An eye for the beautiful things in life

Better living through nice wallpaper?

It was William Morris’ fervent belief that what covers our walls -- or otherwise furnishes our homes -- affects our happiness. Beauty, he felt, was not a luxury but a basic necessity of life. And if one worker made that wallpaper from start to finish, rather than toiling as a cog in the wheel of its production, he could experience the nobility of his efforts. And he too might be happy. Individuals filled with pleasure make for harmonious, equitable cultures, Morris extrapolated.

A beautiful thing, then, just might help bring about a better world.

Morris (1834-96) never strayed far from those core beliefs in the dignity of labor and the necessity of beauty, no matter how many fields he entered or how deeply he ventured into them. He was a polymath par excellence, a widely published author and translator, world-famous designer and prominent agitator for several causes, most notably socialism and the preservation of historic architecture.

“ ‘The Beauty of Life’: William Morris and the Art of Design,” which recently opened at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, takes a comprehensive look at the thought and creations of this Victorian force of nature. It’s deeply informative, occasionally startling in its richness. Yet it’s the nature of Morris’ expansive achievement that even a display of more than 200 works feels like an overview, an introductory sampler.

Thoughtfully curated by Diane Waggoner, the show draws from the Huntington’s extensive holdings in Morris material, which were boosted by a major purchase in 1999. What makes the show compelling, however, is not always the visuals. The wallpapers, textiles, stained-glass designs and panels and printed books range from merely lovely to stunning. Yet it is Morris’ inexhaustibility as a subject that fascinates. His ideas retain not just currency, but also urgency.

In our time as in his, the work of the hand has suffered a sharp decline in status. The energies of production have shifted toward the disembodied and mechanized, and in our case, the digitized. Morris was said to have hated the times in which he lived.

Britain reigned supreme in the mid-19th century, the world’s major imperial and industrial power. But technological progress exacted a cost, and Morris identified it as alienation; specifically, the worker’s estrangement from his own products. Some of the solutions for a better future, Morris felt, lay in the models of the past.

Like others in midcentury Britain, he looked to the medieval period for inspiration. John Ruskin’s writings helped spur a Gothic revival movement in architecture, a bandwagon that Morris jumped on briefly. He had gone to Exeter College, Oxford, to study for the clergy, but, swayed by the university’s impressive Gothic architecture, the Bodleian Library’s enticing, illuminated manuscripts and the “revelatory” writings of Ruskin, he changed course, becoming a missionary for beauty.

He worked for a year in an architectural firm specializing in the Gothic revival style, tried his hand at painting and, more successfully, at poetry, publishing his first volume at age 24. In 1861, he joined forces with a handful of others -- including his fellow Oxonian and dear friend, the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones -- to establish a London design firm: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.

At first, the firm operated in the manner of a medieval craft guild, producing designs anonymously. It soon became evident that this wasn’t the wisest course, since some of the firm’s designers had better name recognition than others. Still, the firm held to the spirit of the medieval workshop, as articulated in Ruskin’s writings, with no hierarchy for the so-called lesser and higher arts.

The firm, which became Morris and Co. in 1875, sold internationally and was the most prominent such enterprise of its time. It produced stained glass for church interiors (the show includes a grand, 10-panel example), paper and fabric wall coverings, embroidered panels, carpets, tiles and more.

The wall coverings are especially attractive. Patterns marry the organic and geometric, the planar and the linear. Twining vines and flowers layer and repeat in elegant combination.

The exhibition contains examples from numerous media and preparatory work as well, such as sketches or carved woodblocks used in printing.

Morris idealized a life that integrated art, labor, creativity and productivity. He was a utopian and learned every craft used by the firm in its workshops. And according to one observer who watched him paint, he took obvious joy in his work: “The forms were led along and bent over and rounded at the edges with definite pleasure; they were stroked into place, as it were, with a sensation like that of smoothing a cat.”

He maintained the same level of hands-on involvement when he turned his energies to socialism in the 1880s. He wrote a small penny pamphlet (“Useful Work versus Useless Toil”) and typeset it himself, launching yet another of his laudable careers, in book design and typography, as director of the Kelmscott Press.

His call for social reform evolved directly from his lifelong campaign for aesthetic reform. Credited as the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris urged a rededication to beauty that entailed a revolution in consciousness and practice.

Revolutionary artists are usually hard to swallow, but Morris, with his genteel designs and quaint passions, goes down easy. It helps, when perusing his patterns, to know where they sprang from, conceptually, and in this the exhibition’s daunting amount of wall text provides a real service.

As George Bernard Shaw wrote about his friend in a published reminiscence, “You never knew how much Morris had up his sleeve until he thought you knew enough to understand him.”

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‘The Beauty of Life’: William Morris and the Art of Design

Where: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

When: Tuesday-Friday, noon to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Ends: April 4

Price: $12.50; over 65, $10; students, $8.50; ages 5-11, $5; under 5, free.

Contact: (626) 405-2100