Chapter 12 - Morris & Company

Summary

Morris the designer and maker is Morris the poet and Morris the socialist, for reasons that take us to the heart of his ambitions for the decorative arts and the nature of his practice. His work in the visual and tactile arts of decoration and design takes as its larger subject the workings of a desire for beauty in an often unlovely world shaped by the industrial revolution and driven by an optimistic capitalism. The designs he contributed to the furnishings business he created with his artist friends, Morris & Company, balanced harmonious colour and ordered structure against a complexity that invited the imagination to wander. His designs were intended to function therapeutically, addressing distortions of perception and sensibility produced by the conditions of modern labour and the effects of modern mass-produced objects on workers and consumers. Morris was frequently disappointed in his efforts to create an art for all, both by the economic exigencies of running a commercial business and by the decorative preferences of his clients. Yet in his designs for walls – wallpapers and textiles – he created an art of the domestic and the everyday, an art to live with that refused to abandon hope for a different future.