Page 64 - Studio International - March 1968

on of Janey and Rossetti (136), but has also (143) 'A be saddled with Arts and Crafts-Watkinson insists on
The Morris world good deal of the masochist'; on the same page (81) he this, sweeping almost everyone into that loose net­
has 'rude and robust health' and is epileptic, a
and garden suburbs and garden cities and new
disease he passed to his daughter Jenny (166): this towns, as Thompson has it, then we had better pause
particular notion depending on an assertion by Shaw, and reflect: let us remember Walter Crane, and ask
of very dubious worth. whether we are to admire that; and ask about the
William Morris, his Life, Work and Friends by Philip
Henderson, 388 pp. Thames ar.id Hudson 63s. Discussion of this opaque personality Is not irrele- share of late pre-Raphaelitlsm and Arts and Crafts in
William Morris as Designer by Ray Watkinson. 84 pp. vant,--beeause-jey-in-wor-k-and work In joy, fellowship, - h1ndering the Modern Movement in England and on the
art as co-operation are such important parts of the
with 90 illustrations. Studio Vista 70s. deplorableEngllshobsesslonwiththepicturesque and
The Work of William Morris by Paul Thompson. xvi, idea of Morris (a man who worked, on my reading, on with the village, and the refusal of the city and urban
300 pp. Heinemann 63s. the edge of desperation); and it is increasingly clear architecture. Better to look at Morris's patterns. Paul
that it is the idea of Morris that mattered and matters Thompson tends to shout. When Atkinson writes
Three books on Morris in as many months; and all for his beatification. Medieval Morris, always at his about the glass or the patterns, in his rather un­
addressed to the famous 'general reader'. An un­ loom-composing epics as he went along-artist skilfully arranged essay, he writes well; he has
precedented demand for chintzes and wallpapers by craftsman, hands and arms stained blue from the precise technical knowledge and can use it for analy­
Morris (or May Morris, or J. H. Dearle) at the admir­ lndigo vat, revolutionary in design; great pioneer of sis. This is more to the point than the vagueness of
able Sanderson's; and welcome, or unwelcome, the Modern Movement and of our only hopes for ,the 'the characteristic Bauhaus product was utterly alien
almost but not quite Morris papers produced else­ regeneration of life. You select which role you prefer to anything of Morris's own production; but it was
where. and support it with a carefully chosen anthology of made in his spirit'.
Take Pevsner, take E. P. Thompson's account of texts from Morris's writings (you can find a text for Yet the Idea or legend of a man may be more Im­
Morris's political Ideas, take the late Peter Floud's almost anything); or you can combine more than one. portant historically, and more moving, than anything
articles, and some scattered work on Morris, and on (Paul Thompson likes Morris's socialism; Philip he wrote or said or made. This I believe to be the case
contemporary design, and you have what has Henderson doesn't). with Morris. Much has to be said about Morris yet-
affected our view of Morris; and this has been duly Paul Thompson and Watkinson are deeply involved about his art, about the late romances, about the
used by our authors (though Watkinson's bibliography with Morris as Pioneer, the much advertised line: placing of his essays and speeches, exasperating
is unsatisfactory.) On the narrative of events, per­ Morris Arts and Crafts Muthesius Werkbund though these so often are, confused, contradictory,
sonality, relationships, Mr Henderson, whose book Bauhaus. But they are continually having to admit defaced by an arrogant, complacent ignorance and
will be widely read, for all his careful diligence and that none of Morris's work quite fits into this scheme; philistinism. Morris had one great talent, pattern­
extensive search of the archive material has not been which was indeed, surely based on an idea, a highly making; and many gifts. Of these the most remarkable
able to add very much that makes a substantial selective version of what a man was and represented. was his capacity to make what one can only call a
difference to what we know. Perhaps little Is to come. The literary critics won't have the poetry and are not total world, a 'Morris world', composed of people,
To amateurs of the home life of Morris, Paul Thompson likely to be impressed by Paul Thompson's eccentric houses, objects, literary projections. Elements were
offers startling news: 'Shaw found Janey as silent as admiration for Sigurd the Vo/sung. The Kelmscott given; but the synthesis was his; built on ruthlesness,
any earlier visitor, but he remembered Morris's Press has gone, except as a stimulus, and our authors, an obsessional temperament, self-absorption; and on
transparent affection for her. He could not sit in the though well informed, neglect the revival of interest inherited money. Morris, through the Firm, was able
same room without his arm round her waist. His voice in the printed book, and specifically in the North to attach and so sustain his world, private though it
changed when he spoke to her as it changed to no one Italian or Venetian book, which was so marked in the seemed, to an acceptable recognizable world of
else ... '. Unfortunately the name Shaw wrote was 1880s in the Century Guild circle. The glass has to be making, displaying, advertising, selling ;just as he was
Jenny (Observer, Nov. 6, 1949)-Paul Thompson is related to what others were doing. The Red House is able to write a best seller, The Earthly Paradise. His
sometimes careless-and so an agreeable image not so revolutionary as it once was. The Firm was not social-political concerns were earnest, persistent,
dissolves, and a !:>it of Paul Thompson's cheerful such a new or isolated case: only the most successful. costly. Yet again he was attaching himself to institu­
assertion that 'Morris in 1895 was thus a happy The more we learn about the organization of its pro- tionalized forms of behaviour-lectures, speeches,
man .. .' duction, the more conventional it becomes; and the meetings, processions, with the resulting 'publicity'­
Such argument Is not unimportant, for all these further recedes the image of designer-maker Morris which were to create 'personalities or explemplars"in
books are hagiographies. Paradoxically, Mackail's always at loom or dye-vat. As for the textiles and the last two decades of the century. Morris did not set
Life (1899), so skilful In its suppressions, is the least papers, we must accept Floud's formulation: Morris out to 'make himself' in this kind of way, as Shaw
hagiographical of all. And all our authors are com­ was no revolutionary innovator but the great classical deliberately did. Yet in a way he did: these activities
pelled to answer, evade, or minimize, Mackail's designer of his age. meant he was offering himself to a variety of groups,
fundamental premise: that Morris was incapable of There is no need for Watkinson and Paul Thompson with all his roles upon him, as guaranteeing what he
human relationships. 'He had no need for other to worry. Achievement is not necessarily measured, said. Through such networks of display and communl­
people. I doubt if their marriage or death made him nor history seen in terms of a value here and now (or, cation, as well as, or more powerfully than, through
sad or glad, and yet no man I have known was so well a yesterday, perhaps 7). If Morris's patterns were a the works, the idea of William Morris was made and
loved.' That is Yeats, not Mackall. This can happen culmination, an end, not a beginning, that does not carried, in which role or combination you wished. I
and It would be better to accept the fact. Paul Thomp­ spoil them. Paul Thompson knows this, but without can never read of Morris's last weeks or of the funeral
son and Mr Henderson seem rather naive; and Mr real acceptance. If we want a line reaching towards at Kelmscott without being deeply moved. Because, I
Henderson self-contradictory. For him Morris has 'a us, let someone write the full story of Godwin, Whist- 'think, there is this sense of a total world, so private
healthy man's impatience' with the neurotic goings ler, and that great vulgarisateur, Wilde. If Morris Is to and so public, properly completed. D. J. Gordon

furniture of those who want to talk, write about, buy which she deals with the work of Individual painters,
The American story and sell modern art as well as of many who make it. the most important of whom rate four or five pages of
Barbara . Rose unargumentatively assumes the combined biography and stylistic discussion. This
importance of what she is writing about as one who always follows orthodox precedents, often the artists'
is at the centre of it: wife of a key figure In the story own statements. If a lot of it seems intensely familiar
American Art Since 1900 by Barbara Rose, 320 pp. and herself an involved critic and editor. She writes a it is because so much has been written in articles,
Illustrated throughout in colour and monochrome. tightly-packed narrative, occasionally lapsing Into catalogues, reviews, monographs, etc. and In such
Thames and Hudson 35s. cloth, 21s. paper. 'Time Magazine' English when she tries to squeeze detail that the writing of this book must have been
This is the first history of twentieth-century American another fact-bearing participle into an already felt as a process of summarizing what was best
art to be published over here in a format that will be heavily loaded sentence: 'Arriving in New York In established. The author generally deals with every
read by a wide public. It comes to meet a need which 1929, Wyoming-born Pollock was perhaps almost as phase of art on its own terms and does not attempt to
is so keenly felt that It approaches an acute anxiety much a foreigner as de Kooning, who had arrived in rewrite history too radically from a mld-60sstandpoint.
to know about and understand what has been happen­ 1926 from Amsterdam, where he had studied at the Painters like Curry are not over-valued because they
Ing In the United States. This knowledge and under­ Fine Arts Academy.' may at times have prefigured what was to come in the
standing is so essential a part of the intellectual The overal I narrative alternates with sections in heroic era after the war, or others glibly damned for
156