Exhibitions 1
William Morris (Victoria & Albert Museum, till 1 Sept)
Biding his time
Tanya Harrod
Self-portrait by Morris, 1856 There have already been some notably sour previews and reviews of the major William Morris exhibition at the V&A in which the great man has been held respon- sible for all kinds of nastinesses, from the savagery of the Khmer Rouge to the safe eclecticism of the World of Interiors.
Blaming Morris's designs retrospectively for Laura Ashley wallpaper and British cul- tural conservatism or reading mass execu- tions and totalitarianism between the lines of his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, is as misjudged as identifying Morris solely as a pioneer of the Modern Movement. Yet there are problems. This is the centenary of his death but it is patently not quite Mor- ris's moment. He stands foursquare, devoid of the ironic, parodic, knowing ambiva- lences that appear to postmodern sensibili- ties. If there is a postmodern hero of the exhibition, it is surely Dante Gabriel Ros- setti, whose malicious little caricatures of Morris (often sent in letters to Morris's wife Jane) form a cruel subtext to all Mor- ris's positive, innocent activities. But the fact that it is currently unfashionable to feel enthusiastic about Morris's complex and endlessly creative life and works tells us more about the shallowness of design and art criticism in the 1990s than it does about Morris.
The young Morris emerges at the V&A as a touching but confused figure. The activities of his early years were both com- plicated and eased by his great wealth he did not really have to stick at anything and he was surrounded by more talented men, with Rossetti as a towering figure who took both Morris and Edward Bume- Jones in hand, introducing them to a life of art and to a London that mixed glamour with squalor.
For Rossetti, 'art' meant painting, and for a while Morris laboured at it. But his marriage to a stableman's daughter, Jane Burden, gave a new focus to his developing creativity. At first he tried to paint her. But then he decided to create a home for her, in collaboration with the architect Philip Webb and drawing on the artistry of the men and women in his circle.
The Red House was a utopian haven, an alternative to the upper-middle class Victo- rian milieu in which Morris had been brought up. It was an important project for two reasons. First, the Red House stands as the first interior created by an artist for a life of social and intellectual dissent. Its progeny includes Margaret and Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow flat of 1900, Charleston in Sussex decorated by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell from 1916 onwards, and the interiors made by artists like Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan and Derek Jarman in the 1970s and 1980s. Such places were sanctums or what the architec- tural theorist Robert Harbison had called `dreaming-rooms', expressing a rejection of every kind of convention, from convention- al marriage to straight heterosexual society. Second, the Red House marks Morris's switch to applied art and to ambitions for `a glorious art made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to both maker and user'. This withdrawal from fine art took Morris to the heart of all kinds of specifically modern anxieties about every- day objects and skills and materials employed to make them. It is a new orthodoxy to dismiss Nikolaus Pevsner's identification of Morris as the harbinger of modernism in design. Nonetheless, his passion for intense research and development — only fully realised after he set up Morris & Company in 1874 — seems wholly modern. Morris took stock, plunging his arms into vats of indigo dye, in order to respond creatively to the plethora of new materials and tech- nologies that emerged during the 19th cen- tury. Many of his designs, like his range of carpets made on power looms, were mass- produced. On the other hand, some of his most luxurious productions were modern in a craft-revival spirit. These include the knotted carpets that are one of the glories of the exhibition and the marvellous high warp tapestries, mostly designed by Burne- Jones. These glamorous productions of Morris's last years raise questions about the relationship between Morris's thought and his art, not least because at the V&A they are in the same room as a small, timid display devoted to Morris's political activi- ties as a revolutionary socialist.
The V&A curators, unlike the organisers of the 1984 ICA show, William Morris Today, are not putting Morris's politics centre stage. It is easy to understand why. The natural response might be to laugh at the juxtaposition of a monumental hand- knotted carpet made for the ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell's mansion in North York- shire and Morris's copy of Le Kapital (he read Marx in French), beautifully bound and tooled in gold by his fellow revolution- ary socialist Thomas Cobden-Sanderson.
It is easy to mock Morris's politics, tempting to overlook them. It is likely that Morris's employees did not experience any real joy in labour as they sat for long hours on low benches knotting and cutting each double strand of an immense carpet. Mor- ris liked to involve his women clients in embroidery projects but the wealthy Ada Godman probably tired as she slowly stitched the sequence of 'Artichoke' hang- ings Morris specially designed for her drawing-room in Northallerton. He had Adoration tapestry designed by Edward Bume-Jones, William Morris and Henry Dearle, 1888 created a powerful repeat pattern, suitable for handblock printing but cruelly monotonous for an embroiderer to carry out.
And what of the Kelmscott Press, a pro- ject initiated in 1891 at the end of Morris's life? Morris spared no effort to create beautiful typefaces, engraved woodblock borders, fine inks and papers. But in 1899 the American economist Thorstein Veblen took Kelmscott Press books as prime exam- ples of conspicuous consumption, less examples of honest workmanship, more trophies consumed by the leisure class to display their wealth and taste. Where was Morris's 'glorious art made by the people and for the people'?
In an unexpected way, Morris's exclusive productions did reach a wider public posthumously. Morris & Company work was sent by the Board of Trade to Ghent in 1913 and to Paris in 1914 to signify `Englishness'. It was seen again at Burling- ton House in the 1916 Arts and Crafts Society exhibition performing the same function at the height of the first world war. This transformation of Morris into the bearer of Edwardian national identity sig- nalled that Morris was being depoliticised. For most of this century he has been asso- ciated not with radicalism or even design reform, but with a few pleasingly familiar wallpapers. And, it will be said, this was just as well, for Morris's politics were grotesque, an early example of champagne socialism.
In fact, it is absurd to set his politics aside. Morris, like many of his contempo- raries, inhabited an intellectual universe that knew nothing of the actuality of revo- lution. Had he lived beyond 1917 he might well have recast his thoughts. But from the late 1870s onwards Morris began posing all kinds of uncomfortable questions. He learnt to ask some of these questions from his beloved John Ruskin, from the passion- ately indignant passages of 'On the Nature of Gothic' in The Stones of Venice, and they concerned the relationship between art and work and pleasure in work. Perhaps that is why Morris is not a man for our time, for we have not even begun to answer any of those questions.
It is easier, therefore, to pass judgment on Morris for his inconsistencies than to wonder why ideas about joy in labour seem so embarrassingly remote and why the con- temporary work place is more likely to be a site of anxiety and mistrust than of joy. And, looking at the bold scale of the late embroideries, tapestries, carpets and books in the final room of this majestic exhibi- tion, all criticism falls away. They were mostly made for a group of wealthy individ- uals but they go beyond the painting and sculpture of the age in their quiet grandeur. They do not look like a private art but more like a glimpse, an intimation of a new kind of unrealised public art of a humane and engaging kind. They make sense of all that Morris said and did.
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