Leaving His Handprint on the Machine Age

William Morris died only once, although he lived, it was said, the lives of 10 men. The bearish Englishman (1834-96) made a lasting impression wherever he went, and in every field he entered--literature, design, business and politics--he left an enduring mark.

More than a century after his death, Morris’ importance as the father of the Arts and Crafts movement continues to grow. The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens purchased, for $5 million, a vast collection of his work in 1999, ensuring him a permanently high profile in Southern California. The collection, amassed over 30 years by the late Sanford and Helen Berger of Carmel, spans all of Morris’ professional output, from his published writings to his firm’s early stained-glass windows, through decades of wallpaper and textile patterns up to the products of his final labor of love, the Kelmscott Press. The Huntington now stands as the foremost center of William Morris material in the United States, and the third most substantial in the world.

On Tuesday, the Huntington opens its first exhibition culled from the collection. It’s a sampler, an appetizer to ready the palate for a comprehensive, more contextualized survey opening in the fall of 2003. Curated by Anne Mallek, the collection’s primary cataloger, “William Morris: Creating the Useful and the Beautiful” contains some 70 objects produced by Morris and his workshops. Alongside a luminous stained-glass window depicting the winged figure of Liberty hangs Edward Burne-Jones’ full-scale preparatory cartoon for it. Near the display of a sheet of wallpaper teeming with tendrils rests one of the hand-carved woodblocks used in its printing. A rare dye book with hand-inscribed recipes and instructions accompanies examples of Morris and Company’s richly patterned textiles.

“The interest with Morris is always in exploring the process,” Mallek explains, “because in everything he did, there’s so much attention to detail, to historic examples, to the idea that each product should be handcrafted as much as possible. Not that he rejected machines completely, but he wanted there to be some kind of human control with the finished product.”

For Morris, every stage of production reflected his commitment to personal and social betterment. Pleasure in life, he felt, derives largely from the expression of natural, creative impulses. Everyone possesses those impulses, but industrial culture--on a revolutionary rise during Morris’ time--suppresses them, preventing the common man from experiencing dignified, nourishing work. Machinery deadened labor and rendered it monotonous. Morris supported industrial advances insofar as they relieved workers of dull, repetitive tasks, but was appalled at the way technology distanced workers from the products they made. The increasing specialization of labor, he felt, yielded inequality among men, class differences that he spent the last decade of his life battling against as a socialist activist.

As a young man, he intended to join the clergy. Soon after he entered Oxford in 1853, though, he hooked up with the artistically inclined Burne-Jones, and began reading the art historian John Ruskin, finding resonance with his ideas on the beauty of the Gothic and the need to morally regenerate the culture by reuniting art and labor.

Both Morris and Burne-Jones turned their attention to architecture briefly, inspired by medieval craftsmanship, then to painting, which remained Burne-Jones’ primary focus. Morris, not very promising as a painter, met better reception as a poet, publishing his first volume at age 24.

A shared passion for the decorative arts, especially as practiced in earlier eras, brought Morris, Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and several others to form a business in 1861. Included in the show is a one-of-a-kind logbook that documents the firm’s initial commitment to present its designs to the public anonymously, in the model of a medieval craft guild. That resolve faded quickly. Some artists proved more marketable than others, and recognizing this did wonders for the business’ bottom line.

The company thrived, following Morris’ serial passions. At first, stained-glass window commissions dominated, but eventually inroads were made into a range of home furnishings. Typical of the firm’s graceful designs is a section of wallpaper featuring birds and twining pomegranate branches against an indigo background.

“The idea was simple, organic growth, so that your eye would always be led onward and upward,” Mallek says. Morris “always wanted meaning in his patterns. He didn’t believe in imitation. He wanted you to look at a pattern and it would remind you of something in nature, so you would have to conjure that flower or plant in your own mind and become part of the creative process. In his words, he wanted to stimulate and elevate the mind.”

In 1875, divisions within the company forced a split, and Morris took charge of his own firm, named Morris and Co., which ran a thriving shop for home decorating materials in London. In 1891, he embarked on his last business venture, the Kelmscott Press, which published 66 books, from the works of Chaucer to contemporary poetry and fiction. Burne-Jones did most of the illustrations, while Morris did the rest, designing typefaces, borders and initial letters. Second in importance only to the beautiful house, Morris felt, was the beautiful book, an experience for the hand and eye, not just the mind.

“To enjoy good houses and good books in self-respect and decent comfort, seems to me to be the pleasurable end towards which all societies of human beings ought now to struggle,” he declared.

Although the exhibition is divided into separate sections for stained glass, textiles, wallpaper and printed books, Morris, a consummate multi-tasker, had his hands in most of these at once.

“He was moving on from one thing to another, but he was retaining at the same time,” Mallek explains. “At the same time he was a poet, he was also working on a wallpaper, a textile, carving illustrations for one of his books, probably approving designs for stained-glass windows.”

Most remarkably, he learned each craft thoroughly before it went into production. He never designed anything that he did not know how to produce with his own hands--which, Mallek notes, were often stained blue from the indigo dye he favored.

This hands-on involvement was, for him, a political act, a gesture of resistance against the dehumanizing trends of industrialism.

“Socialism was a necessary development from working with these crafts,” Mallek says. “As he worked in each craft, he learned about the industries at the time. He tried to set up his workshops as working examples of how things should be.”

Once he committed himself to the socialist cause, he poured his robust energies into it, giving lectures, writing articles, designing membership cards, even composing chants to be sung at meetings. Because of his own personal wealth, Morris’ advocacy for the common man rang hypocritical to some, comical to others. He was accused of living a contradiction, practicing a “comfy” form of socialism, one that didn’t require any sacrifices.

Whether glorifying the past or campaigning for a better future, Morris remained an idealist. He fleshed out his utopian dream in his 1890 novel “News From Nowhere.” The narrator goes to bed one evening in the late 19th century and wakes up in the early 21st. What he finds in this shocking new age is that “people are living close to nature and capitalism has been eradicated,” Mallek says. “No money is exchanged. Everything that is made is useful and beautiful. There are no museums. There’s no need for them because beautiful objects are all around.”

How would Morris, the missionary for beauty, react if he were to be magically transported to the present, to the disembodied culture of the electronic age? Mallek laughs.

“He probably would have a heart attack. He wouldn’t be able to take it all in.”

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“William Morris: Creating the Useful and the Beautiful,” Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. April 9-Sept. 22. Closed Mondays. $10, adults; $8.50 seniors; $7, students; free, children younger than 12. (626) 405-2100.

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Leah Ollman is a regular contributor to Calendar.