HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS : Happiness is a Sleeping Porch

The Arts and Crafts movement met its maker in the Eden of California circa 1890, when and where the tenets of a high ideal converged to create a little something known as “the good life.” It was only to last for 20 or so years, but in that time it left shining vestiges of its progeny on a landscape it can rightfully call its own.

To this day, so long after the movement made its way east from its roots in Victorian Britain to find a believer the size of a state, the style known as Arts and Crafts continues to court contemporary designers with the passion and purity reserved for lost loves and might-have-been’s.

In The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life by Kenneth R. Trapp (Abbeville Press: $55; 328 pp.) , Trapp and his coterie of seven scholars approach the Arts and Crafts movement in California with such an infectious lust for their subject that it is difficult not to fall under their spell. Each and every essay captures the romance of those pioneer spirits who knew that head, heart and hand could work in unison, with nature as the inspiration and the end of civilized American as the destination.

Disaffection for the “just-another-cog-in-the-wheel” mentality of the Industrial Revolution spawned this merry band of thinkers who knew deep down it was all in the doing. The thought was as important as the materials used, and only of value if the result was in harmony with its environment and the people who were to live in it, and with it. Nowhere else could this notion of “the good life” be better lived than in California where “artists were challenged by the wealth of natural subjects as close as their windows. Whether depicting the golden poppy, the Torrey pine, the redwood or the sublime majesties of Yosemite, California’s artists extolled the state’s natural beauty and bounty.”

“The movement’s ideal of ‘the good life’ in which the virtues of simple living and high thinking were complemented by material well-being,” gave birth to the bungalow, both simple and grand. Outdoor living was made habitable in the form of wraparound sleeping porches and low-slung roofs designed to shun the harsh white sunlight of pre-pollution haze. The cool recesses of the rooms inside housed Mission furniture and variations on the theme. A chosen-upon design motif would be echoed in the ironwork, glass, tile, lighting and pottery to affect a reverberation of spare intellectualism. The requisite gardens, often Japanese, underscored the serenity of indoor-outdoor living.

The names associated with the movement were silenced in the thunder of the Machine Age. What was once new, became old-fashioned. A few loyal die-hard’s refused to raze the structures their daring had built, determined to teach their young to appreciate the innocence of their own youth in the wisdom of their age. The stunning architecture of the venerable firm of Greene & Greene lives on in houses public and private. The Gamble House in Pasadena welcomes travelers of time to savor the grander side of Arts and Crafts. With Kenneth Trapp’s book as the guide, “the good life” can be imagined by all.

One who lived it with particular panache was the visionary architect Bernard Maybeck (1862-1957). In Sally Woodbridge’s insightful study of this iconoclastic personality, Bernard Maybeck: Visionary Architect, photography by Richard Barnes (Abbeville Press: $55; 248 pp.) , the Puck of the Arts and Crafts movement plays out his own Midsummer’s Night Dream on site-specific stages in Berkeley and Oakland. Never concerned with the promotion of a single style to hang his hat on, Maybeck served the will of the land and that of his client. A dash of Swiss chalet, two pinches of Gothic church, steeped in English half-timbering and what a tasty treat a Maybeck could make.

Here was a fellow who took to wearing a long red velvet home-sewn robe chez Maybeck, when starched collars were called for from a man the likes of Phoebe A. Hearst would commission to erect monumental structures. He costumed his friends and family for ad hoc pageants and theatrical productions in the back yard with the same sense of drama he evoked in his building of the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Provocative yet deceptively facile, Maybeck charmed the color out of every corner in his life. Even the natural redwood he used in his bungalows and club houses somehow seems as vibrant as the Venetian red he painted in the First Church of Christ, Scientist. He was as inventive improvising with what he had at hand, as when given the finest materials money could buy. Look at the surviving examples of Maybeck’s romantically eclectic yet vigorous architecture and it is clear that his profound understanding of all materials allowed him total freedom to construct unconventional structures within a demanding intellectual context.

The ideal of “the good life” manifested itself in Maybeck’s resilience to fickle fashion. A self-described “long distance dreamer,” Maybeck was the most spiritually challenging member of the Arts and Crafts movement. At the age of 61 he wrote: “There is something bigger and more worthwhile than the things we see about us, the things we live by and strive for. There is an undiscovered beauty, a divine excellence, just beyond us. Let us stand on tiptoe, forgetting the nearer things and grasp what we may.” The dream is still there for the taking, if not for the sheer pleasure of the reading.

First in a series of eight exhibitions at the American Crafts Museum in New York City, “The Ideal Home” (on view through February 15, 1994) comes with a book that promises to be the definitive study of 20th century American crafts. The Ideal Home: The History of Twentieth-Century American Crafts 1900-1920, edited by Janet Kardon (Harry Abrams in association with the American Craft Museum: $50; 304 pp.) is everything a companion book to an exhibition can and should be; a better breed of catalog. Discerning, comprehensive, and wonderfully easy on the eyes, “The Ideal Home” rewards the reader with a virtual reality-like experience of being there--handling the objects, admiring its content and understanding its journey from conception to completion. In an environment saturated by electronic media, “there is a century-long alternative voice, a leitmotiv, a quiet but powerful counterpoint to be found in craft, the art form that pays particular homage to the hand, to material, to process.”