THE REAL ARTS AND CRAFTS LACMA EXHIBIT GOES INTERNATIONAL TO DISMANTLE MYTHS OF DESIGN MOVEMENT.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

The Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries often gets labeled as conservative.

It is seen historically as a way in which artists protested the age of industrialization's emphasis on mass production by championing the exquisite, often-handmade design of objects and decorations for the home - and the homes themselves. It was their way of wishing away a tidal wave of societal change.

But a new exhibit opening Sunday and continuing through April 3 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art sees progressivism and modernism in it, too. And in that, ``The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World'' attempts to make an important new statement itself.

The show, which occupies the first floor of the museum's Hammer Building, contains some 300 objects from 13 countries and 75 lenders, as well as from the museum's own collection. Wendy Kaplan, the museum's curator of decorative arts, has been working on this since arriving at LACMA at the beginning of 2001. After Los Angeles, the exhibit will travel to Milwaukee and Cleveland. Local philanthropist Max Palevsky donated $1 million to support the exhibition and additionally bought objects for Kaplan to display as they came on the market.

As begun in Britain in 1887 with the founding of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, the movement did have a conservative - Luddite, even - component to it. Artisans frequently banded together in societies or art colonies to share ideas. The British artists represented in this show - a group that includes William Morris, M.H. Baillie Scott, C.R. Ashbee and various guilds, studios, schools and potteries where work was collectively credited - were profoundly uncomfortable with aspects of industrialization.

A low oak dining table by Sidney Barnsley, for instance, has a piece connecting its legs that intentionally branches out like agrarian-age pitchforks. Barnsley had moved out of London to the rural Cotswolds in order to create everything by hand, finding spiritual meaning in the isolated, methodical way he worked.

But not all Arts and Crafts artists - especially not all outside Britain - wanted to look away from industrialism and its promise of mass- produced goods.

``One of the goals of the show is to correct the misperception that the Arts and Crafts movement was both anti-industrial and anti-modern,'' Kaplan says. ``The most important thing is they were looking for alternatives to the worst excesses they perceived came about with industrialization - alienation of the human spirit and the idea that if you did mechanical, repetitious work in the factory you'd lose your individuality. (But) only the most radical of Arts and Crafts leaders were against the machine per se.''

Others wanted to make well-designed objects for the home - previously a luxury for the wealthy - affordable to everyone. Kaplan views this as a thrust toward ``democratic design that would be accessible to more people,'' and the show has many examples.

One of the most striking is a re-created ``ideal room'' that Germany's Peter Behrens designed for Berlin's Wertheim department store in 1903. This room contains a stylized, stained oak and galvanized metal buffet, side chairs, porcelain, silver, and mocha cup and saucer that once were featured at the Berlin store.

This model dining room is an example of an Arts and Crafts designer responding to the changes wrought by an industrial society without rejecting it. Behrens wanted to make domestic spaces beautiful - a concept that sounded good to a department store trying to sell manufactured goods for the home. The result was German modernism at work - more than a decade before the creation of the Bauhaus art and architecture school.

``Where a society has changed from rural to urban, the Arts and Crafts movement was largely a domestic one,'' Kaplan says. ``We're overwhelmingly talking about houses and domestic furnishings. What came with industrialization was a separation of where you work and where you live.

``Until the early 19th century, the two were the same,'' she says. ``You were a farmer, or if you made things, then your shop was in your house. With the creation of an industrial class and a service industry where people worked in shops all day, the home was viewed in a different way. I wish there was a way to communicate to people the newness then of what is now just the way we live.''

The show's galleries are devoted to separate countries - industrial nations such as the United Kingdom (England, Ireland and Scotland), United States, Germany, Belgium and France; and then-rural Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Some might find it unusual that the show only features two objects from Scotland's Charles Rennie Mackintosh - an armchair and a linen press - since he is one of the most famous of all Arts and Crafts designers. But Kaplan argues, somewhat controversially, that he wasn't really part of the movement.

``What's not Arts and Crafts about him is his total indifference to function and construction,'' he says. ``He's totally about design.''

In the U.S., some of the most famous Arts and Crafts devotees were architects who also designed the interiors of their homes for their clients - the furniture, lighting, windows, vases, bookcases and all other details. One was Frank Lloyd Wright and the show has six objects by him - a vase, urn, stained-glass window, table lamp, side chair and presentation drawing.

The other was Pasadena's own Greene & Greene - Henry Mather Greene and Charles Sumner Greene. Their Arts and Crafts mansions, which seem to horizontally float like cruise ships on a calm sea, achieve an organic balance between exterior materials and angles and interior design. They are some of California's finest residences; their 1908 Gamble House is owned by the city of Pasadena and run as a museum by University of Southern California.

For this show, Kaplan has created what she calls a period ``setting'' from another Greene & Greene home in Pasadena, the privately owned Robert R. Blacker House of 1907. The museum owns furniture from the home and in this show displays furniture and a stylized breakfast-room light fixture.

The Blacker House is even more luxurious than the Gamble House, Kaplan says. ``The Blacker family made its money in lumber, so Mr. Blacker cared about having the most amazing woods,'' Kaplan says. ``We have the most amazing Blacker House furniture in our collection, but it's not all from the same room.

``The people who bought the furniture in 1940s bought it at a yard sale - the house was so totally out of fashion,'' she says. ``The guy who bought it left it to his son, who lived with it as household furnishings until the 1980s, when he realized the value and sold a lot at auction. That's how we got it.''

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., Los Angeles.

When: Opens Sunday. Hours are 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; through April 3.

Tickets: $9 adults; $5 seniors and students; free after 5 p.m. and on the second Tuesday of each month. [phone], lacma.org.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) This 1970 armchair by Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, made of mahogany, ebony and oak (with replaced upholstery) is from the Robert R. Blacker House in Pasadena.

(2) This Frank Lloyd Wright table lamp made by Linden Glass Co., circa 1903, is crafted from glass, bronze and zinc.