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Book Reviews

Arts and Craft ObjectsImogen Hart

Manchester university Press 2010288 pagesColour illustrationsPaperback£17.99ISBN: 978-0-7190-7972-6

This volume contains many original interpreta-tions and an important re-evaluation of the Arts and Crafts movement as a whole, which will interest specialists on the period, whilst at the same time remaining accessible to general readers. A well researched and thoroughly cross-referenced book, Hart draws on writers who were contemporaries of William Morris or who provided important commentaries on nine-teenth-century taste.

In contrast to previous explorations of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Hart’s main aim is to shift the emphasis away from the politics of production, to the experience of the original viewers, consumers and connoisseurs of the objects themselves. She seeks to redefine the decorative arts as worthy of visual analysis in the same way as the fine arts traditionally have been. Hart also acknowledges the fundamental paradox in the concept of the ‘Arts and Crafts movement’ – defined as much by the objects as by the disparate groups, organisations and ideologies surrounding it. A further complica-tion is that, according to Hart, ‘it is generally agreed that no stylistic pattern can be identi-fied’. What is generally agreed is that the ‘ideas’ included ‘a rejection of mass-produced, machine-decorated goods … in favour of indi-viduality, hand-craftsmanship and awareness of the different qualities of different materials’.

The author aims to show us that a new

approach to decorative objects and an encour-agement of their appreciation was one of ‘the movement’s’ greatest achievements.

Where Hart really manages to break new ground in her research is her fascinating reas-sessment of the ‘official’ Arts and Crafts history written from a modernist perspective. This appears to have happened as early as the 1930s, but the most influential figure is Nikolaus Pevs-ner, and his Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1960). She rejects the idea of a linear narrative, a ‘modernist historiography’ that has now become the received wisdom ‘situating Arts and Crafts, often represented by Morris, at the beginning of a story of modernism’. Hart’s book attempts to situate them, rather as ‘the culmination of some-thing’.

To reinforce her argument, Hart returns time and again to contemporary appreciation of Arts and Crafts objects. These primary sources show an appreciation of their beauty and no apparent false dichotomy between Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism or Art Nouveau. The former is so often seen as the forerunner to modernism (and situated within socialist left-wing politics) that there is a complete denial of luxury or style (associated with the latter two) and the role of aesthetics within Arts and Crafts is suppressed. The result, according to Hart, is that Victorian design has been retrospectively divided into separate linear patterns of events: the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts belong-ing to one story, the Aesthetic movement and Art Nouveau belonging to another.

This book challenges this received wisdom and shows evidence of much middle ground and some surprising connections, between the theories of Morris and Oscar Wilde for instance.

Hart’s research also uncovers other accounts that draw attention to ‘the absence of women in

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Book Reviews

standard histories of Arts and Crafts’. This has echoes of twentieth-century modernism’s rejection of the domestic and the decorative object, and a focus on a small number of high-profile leaders, which has been cemented with the modernist ‘Morris-to-Gropius trajectory’ as Hart puts it. The reality was, however, that the movement provided work, autonomy and personal creativity for large numbers of middle-class women.

The author makes no apology for the central figure of William Morris also being central to her book. However, she paints a new and very differ-ent portrait of a paradoxical figure with eclectic tastes and homes furnished with contradictory styles. These included the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Rosetti and Burne-Jones were business colleagues), Middle-East-ern influences and neo-classicism. As evidence, Hart’s book provides fascinating reproductions of contemporary photographs from Morris’s own uniquely styled domestic interiors in the 1890s.

As a whole the book might have benefited from more colour plates, but the few that are included feature ceramics, textiles, metalwork and furniture and are all pertinent to key points.

Hart’s book is a fascinating and welcome addition to decorative art and its histories, and a timely attempt to re-address the ‘modernist historiography’ that tends to dominate any discussion of the period from the mid nine-teenth to the early twentieth century. This book should be of interest to all students and teach-ers of art and design history, researchers of Morris & Co. and general readers with an inter-est in nineteenth-century art and culture.

Simon TaylorBasingstoke

Fashion Print Design: From Idea to Final Print Àngel Fernández

A&C Black 2010192 pages200+ colour illustrationsPaperback£24.99ISBN 978-1-40812-489-5

Early on in Fashion Print Design: From Idea to Final Print, the author comments: ‘Ideas are of greater importance today … ’ and he is right of course, in a contemporary design economy ideas are the main currency in both commerce and education.

It is within this framework that books like Fernández’s are important: at their best, books like his should bolster the confidence of students in idea generation (ideation), and equally serve to remind those already estab-lished in the profession as to why they entered the industry in the first place.

This book format is Quarto paperback, well illustrated and, at its core, provides a methodical journey, taking you through initial ideas, experi-mentations, presentation and on to the various platforms for implementation of the final prod-uct: sketchbooks, silk-screening, technical sheets ‘flats’, digital output and the materials of the fashion industry, are all examined.

Each section is illustrated with a mixture of the beautiful, like the work of New York designer Aimee Wilder, to the more mundane textile patterns of logos and T-shirt design.

Many of the chapters are interlaced with very useful glossaries of materials, printing processes and relevant technical terms, includ-ing a genealogy of fibres: all of which can easily be missed out in a fashion education dominated by ideation – the next big idea on the catwalk or high street. Ask a student today the best uses for crêpe georgette, and your answer might be more culinary than material!

In many ways the book balances the creative and the cognitive – historical and contemporary practice – very well and the text is always informative, laconic and well structured. The