Learning to love William Morris

Blinded by my Bauhaus obsession about "Good Design for the Working Classes," I got more and more irritated by what I falsely saw as the medievalism of the 19th-Century British arts and crafts innovator William Morris.

He hated factories! An unforgiveable sin to this touter of Detroit's Albert Kahn, the greatest factory architect of all time.

So when my favorite weekly magazine, The Economist, commented on how the Brits were honoring Morris as part of London's post-Olympic hoopla (click here), I had to take a closer look at Morris.

I loved his mostly rural villas, and the interior decorations that made their interiors dazzle. But I falsely suspected that Morris's medievalist ideas added to the visual mess that was 19th-Century England, not to mention 20th-Century America.

The "'swinish rich'

Alas, could it be Morris speaking: "I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few," Morris said bitterly in 1873— a decade before Walter Gropius was born— as he decorated still another villa interior. It dawned on Morris painfully that he had spent his aesthetic career "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich."

Wow. Morris could very well have been the idealistic voice of Cameron Sinclair, that Brit who more than a century later came to America to organize a global fraternity, Architecture for Humanity, with its down-to-earth secular bible, Design As If You Give a Damn.

Like the later Sinclair, Morris thought himself in the late 1870s into a radical stance: The great expensive objects he and his associates created "were completely unaffordable for the people he wanted to help." (How Morris would have loved the Swede who created IKEA.)

Early socialist

Alone of his Pre-Raphaelite fellows, Morris crossed what he called "the river of fire" and joined the socialist cause. The Morris devotees have turned his teenage residence in Walthamstow into a Morris museum, which tells the whole story of his career: first the stuffy shop of gewgaws for the wealthy, followed by his political phase of activism in socialism, environmentalism and preservationism. Next came political pamphlets, Utopian novels, the excellent printing of his Kelmscott Press as well as reports of his campaigns to protect the Thames, Epping Forest, and London's historic buildings.

The Morris Museum is conveniently located at the end of the Victoria underground subway line. The Tate Britain complements the new museum with a Morris show through January 13, 2013: "Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-garde."

In an America whose everyday environments grow more and more squalid, the more we build expensive museums, the mature William Morris is an idealist worthy of emulation. His 1860s aphorism is up-to-date:

"It is the allowing of machines to be our masters, and not our servants, that so injures the beauty of life nowadays."♦


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