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cimoreneProto-fantasy novelist and pre-Raphaelite William Morris is the father of the Arts & Crafts movement (my favorite architectural and decorative style), and his textiles and wallpapers were wildly popular in Victorian homes and today are ubiquitous in yuppie remodels and with set dressers creating interiors of the period (partly because they are probably the best-known designs of the period and are widely available because his company, Morris & Co, is still printing his designs from the original wooden blocks. They were not nearly as widespread as you'd think from tv and movies of recent years though, nor have they ever been affordable enough to be).
Icons are free to good homes. Modify if you wish. Credit appreciated.
*titles at bottom
Obviously they are decades earlier than the Bauhaus paintings I've been making icons of lately, but actually, both Arts & Crafts and Bauhaus were strongly political and philosophical movements. Morris was a socialist, and the driving principle behind his work was the democratization of art - the elimination of classist distinctions between the fine arts and the work of craftsmen, and the availability of beautiful objects for everyone. His ideas on this subject were one of the strongest influences on the Bauhaus, which sought to democratize the arts by teaching fine arts, skilled crafts, and architecture simultaneously; and also to make their designs reasonably affordable to manufacture, focusing much of their work on institutional design.
It's ironic that the popularity of Morris's designs and the expense of manufacturing them has made them too expensive for the average consumer for their whole life cycle, but on the other hand that popularity has also helped make them available to everyone - they are now available in unlicensed variants and products all over RedBubble, Zazzle, Etsy, etc, as well as the extremely pricey licensed products you can still buy. The same thing has happened to a lot of Bauhaus designs - vintage pieces of furniture and decorative objects still in production are exhorbitantly priced due to trendiness, even where they are relatively inexpensive to manufacture; but the aesthetic itself had such a tremendous impact that it's not hard to find its descendants cheaply (for example, from Ikea).
1-3 "Lodden"
4-5 "Lodden" 6 "Larkspur"
7-8 "Larkspur" 9 "Pomegranate or Fruit"
10-11 "Pomegranate or Fruit" 12 "Marigold"
13 "Marigold" 14-15 "Golden Lily"
16-18 "Golden Lily"
19-21 "Acanthus"
Icons are free to good homes. Modify if you wish. Credit appreciated.
*titles at bottom
Obviously they are decades earlier than the Bauhaus paintings I've been making icons of lately, but actually, both Arts & Crafts and Bauhaus were strongly political and philosophical movements. Morris was a socialist, and the driving principle behind his work was the democratization of art - the elimination of classist distinctions between the fine arts and the work of craftsmen, and the availability of beautiful objects for everyone. His ideas on this subject were one of the strongest influences on the Bauhaus, which sought to democratize the arts by teaching fine arts, skilled crafts, and architecture simultaneously; and also to make their designs reasonably affordable to manufacture, focusing much of their work on institutional design.
It's ironic that the popularity of Morris's designs and the expense of manufacturing them has made them too expensive for the average consumer for their whole life cycle, but on the other hand that popularity has also helped make them available to everyone - they are now available in unlicensed variants and products all over RedBubble, Zazzle, Etsy, etc, as well as the extremely pricey licensed products you can still buy. The same thing has happened to a lot of Bauhaus designs - vintage pieces of furniture and decorative objects still in production are exhorbitantly priced due to trendiness, even where they are relatively inexpensive to manufacture; but the aesthetic itself had such a tremendous impact that it's not hard to find its descendants cheaply (for example, from Ikea).
1-3 "Lodden"
4-5 "Lodden" 6 "Larkspur"
7-8 "Larkspur" 9 "Pomegranate or Fruit"
10-11 "Pomegranate or Fruit" 12 "Marigold"
13 "Marigold" 14-15 "Golden Lily"
16-18 "Golden Lily"
19-21 "Acanthus"
(no subject)
Date: 14 Feb 2022 01:14 am (UTC)