a&c movement

• Arts & Crafts wallpaper today

  minor updates to this article, originally from Hewn & Hammered in 2004:

  People often think of the interior of Arts & Crafts period homes as austere, minimilist spaces devoid of pattern. They envision tasteful rich woods and plain walls with only a jewel tone paint shade as a foil. There may have been some interiors like that, but the height of the Arts and Crafts movement coincided with the height of Victorian decorating. Rather than homes and design books of the period only embracing one or the other style, what often occurred was a blending of the two styles. One of the finest examples of graphic art to come out of this period were the many rich and detailed wallpaper designs.

  When you think of Arts & Crafts designs it is the iconic images that often come to mind. From the famous Morris chrysanthemums, pomegranates, daisies and marigolds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s hollyhocks
  and branch borders, these patterns from nature figure prominently in
  all manner of Arts & Crafts design. Morris was said to have
  considered wallpaper a ‘medium of communication’ and created over 144
  distinctive textile designs that were reproduced in several different
  mediums such as textiles, wall coverings and carpets. Historically, the
  actual creation Arts and Crafts period wallpaper was a painstakingly
  difficult and involved process. Long sheets of paper were rolled out on
  great tables and dozens of artisans using a primitive silkscreening
  process layered on paint in highly detailed repetitive patterns. This
  made the wallpaper prohibitively expensive for the average decorator.
  But when you have a great room sometimes painting techniques and
  stencilwork just won’t cut it; they just can’t give that ‘wow’ factor –
  that’s when it’s time to look to wallpapers.

  From a ceiling frieze to a feature wall to a room done completely in
  a bold pattern to mimic your favourite period estate, wallpapers is
  what you are looking for. But, where do you find them? Aren’t they
  prohibitively expensive?

  Not necessarily. The advent of laser printing techniques and
  computer-aided design have changed all of that, and as a result prices
  have come down so mere mortal restorers and decorators can work with
  the medium and get the same stunning effect. Currently, several
  companies are recreating these intricate designs.

  A local favourite and one of the few A&C suppliers on the East Coast, J.R.. Burrows & Company and Burrows Studio
  of Rockland MA consider themselves historical design merchants. The
  Burrows Studio, a division of J.R. Burrows & Co., produces and
  recreates designs that are representative of the Aesthetic and the
  early Anglo-American Arts & Crafts movements. The wallpaper designs
  are mainly English in origin, as the English A&C movement was – and
  continues to be – highly influential in New England. There are graphic
  samples of the papers as well as a provenance and a detailed
  description of each style on their extensive website.

  Heading out to the west coast one of the finer manufacturers is Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpapers.
  As recently as 2000, Bradbury and Bradbury began using computers to
  print their beautiful Arts & Crafts friezes, and they are gorgeous,
  lush, rich (okay, okay, I know – enough adjectives, but I can’t help
  it!) full of color and bold, beautiful designs.  The site is unique in
  that designs are grouped by color theme. Choose an olive room and the
  site will show how to coordinate various Bradbury designs into a single
  cohesive look. You can view it all on the site or order a catalog to
  peruse with a good cup of tea in your Morris chair.

  Last stop is way up north in Canada at Charles Rupert Designs Ltd.,
  dedicated to supplying "splendid items for the traditional home and
  garden." Not only do they have all the paper patterns you have been
  dreaming of, but they have the fabrics to match. One of their great
  features is a complete wallpaper and fabric sample cutting service
  which will allow you to see what you envision before you commit.
  Everything they sell is top quality and they strive to use traditional
  natural materials wherever possible, shunning plastic, vinyl and other
  synthetics.

  Thanks to Jo Horner of the always entertaining and often very touching Counting Sheep for this wonderful article!

• Arts & Crafts Revival according to the Seattle Times

  It’s always interesting when a newspaper suddenly and inexplicably picks up that we’re in the middle of a revival of the A&C Movement, especially when this has been going on since the late 1980s. Usually, though, it’s a case of warming up a particular audience for an upcoming home show or museum exhibition. Not so with this article by the Associated Press’ Ula Ilnytzy: it’s a general primer on the Movement, its various offshoots and collector subcultures. It would have been nice to see a bit more specialization – there’s nothing here you don’t already know – but it’s certainly not a bad thing to be seeing articles like this in regional newspapers. And the photographs are certainly nice.

  "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

  Those words of William Morris — British poet, socialist and
  wallpaper and fabric designer — are as inspiring now as they were when
  he helped the Arts and Crafts Movement span the globe at the turn of
  the 20th century.

  With its focus on clean lines, hand crafting and natural materials,
  the style was a response to the excesses of the Victorian era and the
  advent of industrialization and its emphasis on quantity over quality.
  The same ideas feel fresh in the current era of mass production,
  fueling a renewed surge of interest.

  In fact, the revival inspired by a 1972 Princeton University
  exhibition has already surpassed the original life span of the style’s
  popularity in the early 1900s.

• Tokyo’s Nihon Mingeikan & Mingei’s relationship to Arts & Crafts

  Japan’s Daily Yomiuri includes an English-language edition, and a recent issue includes a short article by Robert Reed on Tokyo’s Nihon Mingeikan, a small museum celebrating Mingei crafts and the life and work of Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the Mingei movement. Mingei is sometimes associated with the Arts & Crafts movement by art historians who note both its chronological proximity to European A&C and its similar philosophical underpinnings (the recent International Arts & Crafts show, which originated at the Victoria & Albert and was at San Francisco’s De Young Museum in the middle of 2006, included a model room based on Mingei crafts and made a strong case for that movement’s inclusion as part of the ‘International Arts & Crafts’ milieu).

  From the museum’s website:

  Located
  in Tokyo, the Mingeikan Museum is housed in a beautiful traditional
  Japanese building completed in 1936. Founded in the same year, the
  Mingeikan has over 17,000 items in its collection made by anonymous crafts people mainly from Japan, but also from China, Korea, England, Africa, and elsewhere.

  Yanagi Soetsu
  (1889-1961), the first director and founder of the Museum, coined the
  term Mingei (folk art) in 1926 to refer to common crafts that had been
  brushed aside by the industrial revolution. Yanagi and his lifelong companions,
  the potters Bernard Leach, Hamada Shoji, and Kawai Kanjiro, sought to
  counteract the desire for cheap mass-produced products by pointing to
  the works of ordinary crafts people that spoke to the spiritual and
  practical needs of life. The Mingei Movement is responsible for keeping alive many traditions.

• Arts and Crafts Revival Society of Boston

  reader Carl Close Jr., an artist blacksmith at Hammersmith Studio, forwards the following notice and hopes that other craftspeople in his area will be interested in forming a latter-day craftsperson’s guild:

  Are you an artist or craftsperson that works in the Arts and Crafts style? I am a metalworker in the Boston area and want to start a group that fosters the ideals and philosophies of the founders of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston. I thought it might be fun to also have an exhibit called Then and Now, a show that could showcase past masters and what similar artists are doing today to revive the Arts and Crafts Movement. So if you are a wood carver, metalworker, potter, book artist, silversmith, furniture designer, pleinair painter or any other historically-styled craftsperson, and live in the Boston or New England area, please let me know if this would be of any interest. You can contact me off my website, hammersmithstudio.com, or write me email.

  Thank you – Carl Close, Jr, artist blacksmith

• Forest Hills Gardens: an American Planned Community

  
  Situated on the edge of New York City’s borough of Queens, Forest Hills Gardens is probably the most successful – and best known – example of an English planned garden community in the United States. Originally built as a commuter suburb – even in 1915, just six years after its construction, it was less than 15 minutes from Manhattan’s Penn Station by rail – the community was originally planned and built by the Russell Sage Foundation and Cord-Meyer Development Co. beginning in 1909. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the father of landscape architecture and a great craftsman and technician in his own right, collaborated with architect Grosvenor Atterbury to make a community that worked both internally and as part of the world-class city they both realized New York would soon grow into.

  This thriving community still offers a lush, green and very much park-like escape for several thousand residents, and suggests solutions for our conflict between limiting sprawl and creating living, working, and above all livable communities. Forest Hills Gardens was home to many visionaries of the time, including Frederic Goudy, one of the foremost typeface and graphic designers of the age and an important figure in the American Arts & Crafts Movement. Goudy even published a monograph in 1915 detailing his own family’s many reasons for relocating to the community; unfortunately, the book has not been reprinted, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a copy today. Gustav Stickley’s own magazine, The Craftsman, also featured articles and drawings on the community in 1911.

  Susan Klaus has written a terrific book on Olmsted’s relationship to the community, focusing on the planning of the community and with many illustrations of its history to the present. It’s worth a read if you are interested in planned communities in general and how the Arts & Crafts Ideal can be applied to so much more than simply architectural design. Additional photographs of and articles on the community are available online.

• A Visit with Randell L. Makinson

  the following interview with Randell L. Makinson, by Linda Arntzenius, was originally published in Autumn 1998 issue of USC’s Trojan Family Magazine.

  If there is a Greene & Greene cult abroad in Southern California, USC architecture alumnus Randell L. Makinson can take most of the credit.

  Imagine yourself a keen student of architecture. Eager to assist a visiting professor by bringing him slides for his architectural history class, you approach a large, wooden house on a quiet residential street in an upscale Pasadena neighborhood. No sound save birdsong breaks the late morning silence. Lawns are perfectly cropped, hedges trimmed. No one is about as you set up camera and tripod for a carefully composed shot of the magnificent building. Framed in your viewfinder, the portal is a symphony of oiled teakwood and leaded glass.

  Then, just as you are about to click the shutter, the door opens. A gentleman, tall and imposing in a dark suit, steps out. You watch as, unsmiling, he makes he way across the wide, private lawn and asks you to explain yourself.

  This is precisely what happened to Randell L. Makinson in 1954 in front of 4 Westmoreland Place. But instead of being sent about his business, Makinson founds himself treated to a tour of the house and garden. Three and a half hourse later, he was seated on the living room floor with Cecil and Louise Gamble, pouring over their home’s original blueprints.

  much more after the jump, below

• Design-a-Room

  A group of Parsons graduate students are responsible for Design-a-Room, an interactive tool that lets you play around with motifs and furniture items from the Cooper-Hewitt’s own collection of historic design objects. The Craftsman era collection is not so big, but there are some neat standouts – a Charles Rennie Mackintosh cardtable, a Bradley & Hubbard slag-glass shade lamp, a Voysey (identified as Vaysey on the site) sideboard designed for Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer. Unfortunately, the site is riddled with spelling errors and incorrect dates, but it’s a fun little toy anyway.

• Roycrofters not Luddites

  The Roycrofters – or at least the Roycroft Campus Corporation – have got themselves a weblog.
  So far, lots of Elbert Hubbard epigrams and bits and pieces of news
  relating to the always-interesting events going on in that magical
  place. And unlike this place lately, it’s more original content than links to other places (speaking of which, please do email me if you’ve got pictures or articles you’d like to share with our readers!).

• Greene & Greene at Auction, redux

  Given the recent attention given the sale of a reproduction lantern which hung for a time at the Gamble House, this 2005 article from the Los Angeles Times, detailing the sale of Randell Makinson’s personal collection of Greene & Greene ephermera, may be particular interesting to those who are not familiar with the story.

  It was the auction the Craftsman community couldn’t stop talking about.

  In December, Sotheby’s auction house put up a rare collection of
  furnishings and accessories from historic homes designed by the
  brothers Charles and Henry Greene, the architects who created the
  venerable Gamble House in Pasadena, as well as other celebrated
  examples of the early 20th century Craftsman style in Southern
  California.

  The collection was offered by an anonymous donor whose identity did not
  seem of particular importance until it became clear it was Randell
  Makinson, the former curator and director of the Gamble House. The
  auction, which appraisers say was the largest of its kind, netted
  almost $3 million.

• Arts and Crafts in Boston

  
  Architecture Radio is a wonderful online lecture series and covers an enormous range of topics – and I am ashamed to write that I did not know about this terrific resource until today. A relatively recent lecture (mp3; recorded at the Boston Public Library on 05.05, published 09.05) by Maureen Meister, author of Architecture and the Arts & Crafts Movement in Boston: Harvard’s H. Langford Warren (the first full-length study of this very important turn-of-the-century architect, educator and movement leader) and editor of H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers and Their Era is devoted to the Arts & Crafts Movement in Boston.

  Old House Interiors writes of her book on H. Langford Warren that “(she) makes the point that some architects are influential
  because they have a lot of clients, while others exert their influence
  less directly – but more widely – through students… Warren’s own blend
  of Gothic, Georgian, and Colonial forms was perceived as the proper New
  England style long after his death in 1917. In serving the Society of
  Arts and Crafts for longer than anyone else, Warren further imprinted
  area taste.”

  Paraphrased the jacket of her most recent book: ‘Maureen Meister has taught art history courses at the Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University, Northeastern University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1982. In recent years she has lectured on American architecture at Tufts University.’ And she has a very nice voice, too.