Radically good design

Beginning not with a William Morris textile or a Tiffany lamp but with a map, the new Arts and Crafts exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art shows Europe as it was divided in 1900, its few sprawling empires dominating: Great Britain on one end, Russia on the other, Austria-Hungary in the middle.

The map is the first sign that curator Wendy Kaplan isn’t simply arranging greatest-hits objects in the expected way. Indeed, she has organized the show, which carries the unwieldy title “The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World,” around a pointedly nationalist theme.

In the end, though, that theme is overwhelmed by the seductive familiarity of the objects -- especially strong in Southern California, where most people know what a Greene and Greene living room looks like. For all its depth and ambition, the show suggests that the Arts and Crafts movement, if it hasn’t done so already, is in danger of becoming our Impressionism: an art-world subject so reliably crowd-pleasing that museums revisit it over and over, knowing that they’re helping to rob the art of its original contrarian power.

And these chairs and vases and rugs, however benignly handsome they look to us now, did once possess just that force. They suggested a means of using design -- primarily handcrafted but also mass-produced -- to spread progressive and egalitarian ideals and to help counter the dehumanizing effects of technology. As the show makes clear, they were part of broader, more explicitly political movements, like the efforts to create utopian communities in such places as Darmstadt, Germany, and in western New York. Despite faintly conservative reputations among the avant-garde, architects such as Peter Behrens and Bernard Maybeck and even Frank Lloyd Wright used Arts and Crafts buildings to pave the way for Modernism.

After a small introductory room, in which the map hangs, the show begins its tour of nations with Britain. We then make our way through Scotland, Austria, Hungary and a handful of other stops on the way to America, which gets a full two-room treatment just before the obligatory gift shop. (There, of course, Morris and his famous colleagues are much in evidence.) Kaplan’s goal is to shed light on how artists in what she calls the “peripheral” countries of Europe used handmade craft and the vernacular not just to ward off industrialization but also to promote local political identity and autonomy.

In other words, if you were a potter in Budapest in 1905 or a weaver in Glasgow a decade later, your work wasn’t just a sign of your fidelity to traditional materials and methods. It also symbolized your desire to draw your people out of the shadows of occupation or to reclaim past glories. As Kaplan notes in the catalog, it was a time when a number of dispossessed European nations “sought to establish or reinforce their country’s identity ... Norway was seeking independence from Sweden; Finland from Russia; Ireland from Great Britain; and Hungary from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

That’s a relatively novel way to think about the Arts and Crafts movement. Traditionally, we’ve considered it from the perspective of major capitals such as London or Vienna or from an American point of view. Who knew that a pair of candlesticks made in a smaller European city could be such an effective symbol of ethnic grievances on the eve of the First World War?

As the show progresses, though, it becomes clear that Kaplan isn’t altogether committed to shaking visitors from their aesthetic reverie. Although the scholar in her fights the idea, surely she understands that much of the appeal of these objects is their noble, comforting beauty.

Which brings us back to Impressionism. At some unfortunate point in the 1990s, curators realized that any show with that word in the title would bring in droves. And so we got a long line of exhibitions such as “Impressionists in Winter” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1998.

Usually, these shows broke some ground in terms of scholarship, but they were also careful not to disturb the core appeal of their subject. As a result, they were wildly popular. I’m not suggesting that Kaplan’s show is nearly that crass -- or that Henry van de Velde and Josef Hoffman have the name recognition of Monet or even Courbet. But the exhibition does suffer from the same deadening knowledge that it will attract museum-goers who would rather not have their visions of aesthetic harmony disrupted -- at least not too much.

In this, it misses a chance to connect to contemporary debates and design-centered movements that echo those in the LACMA galleries. Architects working on new kinds of prefab housing are struggling with the same balance between the economies of mass production and the appeal of custom design that Arts and Crafts heroes did. The success of magazines such as ReadyMade and the rise of knitting among twentysomethings, even -- or especially -- tech-savvy ones, recall early 20th century efforts to rediscover personal identity in handmade design.

Design collectives such as Droog and Mooi, both based in the Netherlands, are creating products that both wryly tweak and passionately endorse the appeal of the handcrafted. The sense that technology simultaneously frees us and chips away at our humanity is building today, much as it did a century ago.

Maybe Kaplan doesn’t think of Arts and Crafts designers as the grandparents, aesthetically speaking, of these contemporary subcultures. But following such seemingly obscure cultural threads might be one way to convey the strength of design movements now grown soft. You can bet that the more enlightened of the Arts and Crafts designers, who hated being thought of as reactionary, would not have objected in the least.

*

‘The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; noon to 9 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; closed Wednesdays

Ends: April 3

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org