Craft skills.

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT 

By Rosalind P. Blakesley. London: Phaidon. 2006. [pounds sterling]39.95

'The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.' So 'men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand'. Rosalind Blakesley takes Carlyle's 1829 remarks as one of the foundations of her narrative structure of Arts and Crafts theory and practice. Others include Pugin's condemnation of the division of labour, Henry Cole's evangelical campaign to improve the qualities of industrial design and Ruskin's celebration of craftsmanship and rejection of industrialisation. She is as concerned to expose the inner contradictions of the Arts and Crafts as its triumphs.

Her survey covers the movement's first manifestations in groups and guilds in London architectural circles in the 1870s through the explosion towards the end of the century to decay in the Great War. Bravely, Blakesley attempts to cover all the arts and crafts and their extraordinarily varied expressions across Europe and America. Her coverage is wider than anything we have had before: for instance, she examines the role of the movement in fostering national sensibilities in Poland and Hungary as well as in the well-trodden Nordic countries. She also has a chapter on Russia, where Arts and Crafts idealism and reverence for tradition were inspiration for the fantastical official Russian contributions to the Paris and Glasgow international exhibitions at the turn of the century Perhaps in a future edition, she will be able to extend the geographical range to places as far apart as Bohemia, the Antipodes and even Turkestan, in all of which the movement had influence before the First World War.

Architecture is briefly given its proper place as mother of the arts, but Blakesley's determination to map the whole world of the Arts and Crafts enables her to explore little frequented areas such as Cobden Sanderson's fine bookbinding and Morris's reaction to it. Though the older man was in many ways an inspiration to the whole movement, Cobden Sanderson reported that he was reluctant to multiply the minor arts and even suggested in 1885 that 'machinery should be invented to bind books'. By that time, Morris was an ardent socialist, who was one of the first to realise that the movement, which had been founded to foster production of artefacts intended to be a pleasure to maker and user alike, was crippled by the fact that the ethos could not work without radical social revolution. Ordinary people simply could not afford to buy Arts and Crafts products and, as many of the designers refused to be involved with industrial manufacture, prices could not be reduced. The idealism of the movement turned out to be incapable of being sustained. But what a magnificent legacy it bequeathed in buildings, artefacts and in inspiration to new movements as different as Art Nouveau, the Prairie School and National Romanticism.

As well as a kaleidescope of ideas, Blakesley provides a splendid array of images. It is one of Phaidon's best produced books for some time. My only reservation is that her tone sometimes evokes the chalky whiff of the classroom.