THE REFORM SCHOOL IN ARTS, CRAFTS

Leslie Greene Bowman picked up the modest, hand-hammered copper jardiniere: a prime example of an art movement born out of a reaction against the Industrial Revolution, she said.

“You can see the hammer marks,” noted Bowman, associate curator at the County Museum of Art. “They were left on purpose because now that a machine could make something perfectly, it became desirable to leave the vestiges of hand craftsmanship.”

Telltale signs of an artisan’s handiwork were hallmarks of the Arts and Crafts Movement, an international aesthetic that was begun in the late 19th Century by artisans, designers and architects striving to preserve the art of handmade crafts in the face of the Industrial Revolution.

“The Art That Is Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920,” Sunday to Nov. 1 at the county museum, examines the period through 275 decorative art objects, furniture and architectural sketches.

“The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reform movement committed to anti-industrialism,” said Bowman, who helped install the traveling exhibit organized by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

“It is not a style, it’s a philosophy about life,” she explained, walking through museum galleries filled with ceramic vases and stained-glass lamps, inlaid or carved walnut cabinets, oak desks, chairs and other objects.

“During the Industrial Revolution (of the late 19th Century), mechanization threatened the preservation and survival of handcrafts,” Bowman said. “Sculpture and paintings weren’t threatened, but machines were turning out glass, ceramic and silver works previously made by hand.

So “reformers,” first in England, then in America, began producing and supporting the production of handmade decorative art objects, including glass and metal works, textiles and furniture.

“William Morris and John Ruskin, English philosophers who were among the most outspoken reformers, were concerned that if the machine replaced hand craftsmanship, the middle and lower classes would be deprived of art in the home,” Bowman said.

“Art displayed in the home was considered an essential moral influence during the Victorian period. The wealthy could afford fine art, but crafts were the art of the lower classes. So these two men thought that society was doomed with the advent of industrialization.”

Thus, in contrast to this mechanizing and more artificial world, Arts and Crafts Movement practitioners espoused “honest, simple designs that related to function and structural integrity,” Bowman said. They spurned the excessive decoration associated with Victorian designs and romanticized agrarian economies for a “return to nature” that dictated the use of motifs from nature, such as ivy leaves, and organic rather than synthetic materials. And they took pains to show that their works were made by hand.

Oak tables in the exhibit with mortise and tenon joints “exposed to the point of decoration” exemplify the movement’s trademarks, Bowman said, as do drawings of stone or wooden homes with exposed beams and spacious rooms that flow easily from one to another by such architects and designers as Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry and Charles Greene, the famous brothers from Pasadena.

Practitioners of the movement, holistic in approach, adopted a “commitment to total design,” Bowman added, which is why they applied their ideas to architecture as well as furniture and decorative art objects.

Yet, since the movement was more a way of life than a single style, its objects and architecture reflected several styles or influences, including Art Nouveau, medieval art, Asian art and American Colonial revivalism, Bowman said.

“There was also a regionalism and a vernacular side to the movement. Artists used materials or motifs native to their states,” such as one Californian who adorned copper bookends with a eucalyptus leaf design.

“Yet there is a doomsday feel to the Arts and Crafts Movement,” which essentially ended with society’s increasing reliance on machinery at the start of World War I, Bowman said.

“Look at the basic economy of it: The reason the machine becomes an element in society is because it can produce things 10, 20, 30 times faster than a person can. The hand-hammered piece turns out to be more expensive than the piece hammered by machine. And that’s the irony of the movement’s whole middle-class thrust--the concern over the cultural well-being of the middle and lower classes, who at the end of the day couldn’t afford to buy the crafts designed specifically to be affordable to them.”

Taking up where the Arts and Crafts Movement leaves off, “The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941” runs concurrently at the county museum. This exhibit documents the impact of the machine on American art between the two world wars with about 300 examples of fine art, decorative arts and crafts and architecture.