Art
Hand-made
Andrew Gimson
ti!ancy,, Awakening: the centenary exhibi- tion of the Art Workers Guild 1884-1984 (Brighton Museum till 25 November) Irather wish Gavin Stamp were writing this review. He would be the best person to describe and explain the excellence of the exhibition. But unfortunately he was aISO the best person to advise Brighton Museum, on behalf of the Art Workers Guild, about the exhibits, and has self- effacingly declined to judge his own work. We are not, however, completely deprived of the Stampian view: he has written the first of 11 essays in the exhibition catalogue (t2.50 from Brighton Museum), giving us a Useful and eloquent history of the Guild, Which I shall shortly plagiarise. First, though, I must allude to a very Painful episode, my first and I hope my °nIY disagreement with Dr Stamp. It is something which needs referring to for two reasons: family feeling, and to show. that 111Y admiration for the exhibition does not pring from unquestioning acceptance of ur Stamp's views. He said that the five cottages in the Charnwood Forest which IttY great-great-uncle, Ernest Gimson, an early and brilliant member of the Guild, t'resigned for other Gimsons, in order that neY could retreat from Leicester (a town
hose commodiousness was not increased by their factories), had excessively thick walls.
This is absurd. The walls of the cottages, and more especially the chimneys, may have been thicker than was strictly neces- sary to hold up the roofs, in normal times if not during nuclear war or earthquakes (seven feet is a figure which has been bandied about), but the insidious func- tionalism of that argument leads to aboli- tion of every kind of decoration, for decorations are not needed to hold up the roof. Yet a prime purpose of the Guild was to close the gap between architects and craftsmen, especially decorative craftsmen, which had opened by the end of the 19th century, and encourage them to work together.
Dr Stamp no doubt meant that the walls look too thick, not that they are too thick. Other critics have agreed with Dr Stamp about that. Roderick Gradidge, writing in the catalogue mentioned above, says that the cottages were 'excessively vernacular'. One can concede that Uncle Ernest, at this early period of his life, gave way to stylistic exuberances of the kind which afflict many young artists (and are not unbeknown to these ever-so-occasionally-purple-tinged pages). He liked incorporating massive boulders and natural outcrops of rock into his cottages. He may have overdone it: the work, like many products of the Arts and Crafts movement, was simultaneously ex- perimental and traditional, and experi- ments do not always succeed. He had fled from industrialism to the vernacular, as many of his contemporaries fled to the Middle Ages, reinvesting old crafts with vitality. The escaped from the imperson- ality of work done by machines and believed in the innate superiority of work done by hand.
The Art Workers Guild was founded in 1884. It was the idea of five architects working in Richard Norman Shaw's office, themselves inspired by the ideals of Pugin, Ruskin and Morris. By 1890 there were 150 members of the Guild, including some of the best artists and craftsmen in England, and by 1909 over 40 different crafts were represented. Today more than 50 crafts are represented, and there have been more than 1,300 members, including six of the seven Surveyors to Westminster Abbey and five of the seven at St Paul's. Their work is represented at Brighton, in three rooms of modest size, by about 440 ex- hibits, including furniture, sculpture, painting, drawing, silver, glass, jewellery, tapestry, wallpaper, ceramics, posters, books, musical instruments and plaster- work.
Few of the names of the exhibitors, fewer still of the exhibits, are widely familiar. An Underground station name- plate from the Thirties, the typeface de- signed by the Guildsman Edward Johnston in 1916 and still in use today, is one of the few exceptions. Craftsmen do not often mass-produce their designs. Nor, however much they may be inspired by the past, are members of the Guild interested in making bogus Tudor bars or reproduction Chip- pendale. Many more craftsmen would be needed before we could all know their work, all sit on chairs made by hand, and the economics of production do not seem to favour such a thing. And crafts- men have an awkward tendency to care more about the quality than the quantity of their work. They tend to progress towards the fine arts, leaving the poor man to furnish his house with the cheap, machine- made things which often pay a horrible spurious homage to 'genuine' (i.e. hand- made) things. The plastic basket bears a faint resemblance to a wicker one, the metal desk is covered in fake wood or leather. Just as sin is often more accepted when it wears the trappings of virtue, so many customers prefer things which pre- tend to be the work of craftsmen working in harmony with materials, to things which honestly admit (not flaunt) their origins as pieces of metal or plastic moulded by machines.
The Guild's greatest days were before the first war, but it has survived the vicissi- tudes of modernism (some of whose adher- ents were members), and exists still, in Dr Stamp's words, as 'a sort of club, whose members may agree on a general attitude to craftsmanship and quality but are united by no one partisan philosophy or style.' These craftsmen believe in 'the pleasure of creating beautiful things, which is the greatest pleasure in the world,' as William Morris once said. The visitor before me to the exhibition had written under 'Remarks' in the Visitors' Book: 'If any of these things need a home ' The visitor before her had written: 'Good and interest- ing.' Their verdicts can happily be en- dorsed. Perhaps in the age of leisure which is meant to be dawning, more of us will be able to follow the AWG's example, and spend our time making beautiful things.
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