“THE BEAUTY OF LIFE” : William Morris & the Art of Design was a visual delight. Curated by Dianne Waggoner, the exhibition originated at the Huntington Library and was first shown at the Yale Center for British Art, enriched by additions from the Yale Center for British Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Yale University Library. For those who missed this Victorianists' treat at New Haven and San Marino, the fine catalog edited by Waggoner provides illustrations and detailed accounts of the items as well as perceptive critical essays.

At Yale, my Victorianist friends and I oohed and ahed about our old favorites with such un-Victorian decorum that the guard finally had to ask us to behave. But still we, and here “we” includes the many viewers at the Center, shared the pleasure that, from all accounts, Morris himself took in designing and in his own participation in making. If the long poetry that occupied Morris's hours is now barely read and his poetic afterlife continues in the few anthology pieces, such as “The Defense of Guenevere” and “The Haystack in the Floods,” he remains vividly alive for his work as designer, and I use the term in spite of its current limited meaning, for the multi-faceted activity on view in this exhibition. Morris as Victorian lives, then, beyond the academy through, to use the slightly oxymoronic title of the catalogue, “the art of design,” the popularity of this and other exhibitions, the reprinting of his fabrics and wallpapers. So we might examine the reasons for this attraction, and what this fine exhibition tells us about the nature of Morris's afterlife.

The valorization of Morris as designer, as maker of commodities, however, does erase Morris as socialist, as political radical. One exhibition vitrine titled “Morris and Politics” includes original editions of “The Dream of John Ball” and “Manifesto of the Socialist League.” Otherwise, Morris as revolutionary is invisible. A comment in the brief guide to the show epitomizes this depoliticization, describing Morris as a “revolutionary interior designer and book printer,…also a staunch socialist.” While there is an ongoing debate about how revolutionary Morris may have been as maker of books and of integrated domestic interiors, we can note how the term “revolutionary,” the marker of his own political self-identity, has drifted to modify his work as “interior designer” and his socialism has been downgraded to merely “staunch.” This contemporary refiguring of Morris that transfers his energy from the making of revolution to the making of tapestries and furniture is much in keeping with our own neo-liberal times where socialism is an unthinkable term and “revolutionary” describes new consumer products.

For myself, it was good to see a recognition that the influence of Morris & Co. reached from England to the west coast of America. The exhibition marks the acquisition by the Huntington of the collection of two Californians, Sanford and Helen Berger, material that adds to the museum's already large Morris holdings, including many manuscripts purchased by Henry Huntington himself. The fine catalogue essay “Two Sides of the River: Morris & American Arts and Crafts” by Edward Bosley thoroughly charts Morris's influence throughout America. Bosley is a particularly appropriate choice since he is director of the Gamble House, the stunning craftsman residence by Greene and Greene, the centerpiece of the colony of arts and crafts homes built by transplants from the Midwest (Gamble was the Gamble of Proctor and Gamble) in Pasadena, just down the road from the Huntington.

If the exhibition's title, “The Beauty of Life”: William Morris & the Art of Design, suggests what in Carlylean terms may be called the hero as designer, a notion attractive in our time when such designer names as Marc Jacobs or Calvin Klein lend panache to a multitude of differing products, the value of the show, interestingly, lies in its working against this fetishism of the designer as brand name, as well as against the fetishism of the commodity. Although the title suggests Morris's project of following his mentor John Ruskin in endowing the making of household and church furnishings with the elevated status of “art,” the exhibit makes us see Morris's own “art of design” not as an individualized romantic activity of male genius, but instead as active participation in a collaborative activity of designers from famous names to the anonymous and of workers with varying degrees of craft skills. The exhibits vividly demonstrate the shared process of trial and error, the experimentation with recalcitrant material, and the frailty of workers and of Morris himself. This is a Morris exhibition that shows not only the commodities, but how the chintzes, the wallpapers, the carpet on the floor were actually produced. The entry displays photos of the process of making—John Henry Dearle drawing a stained glass cartoon, block printing at Merton Abbey, printing the Kelmscott Chaucer. Within, a fascinating film loop demonstrates the process of reviving Morris's printed wallpapers, from matching the original colors to printing with the original handblocks which are displayed in the same exhibition room.

The mix of objet and sketch, the working documents from the Firm displayed with the finished products, again indicates the shared hard work and constant experimentation that generated the beauty of the objects hung on the walls and covering the floors. The “Merton Abbey book of dye recipes for printed textiles 1882” (Figure 12) shown with a number of textiles is particularly illuminating in indicating the intensely collaborative labor of production, here in the project of reviving the use of vegetable dyes. This bound volume “probably written by one of the workmen in the dyehouse” (“Beauty of Life” 83) contains swatches of printed fabric that are glued to pages covered with precise formulae for dyeing the fabric. The many crossings out and additions indicate how through testing and retesting Morris worked with dyers of various degrees of responsibility and expertise to create formulae for use by workers in the Firm. The catalog nicely quotes Morris on the difficulties of this ongoing process through hands-on experience with the material: “We are not getting on quite as fast as we should with the printing; is very tough work getting everything in due order, the cloths seem to want so much doing to them before they can be printed & then so much doing to them after they are printed” (83).

“Merton Abbey book of dye recipes for printed textiles,” 1882. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

Such glimpses behind the scenes reposition Morris as a designer and an experimenter operating at the center of a company of designers and workmen, some famous–Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, Ford Madox Brown–and some less well known, such as John Henry Dearle, and some anonymous. This collectivity is well demonstrated in the showing of an entire Morris & Co. stained glass window of 1898, “Humility, Mercy, Generosity, Charity, Justice, Liberty, Truth, Love, Faith, Courage” from the Unitarian chapel in Heywood, Lancashire. The window was designed by Burne-Jones and Dearle, who is given an appreciative essay by Dianne Waggoner in the catalogue. Again, the exhibition takes pains to illustrate the collaborative process leading to the finished work. Here, for example, are displayed from the Firm's stained glass workshop several painted quarries, the small-scale squares or diamonds with repeated plant or geometric motifs that serve as backgrounds to the figures of the primary design. Strikingly, these are not only painted by, but also, the labels tell us, “drawn by workers,” anonymous workers who approach the condition of Ruskinian stone carvers and whose “design” is crucial to the total “art of design” of the window.

The section on the “Art of the Book” presents the still stunning masterpieces, such as the hand-illuminated Kelmscott Chaucer. But again we are shown the hard work, the trial and error within the process of making. For against the self-promulgated myth of Morris's art flowing from him as naturally as the waters of the Thames, the exhibits show him carefully working out various possibilities for each detail, as in the sketches of the initial “L” for a proposed edition of Love is Enough (Figure 13). Even in the blue pages of the printer's copy of The Earthly Paradise, Morris continued to fuss, crossing out lines, emending, doodling tiny flowering branches in the margins. But we are offered as well, in the interchange of Morris with his workmen, the sweat and the conflict of the workshop, as in a note by Morris on a proof sheet of the Chaucer, “This is the wrong measure [margin]. What is the use of sending me things which are obviously wrong?” As in the wondrous re-creation of the Gilbert and Sullivan company in the 1999 movie Topsy Turvey, the exhibit shows us how for the Victorians great beauty can emerge from the conflicts within a Victorian collaboration.

“William Morris Design for the Initial ‘L’ for a Proposed Edition of Love is Enough,” 1871. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

The exhibition concludes with a section devoted to the afterlife of Morris, “Morris & Co. in the 20th Century.” Here we see in part the not terribly successful efforts of the Firm under Dearle to reconcile the Victorian aesthetic with elite early twentieth-century tastes. Rather properly, if rather conventionally, the influence of the Firm in the early twentieth century is primarily seen in the fine printing movement among such presses as Doves Press, Ashendene, Merrymount of Boston, and the Roycrofters, an arts and crafts community founded in East Aurora, New York by Elbert Hubbard.

But the question remains of why Morris and, more accurately, Morris & Co., continue to live so vigorously into the early twenty-first century. Like the appeal of many things Victorian, the appeal of Morris operates through very specific forms of nostalgia. Morris, of course, shared with his time the nostalgic dream of a communitarian middle ages and attempted its reenactment at Merton Abbey. Much as Morris attempted to replicate in his own life the life of an imagined former time, so in the twenty-first century there is hope that channeling Morris can provide a similar imaginative leap into the past, if not into the middle ages, at least into the life of a man who sought to enact this dream of the pre-industrial age in a mechanized time. Perhaps the vogue for Morris depends upon our unacknowledged empathy not only with his aims, but also with the well-known contradictions at the very heart of his project–valorizing in a sleek mechanized age a floral, multihued style evocative of a mythologized medieval past; publicly valuing handicraft yet accepting forms of limited serial production; evoking a Ruskinian egalitarianism while producing commodities as status symbols for the haute bourgeoisie; keeping alive the simulacrum of a time of personal craftsmanship in the machine age.

“The Beauty of Life” displays kits made by Morris & Co. in the nineteenth century for embroidered firescreens to be worked at home. In its bookstore, the Yale Center for British Art sells embroidery kits of wool yarn that have, in the words on the package, “adapted Morris's Strawberry Thief as four needlepoint kits large enough to be made into either cushions or chairseats.” The plastic wrapping is imprinted with Morris's celebrated words, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”