Enjoying William Morris

Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960
National Portrait Gallery, London
16 October 2014 – 11 January 2015

On the face of things, William Morris (1834-1896) doesn’t seem to have much of a profile in New Zealand. As a promoter of the arts and crafts movement, which, together with John Ruskin, he founded, he’s a reference, a distant source of an idea. His work as a poet, printer and a political activist, is pretty much ignored probably for the same vicarious reasons. His productions of textiles and furniture, as retailed through Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later Morris & Co), were with the odd exception (the book collector Alexander Turnbull being the notably odd exception) too expensive for the thrifty burghers of the colony and, with its socialist resonances, too devoid of imperial glory for the grandees of the dominion. While his romantic mediaeval-revival poetry and sagas found some passing New Zealand adherents in the early years of the twentieth century, they were known through cheap posthumous editions, not through the beautifully crafted editions from his Kelmscott Press; only Turnbull was financially enabled to collect those. Strangely enough, it was Morris' theorising about art that had impact in the colony, largely by its promulgation through an inadvertent process of colonialism: art education.

John Dearle for Morris & Co. Stained and painted glass window, 1910-1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased with the assistance of the Charles Disney Art Trust Fund, 2010 (GH020700)

A man who has prompted multiple biographies, Morris and his productions appear in most major collections of art and design although there aren't many of those in New Zealand. The tokenist holdings of Morris-related material in the Auckland Museum include a printed curtain, posthumously produced by Morris & Co and a 'Rossetti' chair, marketed by Morris & Co (both acquired in the 1980s). Te Papa's holdings include a stained glass window produced by Morris & Co and a sketch design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for another Morris & Co window. Morris' designs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. In 2008 the Christchurch Art Gallery was the venue for Morris & Co: the world of William Morris assembled by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the one Antipodean institute with a significant holding of his work. The focus of these exhibitions has been on Morris’s work as a designer of textiles, furniture and private-press books and on his firm's retailing of carefully co-ordinated, expensively-produced, commodities for the well-upholstered interiors of the privileged classes.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is the – perhaps surprising – venue for the exhibition Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960, curated by the independent historian Fiona MacCarthy, author of one of the more definitive recent biographies of Morris, William Morris: a life for our time (London : Faber, 1995).  Unlike its predecessor exhibitions Anarchy and beauty investigates the political dimension of Morris' design activities and the impact they had not only on his contemporaries but also on the subsequent generations of theorists, agitators, designers, planners, makers and retailers. Even with its British focus, the exhibition promotes an impressive genealogy, even if some of the more connective elements of the table are missing.

Where, for example, is that great implementer of Morris' ideology, Hubert Llewellyn Smith? Smith underwent a Damascene conversion to Morris' vision after attending a lecture 'Art and democracy' given by Morris, under the aegis of Ruskin, in the hall of University College, Oxford, in November 1883. He was so inspired that he became a Toynbee Hall pedagogue, a protégé of the Webbs, the effective founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts (by way of his 1893 report on technical education for the London County Council), the founding secretary of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade and the patron of William Beveridge, the originator – in 1908 – of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade and hence a whole line of state-sponsored design promotional organisations up to today's neutered Design Council.

Walter Crane. Bookplate design for Alexander Turnbull, 1891.
Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand (A-136-001) 

So in this glorious rag bag of those influenced by Morris' ideology we get the designer Walter Crane (represented in the exhibition among other things by his design of the membership card of the Hammersmith Socialist Society) and the socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist and early LGBT activist Edward Carpenter (represented by his Indian-made sandals) ; the anarchist geographer and philosopher Prince Pyotr Kropotkin; the Suffragette painter Sylvia Pankhurst and the stained glass artist Mary Lowndes; the painter and potter William de Morgan and the silver designer, architect and pedagogue C R Ashbee (a magnificent silver peacock brooch he designed for his long-suffering wife); the priapic calligrapher and designer Eric Gill and Ebenezer Howard, the architect and planner who developed the idea of the garden city. Leaping well into the twentieth century we encounter the furniture and textile designers Robin and Lucien Day, the industrial designer Misha Black and, lastly and certainly not in his view leastly, the retailer Terence Conran. But, as the Guardian's Rachel Cooke observes, despite all this plenitude of names and associated objects, it's fundamentally all about 'Morris, the fat spider, who sits at the heart of the web constructed by the exhibition's curator, Fiona MacCarthy'. It's Morris' insistence on the availability to all of objects that are both utilitarian and beautiful and that the acquisition of manual skills is not only essential to a well-rounded life but also a life-enhancing political act. In Morris case, beauty was to be found in the relics of Mediaeval Europe, later adherents to his thinking found it elsewhere.

David Kindersley after a design by Eric Gill, 'Adam and Eve' garden roller, Portland stone and iron.
Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery)

It's in Ann Calhoun's impressively researched book The arts and crafts movement in New Zealand 1870-1940: women make their mark (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000) that we are able to understand both the impact that Morris had in New Zealand and, in part, why this legacy has been so ignored by local historians of art and design.

Design and its relation with manufacturing was an issue that had been a concern of the British state long before Morris began delving into its roots. From the late 1830s, the British government began establishing Schools of Design around the country aimed primarily at improving the quality of design and thus of industrial production. By the 1850s responsibility for overseeing the curricula for these schools was controlled via the Department of Science and Art's South Kensington Museum. As Calhoun notes, Morris became an adviser to the South Kensington Museum in 1876 and was appointed an examiner, a position he retained until his death. In the absence of any local initiative, this British art training system was imported directly into New Zealand through the establishment of local art schools – with minimal government involvement – who employed not only graduates of the South Kensington National Art Training School but also its teaching methodologies and examinations. Given the non-existence of any significant manufacturing industry in the colony and thus an associated class of 'skilled artisans' the majority of those attending these schools tended to be women and the focus of their education tended to be domestic and/or appropriate for the teaching of primary school children; drawing was an required to be taught in New Zealand schools under the terms of the 1877 Education Act.

'British art section - arts and crafts', from Isidore Spielmann, The British government exhibit at the New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-1907 (London: HMSO, 1908), p. 243. The frieze circumventing the rooms was designed by Walter Crane

Arts and crafts productions did however receive considerable popular exposure and even some acclaim in 1906-07, at the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch, but these were British made, selected by Walter Crane in his capacity as president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Crane's role didn't require him to visit visit New Zealand – he was represented at the exhibition by Alfred Appleby Longden – but he also designed the frieze used on the walls of the exhibit, although he'd executed it for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St Louis in the United States. The inclusion of these arts and crafts pieces in the exhibition seems to have been the result of significant lobbying by Hubert Llewellyn Smith in his then capacity as acting permanent secretary of the British Board of Trade. They were an highly popular component of the exhibition: many pieces sold, 321 articles by 72 exhibitors. However, as Calhoun observes, the exhibit was 'very English' and a colonial hankering for reasonably-priced relics from 'home' may have accounted for the popularity of the pieces, few of which have been identified subsequently.

Effectively, by being stripped of its political dimension, gendered as a feminine concern and its promulgation confined to the genteel middle classes, Morris' noisy, rumbustious, socialist, all people and all classes, hands-on arts and crafts movement failed to flourish in colonial New Zealand. As Calhoun's text demonstrates, there were some enormously talented designers and makers, but the marginality of art and the absence of any viable market for their productions effectively put an end to any dream of living by their work.

Charles James Fox after a design by May Morris. Memorial case of gold-plated wood containing a locket of William Morris' hair, 1896-97
Victoria & Albert Museum

As Anarchy and beauty clearly demonstrates such was not to be Morris' British legacy. His socialism may have been overtaken by larger political events, but its core values remain a part of British political discourse. His furniture, textile and wallpaper productions may have been dismissed for much of the twentieth century as old-fashioned (Morris & Co finally closed in 1940) but the objects he designed and made, as indeed are those of his followers and adherents are highly sought after and many of the textiles and wallpapers remain in production. MacCarthy's intelligently structured, slyly witty (not the usual experience one imparts from a serious exhibition), brilliantly contextualised and beautifully selected exhibition shows the vitality of Morris' thinking and, indeed, its relevance to today. Appropriately, it's also well-designed and is accompanied by an equally rewarding catalogue. A must see, if you can get there.

Industry and the artist: Eric Lee-Johnson and design

Eric A Johnson and his dog, London, about 1937
Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

In the painter and photographer Eric Lee-Johnson’s somewhat hastily written and lightly edited autobiography, passing reference is made to his becoming ‘one of the original members of the Institute of Industrial Design’ whilst in London in the 1930s, noting that ‘I was invited to join by the organiser, Milner Grey (sic), and took no active part beyond attending lectures, but was glad to lend my name to the aims of such movements (sic).’ (Eric Lee-Johnson, No road to follow: autobiography of a New Zealand artist (Auckland: Godwit, 1994), p. 31).

There was no such organisation as the Institute of Industrial Design, organised by Milner Gray, constituted in London during the 1930s. However, Gray was one of the founder members of a group of practicing designers that in September 1930 became the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA). The SIA aimed at ‘becoming a controlling authority to advance and protect the interests of Industrial Artists and at raising the standard of Industrial Art in this country, both from an economic and cultural standpoint.’ (James Holland, Minerva at fifty (Westerham, Kent: Hurtwood, 1980), p. 1).

Eric A Johnson – as he was then known – arrived in London in May 1930 and, as an employee of some of London’s leading advertising agencies, initially S H Benson Ltd and, later, Arks Publicity Ltd, he would have been intimately acquainted with the efforts of British designers to obtain professional recognition. Johnson was not the only New Zealander to be recruited to the SIA; others known to have been members included his friend from Elam days, the designer and artist James Boswell and the radical filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye.

Eric A Johnson's packaging design for Alfred Imhof & Sons Ltd, about 1937

Lee-Johnson’s activities as an industrial designer remain obscure: as with his photography, he evidently felt that knowledge of his work as a designer would compromise his reputation as a painter. The only known example of his work in this field was the design of the packaging of long-playing gramophone needles that he undertook for the record shop Alfred Imhof & Sons Ltd of 110 New Oxford Street while he was at Arks Publicity Ltd. The packaging design Johnson developed for Imhof was typical of the work undertaken by his London contemporaries such as Gray and Ashley Havinden. Influenced by German modernist designers, it was suited for mass display, employed new font types - usually sans serif, employed high contrast tonal fields and, characteristic of the work of many of the London designers, was slightly whimsical. 

Milner Gray's packaging design for Ilford Ltd, about 1937

The formation of the SIA came at a critical time in the emergence of design as a clearly identifiable practice during the first half of the twentieth century. While the ‘industrial arts’ had been a part of the state’s teaching curricula since the 1830s, it had been regarded as a ‘minor art’, a ‘decorative art’, an ‘applied art’. Industrial artists were regarded as little more than ornamentalists and decorators, who, on the odd occasion they were employed by manufacturers, were required to produce superficial designs that could be adapted to the dominant requirements of mass production. Other designers, such as Johnson, were identified, more often than not equally pejoratively, as commercial artists and typographers and they were often employed as technicians in printing offices and, from the 1890s, in advertising agencies.

But from the first decade of the twentieth century attitudes towards design in Britain – and to a lesser extent in the ‘colonies’ –­ began to change as the decadence of Britain’s manufacturing sector became increasingly apparent. Officials at the British Board of Trade, somewhat optimistically, identified design as a missing ingredient in the production process by as early as 1908. But it wasn’t until after the First World War that the first hesitant steps were taken in an attempt to address design deficiencies of the manufacturing sector.

The most notable of these measures resulted from the indefatigable endeavours of one of the most unlikely design promoters, Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, permanent secretary of the Board of Trade from 1908 to 1919 and subsequently Chief Economic Adviser to the Government until 1927. In 1919 Llewellyn Smith wrote - anonymously - a short pamphlet, Art and industry, for the Ministry for Reconstruction that argued a greater role for design in the British industrial environment. Shortly afterwards he managed to extract seed funding from the Treasury for the establishment of a prototype design promotion organisation, the pompously named British Institute of Industrial Art, which functioned, anaemically, until 1933. He also published a theoretical text, The economic laws of art production (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) and the following year taught a course on industrial art to students enrolled for the London School of Economics’ new commerce degree; it was not popular and William Pember Reeves, president of the LSE and a former High Commissioner for New Zealand, had the embarrassing task of informing Llewellyn Smith that his services were no longer required.

Llewellyn Smith was also the major driving force behind the next two measures implemented by the British state in what was an, at times, contradictory design promotion strategy: the formation of the Council for Art and Industry (1934) and the introduction of a National Register of Industrial Art Designers (1936), a state-funded registration formwork for designers, which while not offering the same level of professional protection that had been afforded to architects by the 1931 Architects (Registration) Act, at least provided a level of official recognition for the nascent practice: registered designers were able to employ the post-nominal NRIAD.

It wasn’t only officialdom that was interested in design in Britain. While the formation in 1916 of the Design & Industries Association - modelled on the Deutsche Werkbund (1907) - was probably the result of yet another Llewellyn Smith initiative, the private sector, notably the advertising industry, was beginning to understand how design could radically alter consumer preferences. Probably the most innovative advertising agency in London was W S Crawford Ltd. In 1925 its chairman, Sir William Crawford, who had attended the University of Tübingen prior to the First World War, invited members of the Bundes Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker, the highly influential professional association of German graphic designers to London, a seemingly fugitive event that not only acted as a catalyst for modernism in Britain but also provided British designers with a template of how to organise design practice. The SIA can be viewed as one of the more tangible results of this visit.

Lee-Johnson returned to New Zealand in 1938 and his career as a practicing industrial designer came to an abrupt close. Lacking any significant manufacturing sector and with a consumer market inured to the traditional, there was no recognisable demand for the well-designed products of modernism, even in the advertising industry where he was employed. Surprisingly, given his involvement with the SIA during his years in London, Lee-Johnson does not appear to have been involved with Milner Gray’s 1949 visit to New Zealand and there is no evidence that he retained his membership of the practitioner body following his return to the country.

Instead of practising industrial design, Lee-Johnson began to write about it. His first article ‘Industry and the Artist’ was published in Art in New Zealand in March 1943. In it he lamented the poor standard of design prevailing across the country, arguing that ‘The bad designing in the past of most things produced in New Zealand […] was the artist’s personal responsibility, although noting that ‘this position exists because of the shortsightedness of the majority of our industrialists.’ (Art in New Zealand, no. 3 (1943), p. 3).

Page from 'New Zealand postage stamp design' from the Arts Year Book, no 7,
edited by Eric Lee-Johnson (1951)

It was not a sophisticated analysis of the situation and took little account either of the realities of New Zealand’s trading position as a captive market for British manufacturers or, indeed, the realpolitik of a wartime economy. Lee-Johnson’s views on design shifted; in his last published essay on design matters, ‘New Zealand postage stamp design’, he recognised that his simplistic analysis of the design process was a more complex process and that good design was not just an issue for designers and manufacturers but also other involved parties such as consumers and, critically, the state. (Arts Year Book, no. 7 (1951), pp. 91-96).

Like that other Elam-trained designer, Jo Sinel, Eric Lee-Johnson can be counted among the first New Zealanders to be regarded as industrial designers yet, due primarily to limited opportunity, neither practiced in the country. Lee-Johnson’s impact on New Zealand design comes through his informed writing about the subject at a time few New Zealanders were even aware of the practice.

Glitches in the modernist narrative

In 1988, in the midst of the bicentennial celebrations of European settlement in Australia, in what was the first critical attempt to evaluate the place of design in Australian history, Tony Fry - a lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Power Institute of Fine Arts - pointedly observed that: ‘From the way design has been written about in Australia, and how this writing exists in relation to a textual field from the metropolitan centres of modernity, it can be clearly seen that like much else the cultural and economic nature of design has been a product of the elsewhere.’ (Tony Fry, Design history Australia (1988), p. 77).  Fry’s observation is even more acutely applicable to the place of design in New Zealand: despite recent attempts to confect an ersatz genealogy of design history in New Zealand, the country’s design culture effectively frames a dislocated space.

Alfred Appleby Longden in Christchurch in 1907

Every now and then, one comes across an oddity, an uncharacteristic glitch, in the received narrative of metropolitan modernity. One such instance occurred in Christchurch between 1906 and 1907 and it concerns a temporarily employed British official, Alfred Appleby Longden (1875-1954), who had been despatched by the British Board of Trade to supervise the installation of British works of art and craft at the New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries.  In terms of an understanding of the modernist imperative, Longden is of relative insignificance, but for much of his working life he serendipitously, found himself associated with the emergence of key institutional indicators in the emergence of design as an identifiable set of discrete processes.

British art section: arts and crafts in the British government display at the New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch, 1906-7. 
Christchurch City Libraries

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Longden, after working as an art master in Sunderland, was recruited by the Board of Trade as an exhibition assistant, probably for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St Louis. He was then sent to Christchurch where he stayed from September 1906 until June 1907, evidently enjoying himself. Aside from his substantive work installing and running the British fine arts section of the exhibition, he toured the country, painted watercolours, judged exhibitions and fancy dress parades, identified ‘lost masterpieces’ by Watteau, Rembrandt and Turner and opined on the state of the arts in New Zealand. On his return to the United Kingdom he was appointed director of the Aberdeen Corporation Art Gallery and then, in 1912, was once again recruited by the Board of Trade for its newly established Exhibitions Branch.

In the aftermath of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 British manufacturers were increasingly disinclined to exhibit their products at the great international exhibitions. There was a growing belief that exhibitions were no longer sales opportunities but entertainments for the masses: panem et circenses sort of stuff that satisfied political rather than commercial needs. While there was some validity in the manufacturers’ complaints, the more probable reason for their disinterest was that British wares were consistently outclassed by the output of German, French and American producers and their displays outshone by those of the same nations, which were organised and subsidised by the state.

The British government hubristically concluded that the fine arts were probably the best way the country could maintain a presence at these increasingly showy displays of international one-upmanship. The decision was influenced by the activities of the art entrepreneur Isidore Spielmann (1854-1925) who, from the 1890s actively promoted British art, initially in a private capacity, but later as a representative of the British government. Spielmann’s great moment came in 1906 when David Lloyd George, president of the Board of Trade appointed a committee to enquire into ‘The participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions’. Spielmann was appointed a member; his recruitment was made on the recommendation of Hubert Llewellyn Smith (1864-1945), the recently appointed permanent secretary of the Board who, inter alia, had an obsessive interest in the industrial arts.

After almost a year’s deliberation the committee reported back recommending the establishment of an exhibitions branch to co-ordinate British representation at international exhibitions. A critical factor in the committee’s decision was the success of the British art exhibit at Christchurch (sales exceeded those made at all previous exhibitions) and ‘the small and unrepresentative nature of the trade exhibits’, allegedly the consequence of ‘distance and the want of market’. As his reward, Spielmann was appointed honorary (unpaid) director of art of the newly established organisation. 

The Exhibitions Branch was a game-changer: for the first time the resources of the state were harnessed to the promotion of British industry under the direction of the state, rather than the manufacturer, individually or collectively. This separation of role between producer and promoter laid the grounds for the emergence of design as a discrete process in the production and consumption of commodities.

Once formed – in 1908 – the Exhibitions Branch took charge of the appearance of British displays at international exhibitions, not only in terms of the venue but also of the selection of items. The branch’s taste was conservative: the pavilions it built were either faked-up replicas of historic British buildings or grand, imperial confections – the British School in Rome, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was constructed as the British Fine Art Palace for the 1911 Esposizione internazionale dell'arte in Rome. The contents chosen to fill these halls were equally traditional, academy paintings and, daringly, the whittled, bashed, blown and woven essays of the members of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society.

The work of the Exhibitions Branch was suspended soon after the start of the First World War. While it was resurrected after the war it also prompted the formation of the British Institute of Industrial Art (1919) which morphed into the Council for Art and Industry (1936) which in turn was transmogrified into the Council for Industrial Design (1944) - now known as the Design Council – which, in turn was one of the inspirations for the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (1967). A full circle, if you like.

As for AA Longden: at the outbreak of war he joined up and, as an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery, was awarded a DSO and twice mentioned in dispatches; for the rest of his life he was known as Major Longden. After the war he was employed as director of the British Institute of Industrial Art (another Llewellyn Smith innovation) until that was defunded in 1923. That same year he returned to working on exhibitions, being appointed assistant director (applied art) for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. After the uncertainty of the Institute, Longden seems to have enjoyed himself both as one of the selectors of the British fine art exhibits and as cicerone to visiting worthies. These included the Australian architect John Sulman who took his advice in assembling a collection of 'cheap applied arts' which he intended as a gift for the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sulman's generosity was rejected by the gallery trustees and ended up at the Sydney Technological Museum (now the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, known colloquially as the Powerhouse Museum, after its principal venue) where, in the 1950s, it was dispersed and, in part, disposed of as being of little value; the remaining material has been reassembled subsequently.

A selection of John Sulman's 'cheap applied arts', mostly acquired in London in August 1924
 on the advice of  Major AA Longden.
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Following his success at Wembley and having wangled a transfer back to the successor body of the Exhibitions Branch, the Exhibitions Division of the Department of Overseas Trade, Longden worked on a series of international and imperial exhibitions throughout the 1920s and 30s, in the process seemingly ingratiating himself with various authoritarian regimes (he was made a knight grand officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1938). In 1936 he was appointed joint secretary of the Council for Art & Industry but his genial incompetence infuriated its chairman Frank Pick and so he was despatched to the recently established British Council where, as secretary of its Fine Arts Committee, he survived until his retirement in 1947. His last job, at the age of 72, was as director of the Wernher Collection, an extraordinary assemblage of nineteenth century nouveau riche taste and Romanov trinkets then housed at Luton Hoo and he was still there when he died in 1954.