William Morris on Art and Socialism [Paperback]

William Morris (Author), Norman Kelvin (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 1999

For the Victorian sage William Morris, the subjects of art and society were inseparable. This outstanding collection of 11 lectures and an essay illustrates Morris’s convictions. Includes: "Art: A Serious Thing," "Useful Work vs. Useless Toil," "The Dawn of a New Epoch," and "The Present Outlook of Socialism." Introduction. Biographical Note.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications (August 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 048640904X
• ISBN-13: 978-0486409047
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,447,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Eleven Essays: Draw Your Own Conclusions, December 20, 2009

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Martin Asiner "Adjunct College Instructor" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: William Morris on Art and Socialism (Paperback)

In WILLIAM MORRIS, Norman Kelvin edits eleven essays given by Morris over a period of several years, most of which deal with his view that art ought to somehow be above the sordid details of life. Several of his essays also relate to Morris' late in life conversion to Socialism.

English prose writers of the mid and late nineteenth century tended to focus on the humanistic ideals of the age. For Matthew Arnold, these ideals related to culture in the abstract. For John Henry Newman, it was to establish the parameters of the Anglican Church. And for William Morris, it was the fixing of art as a bulwark against what he saw as the crass commercialization that accompanied and followed the Industrial Age. Morris envisioned art as an entity that was absolutely essential for human progress. Ever since the first caveman etched the first wall painting on his cave wall, humanity had a very nearly unbroken line of artistic creation that empowered both artist and art lover. Morris simply could not accept that any age could exist in which art was not paramount in the minds of all who dared to call themselves cultured. This unbroken line of artistic supremacy showed the first cracks, oddly enough, in the Renaissance, an era that most Eurocentric cultures termed the very height of prominence in art. Morris saw that the Renaissance created the paradox that art was then deemed so unworldly magnificent that there was no way for future generations of art and artists to go but downhill. By the time that Morris was old enough to realize this, he was despairing that perhaps it was too late to set matters aright. Nevertheless, he spent his entire adult life attempting to check what he saw as the artistic nihilism of what he termed the Century of Commerce.

Even as a child, Morris saw, however imperfectly, the flaws that he would later label as the decline in art. He saw part of the solution as a hearkening back to the past when knight errantry was inexorably intermingled with art. By the time he was eight, Morris had read the many novels of Walter Scott which portrayed the Middle Ages as some impossibly virtuous era when battling knights battled for reasons of art as least as often as they did for trapped damsels. At fourteen he enrolled in Marlborough College, where he absorbed an impressive amount of facts related to the history of architecture and medieval history. He was known as one who could spin extemporaneously short and long tales of the magic world of Spenser's fairy world.

He considered art too important to be left to the ignorant tendencies of manufacturers and other capitalists who saw art only in terms of how that art might lead to profit. In 1855, Morris founded a loose brotherhood of like-minded individuals who were determined to preserve what they saw as the inviolate sanctity of art freed from the grubbiness of profit-seekers. This brotherhood collectively wrote, edited, and published a monthly journal called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was to be a forum for their views on the primacy of art. The journal was well-written and included occasional pieces by the renowned artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. John Ruskin and Alfred Lloyd Tennyson lauded it publically. Despite these plaudits, the journal folded within one year even though Morris contributed out of his own pocket considerable sums.

Morris' views on art were not limited to one two or even three spheres of artistic expression. His early association with the Pre-Raphaelites headed by Rossetti convinced him that he had a promising future as a canvas artist. It did not take him long to learn that desire did not equate with talent and by 1859, that part of his obsession with art had ended. However, his sessions with Rossetti led to his meeting Jane Burden, a breathtakingly beautiful model who often was the subject of Rossetti's paintings. Morris married her where both lived in a house that he personally built from scratch. This Red House needed impromptu additions that Morris was only too glad to provide personally. As he was busy designing and building Red House, he evolved an artistic vision that he would retain for life: all art had to be subservient to utility and simplicity. The beauty of such art would reside in these latter qualities rather than in the nouveau-riche mode that he despised.

Red House, as with his earlier Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, had to be sold after only a few years due to limitations of Morris' capital. He and his wife found a more economical boarding house in London. His fortunes soon changed for the better due to the reformation of the Anglican Church by the Oxford Movement headed by Newman, who argued persuasively that the liberal non-ritual traditions of the church were inadequate to meet the changing needs of an English population that sought a return to the ritual and sacrament tradition of pre-eighteenth century church history. Suddenly there was a need for skilled artisans to produce exactly those artifacts for which Morris had a special talent.

While Morris was busy hammering out a wide assortment of crafts, he did not cease his decades long writings based on his fascination with the glories of past ages. Beginning with the publication of the popular poem "Defense of Guenevere" in 1858, his name was continually in the public's eye. Morris followed with the equally lauded poem "The Earthly Paradise," which dealt with life in the age of Chaucer. He later would write prose tales of Viking and Icelandic origin: the Grettis Saga (1869), the Volsunga Saga (1870), and Sigurd the Volsung (1876).

Morris was often asked to lecture on the primacy of art. He used these occasions to note that art need not be limited to canvas painting or sculpture. It should also include handicraft art, an area that would later prove a source of considerable profit for his manufacturing firm Kelmscott Manor House. One of his most anthologized of lectures was his The Beauty of Life (1882), which contained the core values of the primacy of art. Later in life, Morris assumed the world view of the committed Socialist. His perception of the inutility of commercialized art for capitalist purposes blended well with the Socialist thrust that all aspects of individual profit were too damaging to the souls of those who sought to remain above such grubby interests. His writings following his conversion to Socialism often reflect his aversion to the realities of the need for profit to engender the growth of any technological nation-state. Morris' life then was a function of his desire to place art on a pedestal where it could be admired by those who saw themselves as the inheritors of a culture that had been in decline for decades. Morris was determined to halt this decline. It is ironic that he envisioned the coming century as one that would exemplify his cherished hopes related to art. The viciousness of both world wars and the fragmentation of art would surely have filled him with despair.

William Morris spent the greater part of his adult life to preserve art from what he saw as the inevitable and corrosive encroachment of creeping capitalism. His early writings do not harp on the rhetoric of Marxist ideology; it took his later years of reading Marx to enable him to refine his position linking the dissolution of art with the baneful effects of life-denying industrialism. His overarching theme in many of his writings is that art and human life are commingled in a manner that suggests that the one cannot exist independently of the other.

"Beauty" by itself does not refer merely to that which the human mind finds aesthetically pleasing. Rather, it is a union of art and life. The art is the object that the human mind and hand creates out of base elements. When the times are right, the artist lives in an environment conducive to the fruition of that art as an immortal expression of all that is noblest within the human soul. Up until the Renaissance, all times in all cultures were fruitful in that sense. From the Renaissance until Morris' own day, art has devolved from a unique and original flowering of the mind of the artist to a time when art is now perceived only as a pale imitation or "pretense" of what it used to be. It is almost irrelevant--at least from Morris' point of view--whether the art under discussion is of one type or another. He uses the term interchangeably throughout most of the essay.

The flip side of the art/beauty equation is how their fusion impacts on human life in general. Morris sees human beings as sentient creatures who need more than the basic drives of food and shelter to survive. He notes that even in Paleolothic times Cro-Magnon artists managed to evade saber-toothed tigers and mastodons long enough to etch on their cave walls the first primitive attempts to record their nascent desires to establish a paradigm of humanistic thought. Art has invigorated all cultures in all epochs precisely because it allowed human beings to picture a mode of thought external to the harsh realm of gritty existence. This realm was of the mind even if the body was needed to grope toward it. Art was consistently viewed as a model of beauty toward which one could approach but never quite attain. As the world's collective civilizations rose and fell, so roughly did their art. This pattern of rise and fall maintained a reasonably consistent dance of symmetry. Morris sees a tipping point occurring in the Renaissance. What caused the human side of the equation to change was its corresponding "life" side. Morris envisions the Renaissance as a period of such geometric growth of art that a pinnacle had been reached. Art presumably could go no higher. There was no longer a reason for artists to create new art. All that remained was for future generations of artists to... Read more ›