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Uniting the artist with his craft

The Arts and Crafts Movement was against soulless machine-made goods and considered the machine the cause of all evil

WELCOME ARCH Edwin Lutyens, who designed the India Gate among many other landmarks, was a well-known name in the Arts and Crafts Movement PHOTO: RAMESH SHARMA

The Art and Crafts Movement, also called the Aesthetic Style, developed towards the end of the 19th Century. The movement, which called for a rejection of shoddy machine-made products of industrialisation in favour of handcrafted goods, was at its zenith between 1880 and 1910. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin (his books The Stones of Venice and Unto This Last equate the health of a society with the state of its architecture and design), the movement had dedicated apostles like William Morris, Charles Robert Ashbee, T.J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, Edwin Lutyens and the Pre-Raphaelites.

The characteristics of the movement include reformist neo-gothic influences, rustic surfaces and vertical, rectilinear and elongated forms with stylised motifs. Products were left deliberately unfinished for a pastoral effect. Ideas were borrowed from medieval European and Islamic sources as well as Japan. The designer Owen Jones' book The Grammar of The Ornament was a sourcebook for historical design elements.

The Industrial Revolution had separated the artist from his craft. The Arts and Crafts Movement sought to reunite the two. While the movement was against soulless machine-made goods and considered the machine the cause of all evil, there was a dichotomy in the role of machines in the arts. There were those who believed that machines have no place in creativity and others who believed machines should be used to relieve the tedium and do the mechanical work. They felt the craftsman should be trained to master the machine rather than be a slave to it. And so you had William Morris designing carpets for machine production.

Though the original intent of the movement was to make art "for the people and by the people and a source of pleasure to the maker and the user", paying the craftsman an honest wage and doing away with the economical assembly-line production, put the products well out of the reach of the common man and into the hands of the well heeled. The movement was decidedly against division of labour. They wished the designer to be involved in every step of production rather than the cost-effective factory method where workers would be divided into groups and concentrate on one part of the work.

The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, which is also called Mission Style, however, managed to be affordable. Drawing inspiration from material, furniture and architecture was designed to use machines, which in turn lowered the cost. Gustav Stickley in New York answering a need for good-looking durable furniture in the mushrooming middleclass, used machines for the basic structure and craftsmen to finish the product and thus created furniture that was affordable, sturdy and also good to look at. The movement, which was a precursor to Art Nouveau, was a forerunner to modernism as well.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

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