| William Morris | |
|---|---|
| Birthday | |
| Birthplace | Walthamstow, England |
| Died | |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Artist, designer, writer,libertarian, socialist |
| Known for | Wallpaper and textile design, fantasy fiction / medievalism, socialism |
Born Mar. 24, 1834, in Walthamstow, Essex; died Oct. 3, 1896, in London. English artist, writer, art theoretician, and public leader.
Morris studied at Oxford University from 1853 to 1856, when he went to work for the architectural firm of G. E. Street in London. From 1857 to 1862 he concentrated on painting. In 1861–62, Morris, P. Marshall, and C. Faulkner organized an artistic and industrial company of workshops producing decorative painting, furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, metal objects, and embroidered items.
Morris’ views on aesthetics were influenced by T. Carlyle’s teachings and J. Ruskin’s lectures, as well as by the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites. From the 1860’s he offered a romantic critique of bourgeois reality. Regarding art as the chief means of transforming that reality, he made the aesthetic education of the masses his goal. In his effort to demonstrate the value of individual creativity as opposed to depersonalized capitalist production by machines he was joined by F. M. Brown, D. G. Rossetti, E. Burne-Jones, W. Crane, and the architect P. Webb. Nonetheless, he was convinced that under socialism, machine-produced goods would have infinite aesthetic possibilities.
Hoping to solve the problems facing the modern decorative and applied arts, he tried to revive the folk crafts that had been pushed aside by capitalist industry. In a sense, he laid the foundation for artistic design. He attributed the greatest significance to the role of the master creator. The items produced in his workshops and the interiors designed by him are outstanding for their functionalism, for the tectonic balance of their composition, for spare ornamentation featuring stylized plant motifs, and for a restrained combination of colors. In a number of ways they anticipated the art nouveau style. Although his workshops contributed greatly to the rebirth of the British decorative and applied arts, in practice the objects produced merely reflected a reinterpretation of bourgeois life, and inevitably they fell short of Morris’ aesthetic beliefs.
In 1877, Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and in 1890–91, the Kelmscott Press, which published books modeled after incunabula. He and W. Crane illustrated The Story of the Glittering Plain with miniatures in the English Gothic style. With Burne-Jones, he illustrated the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer’s works (1896). Morris’ predilection for medieval motifs and romantic stylization of forms was also reflected in his literary creations, including the collection of poems The Defence of Guenevere (1858) and the series of narrative poems The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).
From the 1880’s, Morris played a major role in the British working-class movement. In January 1883 he became a member of the Democratic Federation (renamed the Social Democratic Federation in early 1884). After the split in the federation he helped found the Socialist League (1884), and from 1884 to 1890 he was the publisher and editor of its press organ, The Commonweal, He left the league when the anarchists came to power in the organization. Although he studied the works of K. Marx, he did not understand the essence of Marx’ teaching, and he remained, in the words of F. Engels, “a socialist of the emotional type” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 36, p. 409). Morris set forth his socialist views in many articles, in revolutionary verses, in the historical novella A Dream of John Ball (1888; Russian translation, 1911), and in the Utopian novel News From Nowhere (1891; Russian translation, Moscow, 1906).
T. I. VOLODINA