William Morris and the Argument for Beauty
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog entry. I’ve been waiting for an exciting topic to present itself, but sometimes you just need to get the ball rolling yourself. This is a good time to tackle a simple question that is always hard for me to answer: who is my favorite artist? For years I would stumble over my words finding an answer. Well, no longer. I have made up my mind. I love William Morris. Artist, philosopher, craftsman, poet, designer, medievalist. Whichever hat he is wearing, William Morris is my favorite.
William Morris (1834—1896) was a devout Socialist and sought to level class inequality—particularly how class inequality was manifested through the availability of arts and crafts. Morris believed art is a necessity, not a privilege, and should be available to anyone who wants it, not just the wealthy elite. A good example of Morris’s mission to make accessible art is his invention of decorative wallpaper. Before William Morris, wall coverings were made of expensive fabrics. Morris innovated many household decorations and furnishings that were beautiful, handcrafted and most importantly—inexpensive. Morris co-founded the decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with close friends and creative colleagues Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. The group created murals, woodcarvings, stained glass, metal work, printed fabrics, and carpets for churches and private homes.
He became increasingly politically active over the years and fully embraced socialism in the late 1880s. He co-authored The Socialist Democratic Manifesto in 1883 and published several socialist periodicals and texts, which sullied his reputation as a respectable poet and artist—especially in the eyes of his alma mater, Oxford. He led the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts Movement (1860—1910), which advocated making decorative hand crafted arts inexpensive while maintaining a high quality standard. By 1890 the organized Socialists in England became overrun by anarchist attitudes and Morris left the group to carry on the traditional socialist ideals alone, albeit a bit jaded and disillusioned.
Along with socialist philosophies, his love of history and folklore colors his artwork. His paintings and poetry often revolve around King Arthur, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table. Morris devoted his later life to The Kelmscott Press (1891), a company he founded that published “illuminated manuscript” medieval styled books adorned with ornate illustrations and calligraphy. Its most famous publication is The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Many writers before Morris had described foreign lands and dream worlds, but Morris was the first fiction writer to describe an entirely invented fantasy world. He’s accredited with influencing C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien even admitted to borrowing the name “Gandolf” from Morris’s The Well at the World’s End.
Morris was clearly a renaissance man, but his devotion to four ideals creates a sense of continuity throughout his life’s varied work: beauty, craftsmanship, respect for history, and equality. I feel a palpable cynicism for beauty in the art world today. I am baffled by this attitude. Beauty lifts our spirits, increases our standard of living, and represents an ideal for which we strive. People have a natural attraction to beauty, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t “escape” into a beautiful painting, movie or song to avoid my problems. “Escaping” into beautiful art has the opposite effect. I return to the struggles of reality refreshed and reinvigorated. Yes, life is hard. That’s what makes beauty so special. It’s rare. And yet beauty is still misinterpreted as frivolous sentimentalism. Looking through William Morris’s work, I think he makes a strong argument that beauty is much more than that.
