The Long Shadow of Ruskin and Morris: The Reinvention of Craft from The Crystal Palace to the Bauhaus

Course Name/Dates/Pricing:

The course title is “The Long Shadow of Ruskin and Morris: The Reinvention of Craft from The Crystal Palace to the Bauhaus.” It features six online Zoom sessions that take place at 1:00 P.M. EST/EDT on Saturdays Mar. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29; Apr. 1, 2025. Each session costs $25 but we offer a Member discount (20%) for Members who purchase the full six session bundle ($150 normally but $120 with the discount). The full six sessions are available to non-Members at the $150 price.

Course Description:

All too often we think of the Arts and Crafts movement as a relatively isolated phenomenon of well-meaning idealists whose rejection of modernity led them back to a fictitious past they were ultimately incapable of re-creating. As a result, we miss the much larger impact the movement had on the rehabilitation and promotion of craft in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For while we can easily recognize and embrace the importance of Ruskin and Morris to the Arts and Crafts movement, we tend not to understand how essential they were to the development of Art Nouveau, Secessionist design, and modernism throughout Europe and the United States. Despite distinctive national styles we will identify an underlying Englishness that permeated the period through Van de Velde in Belgium to Bing in Paris to Ernest Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse in Germany, and Jan Veth in Holland amongst others. These are the long shadows that Ruskin and Morris cast over craft that shaped its rehabilitation in the Western world.

Comprised of six sessions, this series argues that to restrict the Arts and Crafts movement exclusively to aesthetic boundaries is to ultimately rob it of its transformational power. As a result, we will consider how Morris’s and Ruskin’s example became the vehicle for creating a number of different styles and how–even as designers advanced towards new visual languages–they became models for thinking about craft’s place in the modern world.

Instructor Bio:

Dr. Jonathan Clancy has been the Director of Collections and Preservation at the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms since 2020. Those interested in the Arts and Crafts field will know his publications including: The First Metal—Arts & Crafts Copper, These Humbler Metals: Arts and Crafts Metalwork from the Two Red Roses Foundation Collection, Beauty in Common Things: American Arts and Crafts Pottery from the Two Red Roses Foundation as well as articles for The Journal of Modern Craft, Style 1900 and Journal of Design History. Other contributions include chapters and articles on topics ranging from Studio pottery after World War II, American trompe l’oeil paintings of money, and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark. He is currently co-authoring a catalog on European ceramics for the St. Louis Art Museum and contributing to a planned exhibition on French ceramist Taxile Doat. His article on the ceramic collection of Gustav Stickley for the journal Ceramics in America will appear later this year.