. While his early pieces were labor intensive, he turned later to more mechanized production methods. A 1903 eight-legged octagonal top "Damascus" plant stand on view, designed by Henry Wilkinson, was made at the Craftsman workshops of oak with an inset of Grueby tile.

Architect, writer and painter Harvey Ellis designed a 1903 armchair for Craftsman of oak with pewter and ebony inlay by George H. Jones. Although Ellis worked for Stickley for a short time (he died in 1904) his elegant curvilinear designs left a lasting impact on Stickley's Craftsman furniture and houses. A serving table on view has exposed joinery and rounded corners, testament to Ellis's impact.

Chicagoan Charles Rohlfs was an anomaly among Arts and Crafts practitioners. His furniture was sophisticated, richly carved and highly ornamented. Yet his use of exposed joinery and quarter-sawn oak made him a highly regarded designer by his clients and peers.

In the Midwest, architect Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered the quest for an architectural form appropriate to the surroundings. The result was the Prairie School, in which buildings reflected the geography with horizontal lines and other design elements to tie them to the surrounding environment. Interiors followed with the corresponding design of furniture and decorative objects. A leaded glass window by Wright on view, "Tree of Life" from the Darwin D. Martin house in Buffalo, N.Y., exemplifies his expansion of the interior by providing a light screen to allow a continuous flow of space.

Wright also designed a chair of intersecting planes around 1904 and used variations of it for some time thereafter, including the example on view from his Oak Park, Ill., office. Wright's signature leaded glass and bronze table lamp executed for Susan Lawrence Dana's house in Springfield, Ill., also included in the exhibition, echoes the linear qualities of the prairie.

In California, the brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene designed houses and interiors to live harmoniously in that climate. Their houses were filled with pergolas, terraces, even sleeping porches that made use of the salubrious climate.

A room setting from the house that the Greenes designed for Robert R. Blacker in Pasadena, Calif., is on view. The house was a prime example of Gesamtkunstwerk; it was a total work of art. They built the house of locally available wood and stone, and they supplied the furnishings. Although many of their houses were built on a grand scale, the brothers are credited with having devised the bungalow, a style particularly suited to California but that was adapted easily throughout the country.

The Roycroft Press began in 1893 after Elbert Hubbard had visited the Kelmscott Press in London. It grew rapidly to include a bindery and then a leather shop, and expanded into a community with studios for the production of furniture, metalwork and glass. A Roycroft Inn opened to accommodate the visitors attracted to the community. Another community was the utopian Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in the Catskill Mountains of New York founded by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead to practice the art of living through creative manual work. Space was given to painting, textiles, ceramics, metalwork and woodworking in an extremely comfortable setting. A handsome desk made at Byrdcliffe boasts a panel deigned by Sulma Steele and brass hardware by Edward Thatcher.

A major part of the Arts and Crafts movement in America was the pottery designed to be incorporated into the homes of the period. Generally organic in nature, the pieces proved to be extremely popular with the public. A profusion of potteries sprang up across the country, allowing people to not only follow their artistic impulses, but also to make money at the same time. Potteries such as the Paul Revere in Boston allowed the members of the Saturday Evening Girls Club to acquire a marketable skill. The Newcomb pottery in New Orleans enabled students to earn extra money painting pots. The Marblehead Pottery was established to give tuberculosis patients an outlet for their creative energies and to ameliorate the effects of lengthy confinements.

Stellar examples of Newcomb, Grueby, Teco, Rookwood, Paul Revere and Arequipa are all on view.

"The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World," was made possible by gifts, donations, loans and financial support from collector Max Palevsky. The exhibition will travel and it opens at the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 16.

It is accompanied by a scholarly catalog that will serve as the definitive text on Arts and Crafts for collectors and scholars for some time to come.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard. For information, 323-857-6000 or www.lacma.org.