A Victorian's ideas reach modern times
NEW HAVEN -- William Morris, the preeminent Victorian interior designer and revolutionary tastemaker, believed the key to a better world was "the beautiful home" as a universal concept.
Beauty -- particularly when drenched in the medieval traditions of hand craftsmanship -- was the heart of Morris's visionary philosophy, a natural force that can bring about the best of all possible worlds.
Morris and his internationally celebrated artists collective, which is best known as Morris & Co., struck a mighty blow for beauty by driving out the notoriously shoddy, mass-produced, mass-marketed clutter of knickknacks and bric-a-brac from the Victorian home.
Because of Morris, Victorian parlors and pews were never the same again.
Decor was revolutionized by such iconic Morris designs as his floral, plant, and bird patterns for wallpaper and the jewel-like glass of his stained-glass windows. His works were inspired by medieval handcrafts, many of which he revived and built upon with his own artistic vision.
Morris was a man of many parts ranging from superstar poet to firebrand socialist. Through success and Martha Stewart-like fame, he brought legitimacy to the profession of the interior designer.
For all his acclaim back then, this ardent advocate of the house beautiful is hardly a household name today in American homes. But thanks to the Yale Center for British Art, there's now a good and pleasant way to get a solid grip on the Victorian prophet's enormous influence on style and taste.
Everything you need to know about Morris -- and probably much more -- is on display in an ultra-smart exhibition at the museum. The Morris mania, now ruling at this bastion of British art, is sparked by the touring exhibition " 'The Beauty of Life': William Morris and the Art of Design." The show's New Haven stop, which runs through Jan. 2, is its only one on the East Coast.
Organized by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Garden in San Marino, Calif., the 200-piece overview of Morris's classic designs and handcrafted products has been skillfully woven together by curator Diane Waggoner.
The spectacular, iridescent, 18-foot-high Morris & Co. stained-glass window kicks off the exhibition with visual sizzle in the museum's center court. You can get right up close to this luminous work and savor its meticulous craftsmanship and medieval ambiance -- signature qualities for a Morris work. Morris, who was the father of the Arts and Craft Movement, loved traditional hand craftsmanship and loathed both modern mass production and the alienating division of labor that reigned during the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England.
Besides being a beacon, the towering glass work is the prelude to the exhibition that Waggoner has orchestrated into a three-part suite focusing abundantly on Morris as a designer of decorative arts for the home, church decor, and the art of the book.
Adding to the exhibition's giant stock of visual material, the detailed wall and display case labels provide an avalanche of information. They cover Morris's innovative aesthetics, radical politics, Morris & Co., and biographical material, even providing hints of his tortured marriage shattered by a scandalous menage a trois.
Display cases groan under the weight of his prolific writings, including his ponderous, popular, poetic sagas and thunderous socialist tracts. Luxurious tomes crafted by his celebrated Kelmscott Press look like precious merchandise under glass.
Homeowners will want to zero in on the signature wallpaper designs, renowned for their swirling, repetitive patterns and layered effect. It's plain to see why Morris's elegant-yet-spare designs achieved cult status among Britain's financial and industrial barons and landed aristocracy, appealing to the empire's old and new rich.
There was something quite chic about having your London homes and country houses Morrisized. Perhaps there was even a radical chic appeal when the innovative designer in the 1880s became politically radicalized, marching on London streets with proletarian rabble and consorting with communists and revolutionaries, including Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto.
Although he despised "swinish" capitalism and bullying British Imperialism and presciently predicted that the evils of empire would lead to catastrophic wars, his left-wing, dovish politics didn't damage his booming business.
"Morris was out of step, for the most part, with people of the 19th century," says Waggoner, a former Andrew Mellon curatorial fellow at the Huntington and now assistant curator in department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. "But he was very influential in moving us towards many of our current ideas."
Although his heart belonged to his romanticized perception of the Middle Ages, he was actually a Renaissance man of astonishing talents, Waggoner says.
A master weaver and embroiderer, he was also a dyer who concocted organic medieval recipes, scorning modern industrial dyes. A translator of classic works in Greek, Latin, and Icelandic, he was an architectural preservationist and environmentalist. He railed against the industrial pollution proliferating from bleak, smoke-belching British factories. And in imperial England, where machismo ruled, he was a feminist.
Although Morris died in 1896 at the age of 62, Morris & Co., under his handpicked successor, John Henry Dearle, continued until 1940. But the firm's legacy lives on, most obviously in the famous Morris chair, whose design has morphed into the sometimes-cheesy varieties of today's chairs with adjustable backs.
"His designs, particularly wallpaper, are still sold today and are increasingly popular. Various Morris & Co. chintzes are still in demand today with people who do upholstery and dresses. They're out there and they're quite lovely," says Edward R. Bosley, who wrote a catalog essay on Morris's impact in America. "They've never really run out. The Sanderson Co., based in Dedham, England, has been carrying them since Morris & Co. shut down.
"But Morris's real legacy is his philosophy of uniting art with craftsmanship and making useful things beautiful. That has always struck a chord with home designers, interior decorators, architects, and the average American at home," says Bosley, who is director of Gamble House, a national historic landmark in Pasadena, Calif., operated by the University of Southern California School of Architecture.
One of the great paradoxes in Morris's career was that although his firm catered to the rich, the socialist entrepreneur dreamed of someday providing his designs to the masses.
Ironically, Bosley says, Morris's vision of making his works available to the middle and working classes succeeded not in England but in America, a country the designer never set foot in and disdained as "the capitalist enemy." Morris & Co. made the first official offering of its home-decorating goods at Boston's Foreign Fair in 1883, securing a foothold on American soil, Bosley says.
"Here on American shores, American ingenuity and marketing and use of the machine made it more possible for Morris's dream to be realized. But this success occurred through what he would have considered the vulgarization of his philosophy because it was made possible by using mass marketing and machines," he adds.
Morris's designs are alive and well on the Internet. With a little Googling you can check out goods and prices. A good place to start is The William Morris Society website, morrissociety.org. It offers a "shopping guide" of Morris-related products of all kinds.
Yale Center for British Art is at 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, roughly a 2-hour drive from Boston. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10-5; Sunday, noon-5. Admission: free. Information: 203-432-2800; www.yale.edu/ycba.
