Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement was one of several avant-garde artistic movements which occurred, principally, across Europe and America from approximately the 1860s to the 1930s. It emerged from a cultural and social landscape that was despoiled by poor design standards and increasingly mechanized and industrialized systems of manufacture. At its heart, it was a movement that aimed to change how and why art was made. In varying ways, it espoused collaboration between designers and craftspeople, instating joy in labor, working within the limitations of a medium, respecting materials, embedding artmaking in everyday life, and producing useful and beautiful objects for the many, not the few. Those making and writing on art in the wake of this movement have tended, broadly, to reflect on the Arts and Crafts movement as a historical development defined by its noble ideals, even if these were often idealistic and unfeasible. For many, the value of these ideals lies in their persistent relevance. Particularly in the twenty-first century, the writings of William Morris or the furniture of Ernest Gimson, for instance, appear prescient in the ways they encourage us to challenge a neoliberal capitalist world of corporate greed, environmental destruction, sweated labor, mass production, and planned obsolescence. The Arts and Crafts movement is a vast topic on which there is a wealth of scholarly literature. The first flowering of Arts and Crafts movement scholarship occurred between the early 1970s and late 1990s. Leading experts in the field—Annette Carruthers, Margot Coatts, Alan Crawford, Mary Greensted, Tanya Harrod, Linda Parry and Peter Stansky—focused on the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and its major themes, players, and organizations. In the 2000s, a new wave of scholarship established the Arts and Crafts movement as an international phenomenon, which spread and arose independently across much of northern and eastern Europe, the United States, and Japan. This was led by Rosalind P. Blakesley, Wendy Kaplan, Karen Livingstone, and Linda Parry. More recently, Glenn Adamson, Julia Griffin, Imogen Hart, Anna Mason, Zoë Thomas, and others have broadened the critical scope of Arts and Crafts movement scholarship. Their work addresses questions of gender, materiality, craft status, canonicity, and locality.