From ceramics to silver, calligraphy to textiles, glass to
bookbinding, crafts have played a rich and complex role in the
social, cultural and artistic history of Britain in the 20th
century. This book is the first to survey the full range of
individual crafts and key practitioners from the pre-World War I
years of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the 1990s. It shows how
the crafts movement emerged from a generalized anxiety about the
production and commodification of objects in a highly
industrialized society. Caught between the influences of fine art
and design, crafts have defined and redefined themselves throughout
the century. The book offers much to anyone with an interest in
art, design and crafts. (Kirkus UK)
From ceramics to silversmithing, calligraphy to textiles, hot glass
to bookbinding, crafts have played a rich and complex role in the
social, cultural, and artistic history of twentieth-century
Britain. This all-encompassing book is the first to survey the full
range of individual craft disciplines and key practitioners from
the pre-World War I years of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the
1990s. Tanya Harrod shows how the crafts movement emerged in
response to generalized anxiety about the production,
commodification, and consumption of objects in a highly
industrialized society. Caught between the more powerful
disciplines of fine art, architecture, and design for industry,
crafts have defined and redefined themselves throughout the
century. The book begins with the craft revival of the early 1900s,
tracing the complex legacy of John Ruskin and William Morris. The
author then discusses how the Arts and Crafts Movement was forced
to reexamine its aims during the Great War; how the development of
the crafts was closely connected to the development of modernism
between the wars; and how during World War II the idea of the
handmade, often in the form of vernacular craft discovered in
remote pockets of England, played a significant part in
propagandizing a national culture worth defending. The book also
explores the postwar beginnings of a countercultural workshop-based
craft movement led by Bernard Leach and the continuing redefinition
of crafts as the government-funded Crafts Council pushed them
toward the fine arts and then the government attempted in the 1980s
to recast them as exemplars of enterprise culture. Harrod describes
the increasingly blurred division between craft and design for mass
production at the conclusion of the book. Along with historians,
educators, artists, craftspersons, and collectors, readers with an
interest in British cultural history will find in this book much to
delight and fascinate. This book accompanies an exhibition of
British crafts, "The Pleasures of Peace: Craft, Art and Design in
Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s," that will open at the
Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in spring 1999.
Published in association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies
in the Decorative Arts
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