Arts & Crafts movement-William Morris-AWN Pugin-John Ruskin-History of 20th Century Design Movements

Background Information:
Arts & Crafts was a movement set up by a small number of Artists and Designers including William Morris, they wanted to put the power of selling products and Art back into the hands of the original makers, this was successful for a time but eventually made their products only affordable for the higher earning, which was against what they had originally set out to do.
The movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920.
Key Designers: William Morris, AWN Pugin & John Ruskin.
Key Features or Patterns: floral imagery, bible references, handmade items, wood carving, copper, pewter and ceramics often used, patterns made using printing blocks.
Colours: traditional dark brown hardwoods, deep greens and blues.
Line Styles: flowing natural lines for natural imagery, contrasting with straight lines of material.

Further reading

Arts and Crafts movement, English aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century that represented the beginning of a new appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe.
British and international movement.
A room decorated in the Arts and Crafts style by William Morris, with furniture by Philip Webb.
Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, photograph, John Webb
"In the Omnibus" color drypoint and aquatint by Mary Cassatt, 1890-91; in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
By 1860 a vocal minority had become profoundly disturbed by the level to which style, craftsmanship, and public taste had sunk in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its mass-produced and banal decorative arts. Among them was the English reformer, poet, and designer William Morris, who, in 1861, founded a firm of interior decorators and manufacturers—Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company (after 1875, Morris and Company)—dedicated to recapturing the spirit and quality of medieval craftsmanship. Morris and his associates (among them the architect Philip Webb and the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones) produced handcrafted metalwork, jewelry, wallpaper, textiles, furniture, and books. The “firm” was run as an artists’ collaborative, with the painters providing the designs for skilled craftsmen to produce. To this date many of their designs are copied by designers and furniture manufacturers.
William Morris, drawing by C.M. Watts, c. 1895. This portrait was used to illustrate the article “The Aesthetes” by Thomas F. Plowman in the Pall Mall Gazette in January 1895.
William Morris, drawing by C.M. Watts, c. 1895. This portrait was used to illustrate the article “The Aesthetes” by Thomas F. Plowman in the Pall Mall Gazette in January 1895.
The Mansell Collection/Art Resource, New York
By the 1880s Morris’s efforts had widened the appeal of the Arts and Crafts movement to a new generation. In 1882 the English architect and designer Arthur H. Mackmurdo helped organize the Century Guild for craftsmen, one of several such groups established about this time. These men revived the art of hand printing and championed the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists’ ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement.
The main controversy raised by the movement was its practicality in the modern world. The progressives claimed that the movement was trying to turn back the clock and that it could not be done, that the Arts and Crafts movement could not be taken as practical in mass urban and industrialized society. On the other hand, a reviewer who criticized an 1893 exhibition as “the work of a few for the few” also realized that it represented a graphic protest against design as “a marketable affair, controlled by the salesmen and the advertiser, and at the mercy of every passing fashion.”
In the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts movement widened, and the movement became diffused and less specifically identified with a small group of people. Its ideas spread to other countries and became identified with the growing international interest in design, specifically with Art Nouveau.
Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced. In Japan it emerged in the 1920s as the Mingei movement.It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s and its influence continued among craft makers

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From an economics perspective, the A&C movement was intended to replace the brutality of industrial manufacturing after its supply exhausted the demand which made that production necessary. Sadly, the population of the estates were never permitted to reach stasis because of democracy and the mortgage, therefore preventing multigenerational reuse, repair, replacement by craft of domestic goods.