The well-read might recognize this little gem: “win back art”; first penned by William Morris in 1884, but it’s pretty obscure. The rest of us will have had to look it up, and that’s okay, too. Personally, I enjoy the pursuit. That is, uncovering a good quote and then tracking the creator’s contemporaneous intent before the airbrushers of history have applied their gloss. But be advised, the source and even the existence of many favorite quotes turn out to be apocryphal. Keeps the game interesting! Here’s what I found for this one.

Background

During the late Victorian era, William Morris was a highly influential thinker, artist and craftsman. While admired today as a founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, in his own time he was once branded by a British nobleman as the “poet upholsterer”. Seems there were some that could not abide art being associated with craft. But, 150 years later, the world continues to revere Morris’s work in design, furniture and bookmaking while nobody, not even the internet, can locate that nobleman who probably wishes he was titled Lord Apocryphal.

I came across this quote while reading an article from The Craftsman, Gustav Stickley’s periodical published from 1901-1916 to promote American handicraft and his Craftsman ethos. The Craftsman was a wonderful magazine. You can still find fragile issues in library collections or at used book sales but I read my article in The Craftsman: An Anthology, a book of collected articles edited by Barry Sanders and published in 1978. For the benefit of humankind, the University of Wisconsin has recently digitized a complete collection of The Craftsman and provide it in a searchable format free of charge. The article mentioned comes from the November 1902 issue and is titled The New Industrialism, by Oscar Lovell Triggs, a University of Chicago English professor. We’ll skip his outsider’s thoughts on “industrial betterment” for this post but let his article serve as testament to the continuing impact of Morris, then recently deceased, on social movements of the early twentieth century.

The quote

In his 1902 article, published later that year in book form and co-authored by Frank Lloyd Wright, Triggs refers to Morris’s “win back art” as one of three tenets supporting his (Triggs) “new industrialism”. I was intrigued by this monosyllabic triad, and since Triggs neglected to provide a source, I dug deeper to find their origin. It turns out that phrase first appeared nearly a quarter century earlier in a self-published pamphlet by Morris, titled Art and Socialism. I do not know how successfully that pithy call to action was used in its day, but I propose it could help us, today.

First things first, I am not now, nor will I ever advocate Socialism as a political system. Although never abandoning his cause, Morris, himself, had toned down his fervor in that direction by 1890. Win(ning) back art was sought as a means to restore fulfillment to workmen during their daily labor - that’s all. You see, a social crisis had ignited in the early nineteenth century as new materials and methods appeared with ferocious rapidity (think: steam power, coal, canals/railroads, mechanization, task specialization) and this assault had a most demoralizing effect on the working class in Britain, site of first adoption. Recall your history lessons and you will have a sense for how everything resolved here, but fast-forward to the present where we are reaping the benefits of another onslaught (robots, the internet, instant communication, (coming soon!) artificial intelligence) and you can worry that what has since been termed “hyper-novelty” has, once again, far outstripped our culture’s ability to adapt - to say nothing of Homo sapiens’ adaptability as a species. The rising scourge of substance abuse, violence, suicide and perhaps even the rampant tribalism experienced in the US today have to be connected here, although I have not sought scientific confirmation. Regardless, it is easy to draw parallels between both the origins and cultural sequelae of the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Age.

Action

So, what to do? I believe an aspiration to “win back art” might provide real benefits today. And you might, too, if I ever get around to revealing the significance of that phrase, so let’s get on with things.

Early in his Art and Socialism pamphlet Morris convincingly equates a state of “pleasure” with both “labour” and “life”, itself. He then uses Medieval architecture, thus his reference to “three centuries” ago, as evidence for the impressive handicraft of humans before the era of powered machines, “when men had pleasure in their daily work”. The actual phrase “win back art” was used only twice, mid-sentence and without fanfare, half-way into the work. Importantly, this sentence also serves to define “art” as the pleasure of life. Here is that sentence with the titled quote in context.

In these elegant paragraphs, Morris implores us to first recognize the inbred need to create that exists in all humans. To labor in the satisfaction of that need is to make “art” by his definition. He then calls on us to reclaim, for our benefit, the pleasure of labor which we are in danger of losing to the callous demands of productivity. Or, put more inspiringly, to “win back art”. I’ll leave you with that interpretation and ask, not rhetorically, what can we do to win back art for the sake of our lives.