ABSTRACT
In 1936, the German modernist art historian Nikolaus Pevsner published Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. The book undermines the rigidity of concept of the “Victorian/Modernist Divide,” and it puts forward a most interesting vision of connections and interconnections across the two epochs. Namely, Pevsner claims William Morris, the leading Victorian art critic, designer, and founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as a hero of the Modern Movement. While the book predictably points to Morris’s devotion to historicism, and to the Middle Ages and handicrafts as typical nineteenth-century prejudices, he on the whole presents the Movement of the 1860s to the 1880s as leading towards Bauhaus and as marking “the beginning of a new era in Western Art.” This chapter questions Pevsner’s location of the ‘beginning’ of the bridge between the Victorian and Modernist design principles and production, and it pushes the chain of pioneers back a decade further than did Pevsner, to the British 1850s, the decade of the Decorative Reform and the Cole circle (Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper). Rather than there being a linear development between them, William Morris and John Ruskin were at odds with the Reform’s ideals, particularly with the circle’s devotion to mass production, industrialization, non-mimetic representation, and the wish for the new, modern style in design. These were exactly the ideals that divided Morris and Gropius, but which make the Reformers’ claims resonate well with the 1923 Bauhaus slogan, “Art into Industry.” Thus they point to the Cole circle as the missing first heroes of the Modern Movement.
