London

by Tanya Harrod

The exhibition Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy 1860–1960, at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to 11th January), opens with an awkward, ­honest pencil self-portrait by the young William Morris looking up at us, shyly, self-doubtingly. In G.F. Watts’s splendid 1870 portrait across the way, a mature Morris appears sorrowful but wiser (Fig.41). The first section of this fascinating exhibition swiftly introduces us to Morris’s life in abbreviated form – ‘Willow Boughs’ wall­paper, the ‘Daisy’ wallpaper (Fig.42), Edward Burne-Jones’s tender cartoon of Morris ­busily weaving, a ‘Sussex’ armchair, the satchel in which Morris carried pamphlets during his years of political engagement, a battered copy of News from Nowhere, affordable at one shilling, and the Kelmscott Press ­version, striking for its vellum binding, ­elaborate borders, velvety black ink and fine paper. Morris’s bravery and his discomfort shine out from an open page of his Socialist Diary, in which he recorded his relentless political routine in the 1880s. We discover his disquiet – faced with the squalor of the workmen’s club where he was speaking, his audience’s lack of understanding, the coffee shop where he ate 3 pence worth of shrimps, ‘not as dirty as it looked from the outside’.1 ­Morris was a great designer who was also a revolutionary. This made him an ethnographer, travelling in unknown class territory.

Before he turned to active politics Morris had attempted new ways of living on a more personal level, played out in an alternative dreaming-space in Kent. In the section of Anarchy & Beauty devoted to the Red House, designed by Morris’s friend Philip Webb, we meet Morris’s circle – Webb painted by Charles Fairfax Murray, Burne-Jones looking mournful painted by Alphonse Legros, an exquisite Dante Gabriel Rossetti self-portrait in pencil, a touching study of a very young Morris as King David by Rossetti together with Rossetti’s later cruel caricature of Morris as a divided personality, epic poet and tradesman. Webb, who first met Morris in 1856, recalled ‘a slim boy like a wonderful bird just out of his shell’ (cat. p.26) and the Red House, as much as anything, celebrated an unorthodox marriage between the wealthy Morris and Jane Burden, the daughter of an Oxford stable hand. Her strange beauty shines out in a drawing by Rossetti. Morris’s and Janey’s home was sold in 1865, but this site of experimental ­living had led him into business, initially as ­Morris, Marshall & Faulkner & Co, to manufacture ‘all things necessary for the decoration of a house’ (cat. p.28).

Roger Fry’s austere portrait of Edward Carpenter introduces Carpenter’s utopian agricultural settlement shared with a working-class male lover. Morris wrote of Carpenter: ‘I listened with longing heart to his account of his patch of ground, seven acres’ (cat. p.39). But smallholder seclusion was not for Morris. A section on free thought and sexual politics is replete with portraits, pamphlets and ­banners that reveal Morris as the nineteenth century’s most imaginative home-grown communist. He was shoulder to shoulder with Walter Crane, the left’s greatest iconographer, with Eleanor Marx, drawn powerfully by Grace Black, and with Annie Besant, ­photographed before she turned to theosophy; and he handed on the baton to Sylvia Pankhurst, seen in a touching self-portrait, and the redoubtable fighter for suffrage, the stained-glass artist Mary Lowndes, photographed elegantly dressed, holding brush and palette. Was Morris an anarchist, as this exhibition’s title seems to suggest? No, must be the answer – but Morris’s ideas about un-alienated work, learnt from Marx, chimed with the ideals of Morris’s friend, the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, photographed in his study papered with Morris paper around 1890 and painted by Nellie Heath in 1903.

This ingeniously designed show is, however, not simply about Morris’s artistic and political life. Morris died in 1896, and we might ­wonder what he would have made of the events, objects and persons of the following century. As Morris’s biographer and a distinguished writer on twentieth-century design, Fiona MacCarthy is ideally placed to address such questions seriously. She uses portraits and objects to take us up to 1960, showing how issues embodied in one extraordinary man ­fissured into countless causes and groupings. Thus Morris’s love of an unspoilt countryside developed into the National Trust, while his belief that good politics should mean pleasant environments translated into the Garden City Movement, informed Patrick Geddes’s ­speculative, proto-ecological thinking and inspired Ambrose Heal to create ‘Country Cottage’ furniture.

Morris’s research and development of materials and techniques in order to create good design became a goal in itself for figures like T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, C.R. Ashbee and Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney Barnsley. They went deeper into making, were less business-orientated than Morris, more focused on the workshop and, inevitably, less overtly political – although their admiration for Morris was incontrovertible. One of the most touching images in this part of the show is a small painting of May Morris by her friend Mary Anne Sloane, showing a devoted editor’s daughter correcting proofs of the twenty-four volumes of her father’s Collected Works (Fig.43). May Morris emerges as a quiet heroine, both as a guardian of her father’s memory and as an inspirational creative woman.

Morris’s greatness meant that he was ­continually being re-invented. By 1934, his political radicalism had been erased, absent from the exhibitions, speeches and publications celebrating the centenary of his birth. Anarchy & Beauty addresses that complex period through the work of inter-War craftsmen and women like the potters Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach, and the weavers Ethel Mairet and Elizabeth Peacock. But they knew little of his politics and, seeing themselves as modernists, rejected the complexity of Morris’s aesthetic, described by the potter Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie as ‘flowers, flames and birds’ on which the eye could not ‘contentedly focus’.2 The calligrapher Edward Johnston worshipped Morris but disliked his wallpaper, compromising by papering only the hallways of his various houses with ‘Willow Boughs’.3

In turn, Morris might have found the inter-War generation’s passionate focus on discrete crafts limited. Frank Pick of the London Underground, Harry Peach and his Dryad Cane Furniture Works, F.H. Crittall, manufacturer of metal windows, who built Silver End Model Village for his workers, and W.R. Lethaby and his fashioning of the Central School of Arts and Crafts come closer to ­Morris’s breadth and integrity. These figures are missing from Anarchy & Beauty, but Fiona MacCarthy does include Gordon Russell, a comparable benign employer making furniture at Broadway with a local workforce, ready to embrace the finely calibrated mass production of radios in collaboration with Frank Murphy.

Russell’s role as the first director of the Council of Industrial Design takes us into the 1950s. As MacCarthy elegantly demonstrates, wartime socialism led design culture back to ideals that were close to Morris’s unrealised aim of affordable good design for all. In 1951 the Festival of Britain and its South Bank Exhibition offered an ‘interwoven serial story’ of ‘The Land and the People’ for all to admire and celebrate.4 Packed with design, technology and craftsmanship, the South Bank Exhibition was medieval ­modernism at its most convincing.5 Beauty & Anarchy gives us the main players, photographed as men in suits driven by the ideals of social democracy. A haunting little film about the South Bank festivities, Brief city: the story of London’s ­Festival buildings, plays in this last section, showing rapt crowds in trilby hats and demure summer frocks amid the playful architecture. We are reminded of a period in time, not so very long ago, when unrestrained capitalism was kept in check. We meet Robin and Lucienne Day, who sought to design low-cost furniture and textiles. Terence Conran, still in his early twenties, is pictured seated in his ‘Cone Chair’ (Fig.44) and on the brink of a career that brought affordable good design to a mass audience in the 1960s. Herbert Read, painted by Patrick Heron à la Braque, provides a suitably ­paradoxical envoi. Read, an anarchist utterly committed to an art for the ‘agora, the assembled people’,6 was in the process of ­setting up the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Two years later he accepted a knighthood – so he was perhaps not so close to Morris after all.

This is a wonderful exhibition that begins to reinstate forgotten, overlooked linkages and continuities barely addressed since William Morris Today, held in 1984 at the ICA. A highly political show, curated by Sandy Nairne, the current Director of the National Portrait Gallery, William Morris Today sought to restore a proper understanding of Morris’s socialism by juxtaposing Morris’s life and work with late 1970s and early 1980s resistance towards the rising tide of neo-liberal economics globally and in Britain. Anarchy & Beauty treads more cautiously, but it sent me back to G.D.H Cole’s Centenary Edition of Morris’s writings. The great man’s words seemed as fresh and as relevant as ever, even if the earthly paradise that he fought for has been permanently postponed.

1     Catalogue: Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy 1860–1960. By Fiona MacCarthy. 184 pp. incl. 94 col. + 96 b. & w. ills. (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2014), £25. ISBN 97–0–300–20946–4; p.13.

2     K. Pleydell-Bouverie, review of G. Naylor: ‘The Arts and Crafts Movement’, Ceramic Review 13 (January/ February 1972), p.15.

3     P. Johnston: Edward Johnston, London 1959, p.159.

4     I. Cox: The South Bank Exhibition: A guide to the story it tells, London 1951, p.8.

5    I borrow this useful phrase from Michael Saler: The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, Oxford 1999.

6     Quoted in R. Calvocoressi: ‘Public sculpture in the 1950s’ in S. Naire and N. Serota, eds.: exh. cat. British sculpture in the twentieth century, London (Whitechapel Art Gallery) 1981, p.135.