ART REVIEW : Revisiting the Cult of Craft : Exhibition: ‘American Arts and Crafts’ at LACMA illustrates turn-of-the-century nostalgia for simplicity, yet shows off the era’s excesses to good effect.

Ever since our Puritan forefathers dropped anchor in New England, Americans have had a knack for turning piety into profit. Calvinist shopkeepers moved more merchandise by honorably putting fixed prices on items than by haggling. More recently, fine art once regarded as spiritually priceless has been turned into mammon’s commodity.

Starting Sunday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art examines both sides of that coin when it presents “American Arts and Crafts: Virtue in Design” (to Jan. 6). It consists of some 250 turn-of-the-century pieces of furniture and objects ranging from purposely amateurish beaten copper vases by George Edgar Ohr to a sumptuous mosaic fireplace by George Washington Maher. All of it was intended to embody the sanctity of Plain Livin’ ‘n’ High Thinkin’ for people who were fed up with the ornate hypocritical historicism of the Victorians.

Works come from the collection of Max Palevsky and Jodie Evans, the most extensive private holdings in the country. It won’t stay private forever, however, since they’ve already given 32 prime works to the museum and intend to donate the rest.

Arts & Crafts objects are easier to satirize than admire. At a glance, uninitiated visitors are liable to think they are Snow White bumbling into the dwarves’ cottage furnished with mushroom-shaped lamps no owl could read by, heart-backed stools no cat could doze on and carved mottoes saccharine enough to curdle honey. At its collective worst, A&C; seems smug and self-righteous, like any ideology that claims the wisdom to tell people how to live. Fortunately, there’s time for a second look. Art always sorts itself free from cant.

The exhibition signals more than a display of fine furniture and admirable beneficence. There is a craftsman craze afoot that promises to make the show a popular draw. More importantly, the trend itself suggests so much about the current state of the plugged-in American psyche that the show could well turn out to be the season’s social bellwether.

The A&C; movement was a complex, watershed phenomenon. It evolved in England and involved everything from an urge to social reform--sparked by the ghastly working conditions of the industrial revolution--to a nostalgia for imagined medieval simplicity and the nobility of handmade goods. Crafts would rank on the same level as fine art. The machine was anathema.

Its principal promoters were critic John Ruskin and designer William Morris. But the A&C; sensibility was powerful and pervasive, pulling in artists, writers, architects and women in search of equality. Influential, it spread to the Continent. In Germany it became Jugendstil. In France its moral edge was blunted in the tangles of Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau .

Nothing ever happens the same way twice, but there is an echo of A&C; in presently languishing post-modernism. It, too, was dominated by design and architecture rather than painting and sculpture. Its products were used to define “lifestyles,” mainly a self-aggrandizing display of power, opulence and wealth. Trump-l’oeil.

The present Arts & Crafts revival might be seen as a reaction against post-modernist excess practiced by those fed up with the digital anonymity of the computer and longing for an idealistic past. Ah, whatever happened to Woodstock and hippie crafts? Well, good riddance to the crafts anyway, with their flimsy fern baskets and psychedelic wine goblets. Of course real Arts & Crafts objects have gotten awfully expensive and chic themselves. Never mind, it’s the posture that counts.

Besides, don’t forget the prophet’s profits.

In her candid catalogue essay, curator Leslie Greene Bowman points out that the American A&C; movement fudged. Early on, its votaries discovered that true handmade work was just too expensive for a capitalist culture, so most of our craftsman objects are, in fact, a combination of machine manufacture and hand finishing. That may have been a trifle disingenuous, but it did lead to one of the greatest American virtues, success. Where European A&C; remained beyond the reach of the middle class, ours delivered.

Wrote the movement’s leading American innovator and promoter, Gustav Stickley, “Just as we should be truthful, real and frank ourselves . . . so should the things with which we surround ourselves be truthful, real and frank. We are influenced by our surroundings more than we imagine.”

At LACMA, we are surrounded by objects that combine the unvarnished rectitude of oak plank, exposed joint and plain-spoken dowel with a degree of fantasy not always acknowledged. At the entrance hangs an oversize Greene and Greene lamp that looks like something from an imagined medieval Japan.

Nearby, a leather-and-oak Stickley Brothers settle (a couch to most of us) seems fit only for a corpulent, bearded gentlemen smoking a pipe and brooding philosophically while his slip of a wife reads something uplifting. If either focused on the nearby table they’d see a Tiffany lamp fit for a sultan’s reading room.

In the section devoted to European precursors we encounter Josef Hoffmann’s famous 1910 “Sitzmachine” with a back so angled as to be fit for nothing but a barber’s chair and a seat just a foot off the ground. Utterly weird as a chair, it is a heckuva piece of proto-Deco sculpture.

Americans never got this outlandish, but we tried. For a couple of years, Stickley employed an architect named Harvey Ellis who wore Oriental robes to work and drank himself to death in 1904. In his brief sojourn as a designer, he produced some of the most refined of craftsman objects. A diminutive wood-and-leather settle in black shows his love of small scale, delicate inlay and subtle proportion.

By contrast, pieces from Charles Rohlfs’ Buffalo workshop delighted in eclectic excess and cunning ingenuity. A side chair looks like it was cut from a Moorish screen. A desk resembling a medieval reliquary bristles with cute hidden nooks, crannies and drawers.

The American A&C; movement took on qualities of cult and commune. Elbert Hubbard established his Roycrofters’ community in East Aurora, N.Y., in 1895. He started a press inspired by William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, and provided the workers who made his plain Mission-style furniture with playground, library, lecture series and an inn for visitors.

California played a significant role in the movement. In the Bay Area, Arthur and Lucia Mathews practiced like prim bacchanalians while Bernard Maybeck’s particular genius occasionally produced chairs for elves and trolls.

Down here, of course, we had the brothers Charles and Henry Greene. Anyone who has not visited Pasadena’s Gamble House should go, especially these days with the newly opened permanent Greene and Greene galleries at the nearby Huntington Library and Art Gallery. The Greene pieces at LACMA are incredibly suave, from a cantilevered hall table to chairs so finely turned they exist in a state of whispering.

A&C; style actually derives its interest from the tension between its commitment to being as minimal as Shaker furniture and its irrepressible urge to fantastic elaboration. In the end, it’s not its restraint that’s interesting but its excess.

While trying to retreat to the past, A&C; actually set the stage for modernism. Witness what Frank Lloyd Wright did by taking the Stickleys’ slat-backed chairs just a step farther. Looking, you can begin to imagine the next incarnation of art-as-craft-as-virtue.

A&C;’s apparent contrast to the Aesthetic movement started modern art’s most recurrent argument. Should art be an elitist activity appealing only to the chosen few? Yes, said aesthetes from Oscar Wilde to Clement Greenberg. No, said the Russian avant-garde and the German Bauhaus.

Today a reinvigorated A&C; attitude has extended into the fine arts. Artists act as political activists and promoters of causes, trying to make the world a better place, at least for their special interest. Whether art is the best mode of promoting a polemical agenda remains problematic. People have to do what they can. Morris gave up on art and jumped into socialist politics. Hitler crushed the Bauhaus and Stalin snuffed the avant-garde as socially useless.

The wonderful craftsman exhibition reminds us that art finally survives on its own terms. It’s fueled by a passionate care that outlasts specific inspiration. We rarely value a great painted nude for the model.