Recently I found myself drinking pre-mixed cocktails at the astonishingly popular yet vexingly named A Bar with Shapes for a Name in Dalston, east London. There were Marcel Breuer’s classic Cesca chairs everywhere, but the interior was otherwise spartan. The only colour came from the slightly comic jumpsuits in dusty pastel hues worn by the waiting staff. After gently teasing one waiter about his get-up, I was informed the bar was an homage to the Bauhaus, reflected in its holistic functionalist and minimalist approach. Of course it was. If you’re a creative type seeking lessons from modern history, the Bauhaus is currently a predictable source of “cool”. You see its influence in Ikea furniture and Norman Foster buildings. There’s even a pair of React Bauhaus 2019 Nikes. The influence is also clear in the constant exhortations from declutterers telling you how to clear your house and mind. But the movement’s emphasis on functionalism can feel like it dovetails too well with capitalist efficiency — as if the whole point was to turn austerity into an aesthetic. In this world view, pre-mixed cocktails become a streamlined choice rather than a cunning way for a bar owner to grab your cash.
He would have hated the idea of his handcrafted designs becoming mass-produced on tea towels
By contrast, a figure who is decidedly uncool — but would make a far better model for today’s creatives — is William Morris, the Victorian artist, designer, writer and radical socialist, who changed the way millions of us think about art, politics and technology (and who influenced the Bauhaus movement). The problem with Morris is that his work and ideas are so pervasive in our fabrics, greeting cards, frocks, cushions and furniture, that we almost can’t see him for the wallpaper. The great moving force of the Arts and Crafts movement has become unfairly associated with conservative middle England (the metaphorical great-grandfather of Cath Kidston), but he would have hated the idea of his meticulous, handcrafted designs becoming mass-produced on tea towels and pencil cases.
A visit to the brilliant, free-entry William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, alongside a brief survey of his writings, shows that although his legacy is largely an aesthetic one, rarely has an aesthetic been as deeply political and urgent. On the ground floor of the gallery you’re immediately thrust into Morris’s fantasy world. His enduring longing for the chivalry and romance of medieval England began in early childhood (he even had his own suit of armour) and some of his earliest work reflects this. The first display shows some designs from what was to be his first commission: the 1857 murals for the Oxford Union, depicting King Arthur. The artist doesn’t show an obvious talent for painting here and the murals are carried by his friends and colleagues Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti — two fellow deep drinkers from the Arthurian goblet — whom he’d recently met at Oxford. At this time Morris also met Jane Burden, whose beauty is captured in a tender drawing. Described as a “stunner” by Morris, Burden would go on to become his wife, as well as Rosetti’s lover.
Next we glimpse something archetypically Morris: his first wallpaper design. The image was taken from his medieval-inspired walled garden at the Red House, with the rose trellis naturally lending a grid structure to the rustic scene. Displayed nearby are his simple Sussex armchair and beautiful honeysuckle wallpaper, both of which exude truth to materials and an unshowy joy in their craftmanship. The following room introduces the workshop of Morris & Co, the craftsman’s decorative arts and furnishings company, which set the artisanal standard for the contemporaneous Arts and Craft movement in England. Again, Morris’s rejection of the present moment is widely evinced — most notably through his distrust of modern dyes. Morris later reflected that “the leading passion of my life has been hatred of modern civilisation”.
Everywhere is evidence of his fascination with the medieval world: his entire visual language depends upon it, from the motifs and characters of his designs to their colours and weaves. This was much more than a stylistic choice, however; Morris saw in medieval England something noble and worth resurrecting for the soul of the nation. The visit marked a turning point in my appreciation of the artist. I had always suspected a wilful nostalgia in Morris’s boyish hankerings after Queen Guinevere which suggested a rather naïve infatuation with outmoded chivalry, and wondered how he could be so blind to the age’s feudalism. Part of the answer comes from Morris’s close reading of the Victorian critic John Ruskin and his evocation of the Gothic in The Stones of Venice. Ruskin understood Gothic craft as reflecting its northern European makers, who — in contrast to the staid harmony espoused by southern Europeans in the Classical tradition — were dynamic lovers of change and evoked striking images from nature. Unlike in Classical art, where perfection was the stated aim, the pursuit of pleasure and truth through craft defines the Gothic. Both Ruskin and Morris believed workers had more freedom of expression when working on Gothic buildings than they did in the cramped conditions of Victorian industrialisation. The systems of the guilds with their “fellowship” (which Morris saw as solidarity) and synthesis of art and design represented an ideal for Morris. In later life, as a socialist, he would attach great significance to workers being spiritually and aesthetically entwined with their labour.
Morris understood the grim privations of feudalism but he saw something tenacious in the spirit of the medieval age. In A Dream of John Ball Morris gives voice to the characters of the so-called Peasants’ Revolt, an event that was central to this understanding. He contrasts the pervasive violence of the Middle Ages with the “civilised” soldiering of Victorian Britain, believing that when inequality is open and acknowledged it can be challenged — as with the Peasants’ Revolt. He described the London he knew as “a beastly congregation of smoke-dried swindlers and their slaves”.
Ultimately, it was the importance of meaningful work that Morris sought to champion as he became a socialist in middle age. He claimed that “art is man’s expression of his joy in labour” and that unhappy labouring — and the resulting mass-produced goods and dependent destruction of the natural world — were causing its uglification. This pithy phrase is crucial to understanding Morris. “Art” has to be understood in the broadest terms, as an aspirational way of living and working, rather than a sealed-off, functionally useless category of objects. Morris believed that if workers connected more joyfully to their work, appreciating its simple beauty, then this would agitate them to realise what the rich had in abundance and what they too might have if a revolution came. This attitude to work, technology and beauty holds the strongest lessons for today, as we live through yet another major wave of industrialisation in the form of artificial intelligence.
As Morris explained: “All the amazing machinery which we have invented has served only to increase the amount of profit-bearing wares… to increase the amount of profit pouched by individuals for their own advantage, part of which profit they use as capital for the production of more profit, with ever the same waste attached to it. In spite of our inventions, no worker works under the present system an hour the less on account of those labour-saving machines, so called… It is not this or that tangible steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us.”
How prophetic that seems at a time when, despite the galloping pace of new technology and the promise of a world replete with leisure, we work more than ever — and often seem to do so pointlessly. David Graeber has charted the rise of “bullshit jobs” in his book of the same name, which shatters the myth of capitalist efficiency by showing we really work under feudal archetypes: there are “flunkies”, who exist to make their superiors feel important, and “goons” who deceive others on behalf of their employer (ie corporate lawyers). “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes” is a frequent online meme, capturing what many feel about AI’s encroachment on work. It’s a particularly Morris-like take.
The artist and craftsman’s idiosyncratically artisanal brand of socialism is more relevant with our new Labour government than ever before. For Morris, nothing was inevitable — be it technological advancements or the widening gulf between rich and poor — and he continually reinvented the world through his imagination and physical craft. We sorely need this level of imagination in public life today to enable us to resist what many corporate and private actors present as inevitable. We shouldn’t be afraid to find lessons from periods of history that at first glance have none (it is surely partly thanks to Morris that the Luddites are being reappraised). Let us hope Keir Starmer’s advisers are telling him not to be too puritanical about beauty and pleasure — but that we must all find ways to integrate these necessities into our work.
Max Lunn is a journalist based in London
