William Morris 1834-1896

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A Writer of

Fiction&

Socially Aware Texts

•The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) •The Life and Death of Jason (1867) •The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) •Translation of The Aeneid (1875) •The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1877) •Hopes and Fears for Art (1882) •Art and Socialism (1884) •A Dream of John Ball (1888) •The Roots of the Mountains (1890) •News from Nowhere (1890) •The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) •Poems by the Way (1891) •The Well at the World's End (1896) •The Wood at the End of the World (1895) •The Sundering Flood (1896)•The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1896)

A Designer

Furniture, embroideries, stained glass, tiles and tapestries.

And,

Wallpapaer

Tapestries

Wallpaper

                      

Daisy, 1864

           

Marigold, 1875

               

Wandle Chintz, 1883-4

Brother Rabbit Chintz, 1882

                       

http://www.lbwf.gov.uk/wmg/free.htm

Furniture

http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/wmorris/designs.htm#furniture

Typefaces

Morris’s roman, the Golden type, was often combined with elaborate ornaments which he also designed.

http://www.quixote.com/serif/wp-morris.html

A Businessman

He set up a commercial company with his friends in 1861 to produce things he designed. It was called:

Morris & Co at Merton Abbey, Surrey.

Check out: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/morris/morisco.htmlFor more information

An Artist

Jane Burden

“AT its epicenter was the sensuous figure of his wife, Jane Burden, the ''dark pearl'' whose soulful eyes, fleshy lips and bush of hair became the central image of Pre-Raphaelite art. In 1858, Morris presented the humbly born young woman as ''La Belle Iseult'' in his only painting. His friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Jane obsessively, making her his muse and then his mistress.”

http://www.iht.com/IHT/FASH/96/sz0507.html http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/wmorris/graphics/ISEULT.gif

Meld the TwoHe wanted to meld art and enterprise. Art should free people to be creative. Go back to older methods of production and craftmanship. He disliked the machinic, assembly line, approach of modern industry.

IRONY

The only people who could afford his goods were rich people!

Eventually, he would come to the conclusion that Victorian society would have to be utterly transformed before the sort of relationship between art and the people which he had sought for so long could really emerge, but in his lifetime he was never able to resolve, in practical terms, the gap between his aesthetic vision and the reality of things.http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/morris/morisco.html

ART“I can imagine some of our comrades smiling bitterly at the above title, and wondering what a Socialist journal can have to do with art; so I begin by saying that I understand only too thoroughly how 'unpractical' the subject is while the present system of capital and wages last. Indeed that is my text.

What, however, is art? whence does it spring? Art is man's embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man's pleasure in his life; pleasure we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals; and as it is the expression of pleasure in life generally, in the memory of the deeds of the past, and the hope of those of the future, so it is especially the expression of man's pleasure in the deeds of the present; in his work.”

From: The Worker's Share of Art, 1885http://www.anglocatholicsocialism.org/art.html

A Socialist and more …

“I will begin by saying that I call myself a Communist, and have no wish to qualify that word by joining any other to it. The aim of Communism seems to me to be the complete equality of condition for all people; and anything in a Socialist direction which stops short of this is merely a compromise with the present condition of society, a halting-place on the road to the goal. This is the only logical outcome of any society which is other than a close company sustained by violence for the express purpose of "the exploitation of man by man" in the interest of the strongest.”From: Socialism and Anarchism, was first printed as a letter in Commonweal, May 5th, 1889.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1889/sa/sa.htm

News from Nowhere

News from NowhereAll along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship--but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives--men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness." http://eserver.org/fiction/news-from-nowhere.txt

Modern or Medieval

''The leading passion of my life has been and is a hatred of modern civilization,'' claimed Morris.

IRONY

Yet he was revolutionary, both in his fiery socialist principles and in his contribution to Art Nouveau - literally new art.

What a contradiction!