arts and crafts

Widely influential late-C19 English movement that attempted to re-establish the skills of craftsmanship threatened by mass-production and industrialization. Whilst the medieval craft-guilds were revered as ideals, the movement had its origins in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who proposed that manual skills should be acquired by everybody, no matter from what social class, but owed its immediate impetus to the polemical publications and widespread influence of Pugin and Ruskin. The last founded the Guild of St George in 1871 to promote the transition from theory to practice, but the most important personality associated with the Arts-and-Crafts movement was William Morris, who sought to revive medieval standards and methods of making artefacts while holding truth to materials, constructional methods, and function to be the essence of design. Learning the problems and solutions of providing designs for objects in his own living-accommodation, Morris set up a company in 1861 capable of undertaking any species of decoration, from pictures to a consideration of the smallest work in which artistic beauty could be incorporated. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co, with which Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), and Philip Webb were closely associated, embraced medieval craftsmanship as the ideal, opposed mass-production, and encouraged design and decoration intricately allied to the properties of materials and the logical methods of construction, drawing on traditional and vernacular precedents. The movement gave rise to the Century Guild (founded by Mackmurdo in 1882), the Art-Workers' Guild (1884), the Guild of Handicraft (founded by Ashbee in 1888), and the Arts-and-Crafts Exhibition Society (1888) which promoted Arts-and-Crafts ideals. Soon the movement was taken up on the Continent, notably in Austria-Hungary (where the Sezession and the Wiener Werkstätte were two of its most obvious offspring), Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia (where it is still influential at the beginning of C20). Other key figures were Walter Crane (1845–1915), W. R. Lethaby (who had an enormous influence on education, was appointed Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1896, and was the mentor of the Barnsley brothers and Ernest Gimson), and E. S. Prior.

The chief legacy of the movement to architecture was the appreciation of vernacular buildings leading to elements derived from them being widely used in the Domestic Revival (which grew out of the Gothic Revival and aspects of the Picturesque). Important developments in housing such as at Bedford Park, Chiswick (from the 1870s), Bournville, near Birmingham, Warwicks. (from the 1890s), Letchworth, Herts. (from 1903), and Port Sunlight, Ches. (from the 1880s), all employed themes drawn from vernacular architecture and set the agenda for domestic architecture in Britain until 1939. So admired was English domestic architecture that a major study of it by Hermann Muthesius was published as Das Englische Haus (The English House—1904/5), and regular articles also appeared in architectural journals as well as in the influential art journal The Studio (which strongly supported the Arts-and-Crafts movement as a whole). Two American disciples of Morris, Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) and Gustav Stickley (1857–1942), helped to promote the movement in the USA.

Finally, the movement was in the vanguard of recording, studying, and preserving old buildings, and argued for the careful conservation of ancient fabric rather than wholesale or drastic ‘restorations’. Morris himself founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) which has been an influential agent ever since.

Bibliography

• Anscombe (1996)
• Carruthers (1992)
• Cumming & Kaplan (1991)
• P. Davey (1980, 1995)
• Haigh (1995)
• Hawkes (1986)
• Kaplan (1987)
• C. Kelley (2001)
• Kornwolf (1972)
• Lewis & Darley (1986)
• Latham (ed.) (1980)
• M. Richardson (1983)
• Stansky (1996)
• R. Winter (ed.) (1997)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

This article is about the hobby. For other uses, see Arts & Crafts.

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Handicraft. (Discuss)

At the Buell Childrens Museum in Pueblo, Colorado, children and their guardians partake in arts and crafts.

Arts and crafts comprise a whole host of activities and hobbies that are related to making things with one's hands and skill. These can be sub-divided into handicrafts or "traditional crafts" (doing things the old way) and "the rest". Some crafts have been practised for centuries, while others are modern inventions, or popularisations of crafts which were originally practised in a very small geographic area.

Most crafts require a combination of skill, speed, and patience, but they can also be learnt on a more basic level by virtually anyone. Many community centres and schools run evening or day classes and workshops offering to teach basic craft skills in a short period of time. Many of these crafts become extremely popular for brief periods of time (a few months, or a few years), spreading rapidly among the crafting population as everyone emulates the first examples, then their popularity wanes until a later resurgence.

Contents 1 Terminology 2 Types of arts and crafts 2.1 Crafts involving textiles 2.2 Crafts involving wood, metal or clay 2.3 Crafts involving paper or canvas 2.4 Crafts involving plants 2.5 Other crafts 3 See also 4 External links

Terminology

Arts and crafts also refers to the Arts and Crafts movement, a late 19th century design reform and social movement. Its proponents were motivated by the ideals of William Morris and John Ruskin, who proposed that in pre-industrial societies, such as the European Middle Ages, people had achieved fulfillment through the creative process of handicrafts. This was held up in contrast to what was perceived to be the alienating effects of industrial labour.

Works Progress Administration, Crafts Class, 1935.

These activities are called crafts because originally many of them were professions under the guild system. Adolescents were apprenticed to a master-craftsman, and they refined their skills over a period of years in exchange for low wages. By the time their training was complete, they were well-equipped to set up in trade for themselves, earning their living with the skill that could be traded directly within the community, often for goods and services. The Industrial Revolution and the increasing mechanisation of production processes gradually reduced or eliminated many of the roles professional craftspeople played, and today "crafts" are most commonly seen as a form of hobby or art.

The term craft also refers to the products of artistic production or creation that require a high degree of tacit knowledge, are highly technical, require specialized equipment and/or facilities to produce, involve manual labour or a blue-collar work ethic, are accessible to the general public and are constructed from materials with histories that exceed the boundaries of western art history, such as ceramics, glass, textiles, metal and wood. These products are produced within a specific community of practice and while they differ from the products produced within the communities of art and design, the boundaries of such often overlap resulting in hybrid objects. Additionally, as the interpretation and validation of art is frequently a matter of context, an audience may perceive crafted objects as art objects when these objects are viewed within an art context, such as in a museum or in a position of prominence in one's home.

The term can also refer to the useful rural crafts of the agricultural countryside. Craftsmanship refers to Plato's idea of specialization, in which the lower society has a specific job in the greater society so that it functions properly as a whole.

Types of arts and crafts

There are almost as many variations on the theme of "arts and crafts" as there are crafters with time on their hands, but they can be broken down into a number of categories:

Crafts involving textiles

• Banner-making
• Calligraphy
• Canvas work
• Cross-stitch
• Crocheting
• Curve stitching
• Embroidery
• Felting
• Knitting
• Lace-making
• Lucet
• Macrame
• Millinery
• Needlepoint
• Patchwork
• Quilting
• Ribbon embroidery
• Rug making
• Sewing
• Shoemaking
• Spinning (textiles)
• Spirelli (also see Scrapbooking)
• String art
• Tapestry
• Tatting
• T-shirt art
• Weaving

Crafts involving wood, metal or clay

Small wooden sculpture depicting a Native American mother holding her child.

• Cabinet making
• Carpentry
• Chip carving
• Jewelry
• Marquetry
• Metalworking
• Pottery
• Sculpture
• Wood burning
• Wood turning
• Woodworking

Crafts involving paper or canvas

• Altered Books
• Altered Art
• Artist Trading Cards
• Bookbinding
• Calligraphy
• Cardmaking
• Card Modelling
• Collage
• Decoupage
• Embossing
• Iris Folding
• Marbling
• Origami
• Papercraft
• Papier-mâché
• Parchment craft
• Quilling or Paper Filigree
• Scrapbooking
• Rubber Stamping/Acrylic Stamping
• Teabag Folding

Crafts involving plants

• Basket weaving
• Corn dolly making
• Floral Design
• Pressed flower craft
• Straw Marquetry

Other crafts

• Balloon animal
• Beadwork
• Doll making
• Dollhouse construction and furnishing
• Egg decorating
• Etching
• Glassblowing
• Lapidary
• Miniatures
• Mosaics
• Pioneering
• Stained glass
• Toy making
• Polymer clay

See also

• Craftivism
• List of acronyms used in arts and crafts

External links

• Founders of the Arts and Crafts movement

v • d • e Decorative arts, handicrafts, arts and crafts Textile Banner-making · Canvas work · Cross-stitch · Crocheting · Curve stitching · Embroidery · Felting · Friendship bracelet · Knitting · Lace-making · Lucet · Macrame · Millinery · Needlepoint · needlework · Patchwork · Quilting · Ribbon embroidery · Rug hooking · Rug making · Sewing · Shoemaking · Spinning (textiles) · String art · Tapestry · Tatting · Tie-dye · Weaving Paper Bookbinding · Calligraphy · Cardmaking · Card Modelling · Collage · Decoupage · Embossing · Iris folding · Marbling · Origami · Papercraft · Papier-mâché · Scrapbooking · Stamping Wood Cabinet making · Carpentry · Chip carving · Intarsia · Marquetry · Wood burning · Wood carving · Woodturning · Woodworking Ceramic Azulejo · Cameo glass · Ceramics · Glassware · Pottery · Stained glass Metal Metalworking · Jewellery Other Assemblage · Beadwork · Bone carving · Doll making · Dollhouse · Egg decorating · Engraved gems  · Hardstone carving  · Jewellery  · Lathart · Lapidary · Miniatures · Micromosaic  · Mosaic · Pietra dura  · Pressed flower craft · Scrimshaw · Straw marquetry  · Textile arts

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)