An excellent Arts and Crafts exhibition has opened at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Many gorgeous objects represent the movement all over Europe and the US, including surprising places such as Finland and Ireland.
The show's strongest point is how it contextualizes the objects and draws interesting connections between product design and social philosophy. Most surprising is how much the European movement linked handicrafts and motifs with "national identity." Traditional elements stand in for "traditional" values and explicitly refer to a mythological agrarian, pre-industrial utopia. The show calls it Romantic Nationalism, which I think is a much more accurate label than Arts and Crafts, since the movement was as much about the perceived social role that objects--and the making of objects--had as it was about the esthetics (which is one explanation for why the objects in the show have such drastically different appearance from what I had expected).
The seeds of Art Deco and Art Nouveau are there, but so are the seeds of arrogant nationalism and neoclassicism that appeared in Germany and the Soviet Union 40 years later. The thoughts equating purity of form with purity of national identity are chilling. It's easy to see the International Style as a reaction to all of the nationalism in Arts and Crafts.
The US version of the movement is somewhat different. It shares many of the European movement's ideals, but it's focused less on the past and national identity and more on romanticizing the labor of craftsmen. Romantic Populism may be a good name for it.
An excellent and thought-provoking show about how design is the product of cultural values, maybe in ways that aren't always so pleasant.
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