Review: Young Poland: The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement 1890-1918, J. Griffin and A. Szczerski (ed.s), (London: Lund Humphries, 2020)

n/a

Perbandingan antara Arts & Crafts Movement dan Democratic Design dalam Menghadapi Laju Perubahan Revolusi Industri.

Revolusi industri yang terjadi di Eropa hingga abad ke-20 dianggap sebagai pencapaian manusia yang merubah peradaban dunia. Laju perubahan yang dibawa oleh Revolusi Industri mulai dari gelombang pertama (1.0) hingga ke empat (4.0) memunculkan beragam respon dari berbagai sektor, termasuk dari dunia seni dan desain. Arts & Crafts Movement dan Democratic Design adalah contoh bentuk-bentuk respon tersebut. Hubungan antara Arts and Crafts Movement dan Democratic Design dalam sejarah sangatlah jauh, rentang masa diantara keduanya - kurang lebih dua abad. Keduanya merupakan gerakan yang dilandasi pada suatu pemikiran baru dan merupakan gerakan perubahan yang mempengaruhi perubahan di masa depan. Kajian ini dilakukan untuk menemukan kesamaan-kesamaan dari kedua gerakan tersebut, untuk melihat pemikiran-pemikiran pada kedua gerakan tersebut dan dampaknya pada perkembangan desain di Dunia hingga abad ini. Kajian dilakukan berdasarkan studi literatur.

Revisiting the Medievalism of the British Arts and Crafts Movement

This chapter focuses on the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and considers its engagement with the pre-existing but flexible paradigm of medievalism. While accounts of the Arts and Crafts frequently emphasize the influence on the Movement’s designs of material culture from the European ‘Middle Ages’, this research draws out other facets of how this period was reimagined and appropriated. In particular, the chapter emphasizes Arts and Crafts protagonists’ tendency to idealize all things medieval, cultivating a pseudo-historical imaginary that was problematically conceptualised spatially as well as temporally, and was used to legitimize a range of the Movement’s aims and initiatives. A key case study here is the Art Workers’ Guild, a fraternal organization that counted among its members many of the London Arts and Crafts elite, and which contrived a medievalizing organizational aesthetic that rehearsed the group’s exclusivity, and its dismay at contemporary artistic and socio-political conditions.

Illuminating Propaganda

This chapter brings back into circulation the career and achievements of the radical poet and wood-engraver William James Linton. Linton’s socialism and his commitment to bringing beauty to the masses made him a transitional figure between Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts movement of the later nineteenth century. His vision of medievalism was influenced by the radical nostalgia of Cobbett but it also spoke to the agrarian utopianism of the Chartist Land Plan. These motivations came together in his masterpiece of illuminated poetry, Bob Thin; Or the Poorhouse Fugitive, which appeared in the Illuminated Magazine in 1845. Through a close reading of both the satirical and pastoral elements of this poem, the chapter argues for Linton’s reinstatement in the canon of Victorian medievalism.