Arts Textile

Arts Textile design/Morris/1862 Olympia/Manet/1863 Morris agreed. He thought labour should be a noble activity, and looked back with a pair of very large rosetinted spectacles to Arthurian legend and medieval guilds with their progressive workplace education system in which you went from apprentice to journeyman to master of your craft. Old-school artisanship with a back-to-nature aesthetic was the vibe at Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, where Morris got busy designing stained-glass windows and carved oak furniture. For him it was all about the beauty and integrity of the handcrafted object, from drawing decorative wallpaper patterns to weaving exquisite tapestries. He hoped to produce his products at a price ordinary people could afford but that proved unrealistic Bauhaus movement/Gropius/1919- and he ended up with a client base of wealthy folk, which, for a proto-socialist, stuck in the craw. Nevertheless, he was on to something. A few months after Morris died in 1896, German diplomat Hermann Muthesius was sent to London for a spot of gentle spying. His official title was ‘cultural attaché’, but his real purpose was to find out what was behind Britain’s commercial success and enviable productivity. Muthesius thought the English were Black Square/Malevich/1915 WILLIAM MORRIS, DESIGN FOR TRELLIS WALLPAPER, 1862; ÉDOUARD MANET, OLYMPIA, 1863, MUSÉE D’ORSAY, PARIS; KAZIMIR MALEVICH, BLACK SQUARE, 1915, TRETYAKOV GALLERY, MOSCOW; JOHN AINSWORTH, WALTER GROPIUS’ OFFICE, 2018, HERITAGE IMAGES; TRACEY EMIN, MY BED, 1998 © TRACEY EMIN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS /ARTIMAGE 2020. IMAGE COURTESY SAATCHI GALLERY, LONDON. PHOTO: PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES LTD My Bed/Emin/1998 iPhone/Apple/2007 hilarious, what with their rigid class system and eccentric customs such as putting milk in a cup before tea (to stop the hot water cracking the bone china). He soon discovered the work of William Morris, which he loved. When he returned home in 1904, he wrote a threevolume book called The English House, in which he waxed lyrical about the arts & crafts movement. He told his government bosses that the English had made a great commercial discovery but had failed to recognise its value. They should have combined cost-effective massproduction with the design sensibilities of an artist such as Morris. It would give machine-made items some heart and soul, which would be highly desirable to consumers. Within months, the German administration had sanctioned the teaching of industrial design across the land. In 1907, Muthesius founded the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of architects, artists and IT WOULD GIVE MANUFACTURED ITEMS HEART AND SOUL artisans willing to collaborate with German industry to help it manufacture attractive products. Among them was Peter Behrens, a bohemian painter who became the creative director of AEG, and in the process established the practice of industrial design. His junior employees included soon-to-be 20th-century titans Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, who would go on to found the legendary Bauhaus in 1919 with a creative manifesto that could have been written by Morris. And so it was the heavy-set, bushy-bearded Englishman who wrote the first chapters in modernism’s story, inspired by his arts & crafts movement via art deco and art nouveau. The spirit of Morris can be found in everything from a Jaguar E-type to an Apple iPhone. It is a modernist aesthetic that remains dominant to this day, and shows no signs of being usurped. J 54 / Jaguar Magazine Jaguar Magazine / 55