TY - JOUR
AU - Alford,, Sarah
AB - Abstract Frank Lloyd Wright’s address ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ is widely remembered as an early manifesto for the modern movement and machine-made simplicity. However, Wright’s concept of the ‘Machine’ was influenced by Louis Sullivan’s organic theories of architecture, which combined Victorian science and idealism. An acknowledgement that Wright’s Machine was also metaphysical, the ‘Will of Life’, resituates his characterization of the arts and crafts movement as anachronistic and elitist. Furthermore, Wright delivered his speech at Hull House and directed much of his criticism at the social settlement workers and indirectly at their neighbours, many of whom participated in craft activities after working on machines all day long. Ellen Gates Starr, bookbinder and co-founder of Hull House, responded to Wright’s address and agreed that handwork and social work are not synonymous. She also made it clear that neither she, nor other members of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society were against the machine. Starr’s insight drew upon the conditions of contemporary industrial society, while Wright’s conception was based on the power of individual genius. This complicates a persistent narrative that the arts and crafts movement failed because its practitioners made expensive, hand-crafted items and refused to embrace standardization. Introduction In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) fondly remembered his speech ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ (1901) as ‘rank heresy’ and the beginning of the end for the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society (CACS).1 While neither of these is true, Wright’s address remains widely remembered as a key moment in early modernism, as a clarion call for the rejection of hand-crafted objects in favour of well-designed, inexpensive, machine-made goods.2 However, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ is not just an early manifesto for the modern movement.3 There are multiple machines in Wright’s address, including a capital ‘M’ ‘Machine’ which owes its origins to Louis Sullivan’s (1856–1934) adaptations of natural philosophy to architecture. The first half of this essay explores Wright’s Machine as an expression of natural law, which situates his concept of the ‘organic’ within a heady mixture of mid-Victorian science and metaphysics. Acknowledging Wright’s reliance on both progressive and vitalist notions of the machine allows us to complicate our reading of his address and contextualize its meaning within a specific period of history, one in which issues of industrialism and design were central to wider discussions of science, democracy, and social welfare. Furthermore, an analysis which incorporates the idealist and materialist tensions at work in ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ invites us to re-evaluate Wright’s characterization of the arts and crafts as an anachronistic and elitist pastime. His view of the movement persists and it has served to either naturalize or justify the movement’s failure to remake society ever since. 4 In light of Wright’s criticisms of the CACS, the second half of the essay turns to Hull House, the social settlement where Wright delivered his speech, and to Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940) who responded to his address. Starr was an accomplished arts and crafts bookbinder but is best known as Jane Addams’s partner in the co-founding of Hull House in 1889.5 The residents of Hull House were mainly women who reformed ward politics, created neighbourhood parks and playgrounds, and established several state and federal laws related to unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, compulsory education, the protection of immigrants, and women’s rights, all while tending to the immediate and specific needs of their neighbours. Settlement houses were established in the poorest urban neighbourhoods and were the forerunners of social work. Wright delivered his speech to members of the CACS, which not only included professional artists and architects but also those who provided vocational skills or recreational opportunities in the neighbourhood. Settlements were established in order to bridge class divides perpetuated by charitable giving, and recreational activities were perceived to be ways in which the classes could have direct and mutually constructive contact with one another.6 Wright’s pointed advice to the CACS, that they should dissolve the handicraft society and direct its good yet misguided intentions toward science and industry, would seem tone-deaf in this environment. Yet Starr, in her response, addressed an oft-ignored aspect of Wright’s criticisms—those that point to a difficulty she faced her entire life—how to find a constructive balance between activism and handwork. Surprisingly, she concluded in agreement with Wright: handwork and social work are not synonymous. Furthermore, Starr made it clear that she was not against the machine: One side of the argument is gaining support that all work, even the artist’s, can be done as well or better by machine. The present writer, though practicing a pure handicraft, has no wish to decry the machine, or even to deny that, judiciously designed, beautiful things as well as useful can be made by it.7 Despite Wright’s insistence to the contrary, the appropriate versus the inappropriate use of machinery is not what differentiated his practice from the arts and crafts, nor does the difference lie in what he saw as the conflation of social work and art work. Each, however, located the source of artistic agency in vastly different places and also disagreed on how it could become a force for social good. For Wright, this force was vital, natural, and conducted through the gifted individual. For Starr, this was a social force, one that emerged from collective well-being. Wright and the machine Wright revisited the themes in ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ throughout the years but his central message stayed the same: If the machine is to construct a democratic society, it must be the focus of an artist’s creativity. Decorative artists must let go of the noble yet outdated handcraft ideals of William Morris (1834–1896) and John Ruskin (1819–1900), and collaborate with industry. Until this happens, craftsmen and architects will continue to make artistic monstrosities and the machine will remain both dangerous and lifeless [1]. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Trust Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Trust Wright suggested that the machine’s most important gift was ‘Simplicity’. On the practical level, where the machine had been used to perpetuate ‘the mass of meaningless torture to which wood has been subjected since the world began’, the artist could use the machine to bring out the inherent beauty of a material. The machine would also be able to do this finishing economically, so that ‘the poor as well as the rich may enjoy today beautiful surface treatments of clean strong forms’.8 It would eliminate toil and create a society in which all will live in ‘rational freedom’.9 Significantly, however, Wright differentiated between material and metaphysical simplicity.10 In the ideal realm simplicity is a priori, beyond common experience, it is the ‘principle of organic growth working irresistibly the Will of Life through the medium of Man’.11 Using a scientific analogy, Wright described how the artist’s nature vibrates ‘as the magnetic needle vibrates—by magnetic law’. He explained: Simplicity in art, rightly understood, is a synthetic, positive quality, in which we may see evidence of mind, breadth of scheme, wealth of detail, and withal a sense of completeness found in a tree or a flower. A work may have the delicacies of a rare orchid or the stanch fortitude of the oak, and still be simple. A thing to be simple needs only to be true to itself in organic sense.12 For Wright, simplicity was a natural law, one in which the principle of growth makes itself manifest in every conceivable organism in endless individual variety. Depending on its inherent nature, one thing will be as simple as a planed board, while the other will be as simple as an ornate flower. Wright did not prescribe a style; rather, he asked that the ‘Will of Life’, which allows an individual organism or system to be alive and take shape, be the force by which an artist wields the form-giving potential of the Machine.13 It does not originate in an individual but is channelled through an individual. The Machine is the vehicle by which the ‘Will of Life’ makes itself manifest through organic law; a plant is a Machine, a vehicle for simplicity, and man is a Machine, a vehicle for democracy. Wright also described the Machine as the conduit not just for natural law but for human creativity and intellect in general. His example was medieval buildings in which ‘all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point—architecture’.14 Wright finished his address by combining an appeal to the ‘SOUL!’ with language that reflects early nineteenth-century studies into the forces of vitality and mechanism: And the texture of the tissue of this great thing, this Forerunner of Democracy, the Machine, has been deposited particle by particle, in blind obedience to organic law, the law to which the great solar universe is but an obedient machine. This is the thing into which the forces of Art are to breathe the thrill of ideality! A SOUL!15 As Wright recalled: ‘I found that when I talked about Nature I was not talking about the same thing those around me meant when they used the term’ [2].16 Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Home Dining Room, courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Trust Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Home Dining Room, courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Trust Louis Sullivan and organic thinking A significant reason why it may be difficult to connect Wright’s address to romantic-era science and philosophy is because Wright himself was likely unaware of this connection.17 However, he did acknowledge the formative influence of his mentor Louis Sullivan, and it is Sullivan who consciously made the connection between the organic and vitalist principles of botanical science and architecture. As Wright acknowledged in 1914: The principles, however, underlying the fundamental ideal of an organic architecture, common to his [Sullivan’s] work and to mine, are common to all work that ever rang true in the architecture of the world and free as air to any pair of honest young lungs that will breathe deeply enough.18 Historians have broadened an earlier functionalist view of Sullivan’s architecture to acknowledge how his personal and professional world views were steeped in metaphysics, and that he drew his ideas from a wide range of nineteenth-century intellectual and philosophical sources, including English romanticism, German idealism, American transcendentalism and French symbolism.19 Sullivan also secularized and contemporized nineteenth-century natural philosophy in order to explain how decoration and democracy are formed by natural law. Unlike Wright, for whom these concepts can appear in ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ as confused and overexcited, Sullivan spelled it out in the form of a Whitmanesque Socratic dialogue in his Kindergarten Chats (1901, rev. 1918), wherein his young protagonist finally begins to make progress in the series of ongoing lessons, or chats, when he reiterates the teacher’s lesson on form and function: ‘The gist of it is, I take it, behind every form we see there is a vital something or other which we do not see, yet which makes itself visible to us in that very form’. He continues: ‘In other words, in a state of nature the form exists because of the function, and this something behind the form is neither more nor less than a manifestation of what you call the infinite creative spirit, and what I call God’.20 He further explains that this is not just true of nature, it is also true of human life, ‘and it is just as true, because it is a universal law, of everything that the mind can take hold of’.21 The teacher responds in agreement and explains to his protégé that this is called ‘organic thinking’.22 Later, the teacher discusses the words: ‘organic’, ‘organism’, ‘structure’, ‘function’, ‘growth’, ‘development’, ‘form’, and explains: ‘all these words imply the initiating pressure of a living force and a resultant structure or mechanisms whereby such invisible force is made manifest and operative. The pressure we call Function, the resultant, Form’.23 In his Autobiography of an Idea (1924), written in the third person, Sullivan revisited the lessons in Kindergarten Chats through an autobiographical lens. He explained that the idea of form and function took root while he was a child and that it grew until ‘he began to see the powers of nature and the powers of man coalesce in his vision into an IDEA of power’.24 A significant aspect of this journey was his growing appreciation for the scientific method, which he described as ‘an approach to that which lay behind appearances, a relentless method whereby to arrive at the truth by tireless pursuit’.25 In his ‘What is Architecture’ Sullivan connected simplicity with natural law: ‘When Newton saw the apple fall, he saw what you might likewise call an absurdly simple thing. Yet with this simple thing he connected up the Universe’.26 While Sullivan saw these revelations as scientific, yet able to be translated into architectural and social forms, Wright recast this insight as a form of artistic expression, one made manifest in the creation of something new. In 1931, Wright reiterated this: ‘But the organic simplicity to be thus achieved as new is the simplicity of the universe which is quite different from the simplicity of any machine’ [3].27 Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A System of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man’s Powers’, Pl. 6. 1922. Louis H. Sullivan. Sullivania Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #193101_150922-020.jpg Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide ‘A System of Architectural Ornament According with a Philosophy of Man’s Powers’, Pl. 6. 1922. Louis H. Sullivan. Sullivania Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #193101_150922-020.jpg Sullivan believed that ornamentation must return to its simplest elements in order to let the organic laws of simplicity take over, to let the seed of that form grow back into complexity, into, as he wrote in 1922: a ‘fusion of the Inorganic and the Organic into a single impulse and expression of Man’s Will . . .’. He continued: ‘but that all this be taken from the realms of the Transcendental and brought into physical, tangible, even psychic reality, requires that the spirit of Man breathe upon the ideas the breath of his living powers.’28 For further clarification, Sullivan referred his reader to Gray’s School and Field Book of Botany.29 Sullivan first studied this text while he was a high school student in Moses Woolson’s (1821–1896) class. Sullivan further recounted that the botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) of Harvard University occasionally came to speak to his class. Gray is well known for reconciling Darwinian theory and theology and Donald Pfister notes that Gray commenced his botany classes with a lesson on form and function.30 If one were to follow Sullivan’s advice of 1922 and refer to Gray’s School and Field Book of Botany, one would find its author insisting that the study of botany reveals that the manifold variety of natural forms are derived from ‘one and the same plan of Creative Wisdom in the vegetable world’.31 Gray further explained that nature: . . . from the most complex to the most simple, is exhibited under a wide and most beautiful diversity of forms, all based upon the one plan of vegetation which we have been studying, and so connected and so answering to each other throughout as to convince the thoughtful botanist that all are parts of one system, works of one hand, realizations in nature of the conception of One Mind.32 Sullivan seemed to have taken Gray to heart, as he described how botanical studies taught him ‘the way of organized intelligence, and increased power of manipulation of things and thoughts. His insight into the relationship of function and structure deepened rapidly’.33 Wright drew upon these insights for ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, which differentiates his views of the machine from European modernists working in the international style.34 Form Follows Function, he explained in 1957 was ‘misunderstood’, it is: ‘. . . the idea of life itself—bodily and spiritually—intrinsic organism. Form and Function as one.’35 Design reform The Victorian climate of art and science that Sullivan inherited, Gray helped reconcile, and Wright absorbed, was a blend of evolutionary theories, practical Platonism, art botany, transcendental anatomy, and comparative biology. While subject to much debate as to the degree and consequence, generally in natural philosophy, empirical experience was thought to allow the philosophical mind to unfold. Objects of manufacture and of nature were both believed to express something ‘Absolute’ within material experience. The goal of natural philosophy was to gain access to nomothetic, or general laws, through careful attention to ideographic, or individual, concerns. In their respective fields, science and aesthetics were entwined and based, as Barbara Keyser reminds us: ‘in a metaphysical optimism and unitary world view foreign to twentieth century modern sensibilities’.36 As suggested by the title of his Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan oriented his life toward the apprehension of a transcendental, monistic explanation for all phenomena, the ‘universal law that will admit no exceptions’ based on theories of natural design.37 Yet, Sullivan’s conception is certainly not a static theory of nature such as that espoused, for example, by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) or Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). By the time Sullivan was in high school, in 1870, evolutionary theories in which nature and design undergo historical change had become dominant, which also allowed Sullivan and Wright to understand the emergence of American democracy as a progressive stage in history, closely tied to natural law and the development of historical styles. Sullivan was not the only ornamentist to adopt natural philosophy as a design strategy. In Britain this became a movement initiated by a Parliamentary Committee on Art and Science in 1836, and it was spread worldwide by Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856), which urged designers to idealize or conventionalize nature in order to ‘see how various the forms how unvarying the principles’.38 The botanical principle of idealism became a progressive force in British design, exemplified by designer and botanist Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) who gravitated toward the depiction of an authentic ideal in decorative art, conventional, as opposed to naturalistic representation. As David Brett and Keyser demonstrate, design theory became integrated into the principles of natural philosophy and industrial art, which were then folded together into a uniquely nineteenth-century conception of the vital affinities between the natural and industrial world; a world in which Dresser’s motto ‘Fitness to Purpose’ is connected to botanical science and idealist philosophy, one in which plants and machines are not the simple dualities they appear to be today.39 By mid-century, as Brett notes: ‘It is not altogether an exaggeration to say, that to be a successful decorative artist in the 1850s, you also had to be a practical botanist’ [4].40 Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Diagram to illustrate art botany lecture, Christopher Dresser, 1855. Victoria and Albert Museum Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Diagram to illustrate art botany lecture, Christopher Dresser, 1855. Victoria and Albert Museum In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of art botany based on the geometric stylization of plants became a cornerstone of the courses at the London School of Design (now the Royal College of Art, London). These developments coincided with a period in which transcendental science became increasingly popular in Britain. Philip Rehbock explains that in the 1850s, Britain experienced a romantic revival in which the ideas of philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) were translated into a scientific appreciation for a priori patterns.41 Sullivan and Dresser shared a neo-Platonic interest in art and science. Dresser published widely on science and art but was uninterested in post-Darwinian developments in natural history. In his The Art of Decorative Design (1862), Dresser’s primary observation is that nature works with fixed mathematical principles and that these same formulas may be applied to the design of ornament. Furthermore, botanical laws manifest ‘the hidden principle of life’, analogous to how a soul animates the human body.42 Ornamental art, he stated, is the link which binds science and art together. Ornamentists must ‘likewise strive to observe the unit out of which all vital forms are wrought, and to discover the ultima thule of life’.43 Sullivan and Dresser emerged out of the mid-nineteenth century with similar monistic ideas about form and function based on natural law, which attests to a wide dialogue between natural science and design at this time. As Sullivan stressed in his autobiography, it was in the biological sciences ‘he discovered that in truth it was not simply a matter of form expressing function, but the vital idea was this: That the function created or organized its form’.44 Sullivan’s differentiation between the expression of function and the organization of form is not just a connection to nineteenth-century botanical studies and their use in design curricula; it is also key to understanding Wright’s concept of organic architecture, an understanding that transcends sensitivity to site-specificity and harmonious living arrangements. Organic also means organized: ‘deposited particle by particle, in blind obedience to organic law, the law to which the great solar universe is but an obedient machine’.45 Ellen Gates Starr and handcraft In ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, Wright not only discussed ‘simplicity’ as a formal quality, and a law of nature made manifest but also in relation to the ideals of William Morris, who ‘pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art’.46 Wright connected the simplicity of Morris’s designs with his moral stand against the machine as a ‘terrible engine of enslavement’.47 Wright argued that in the modern age Morris’s ideals must take new form, and he exhorted his audience to celebrate the machine as a labour-saving device, as it had ‘widened the margin of his leisure until enlightenment shall bring him a further sense of the magnificent ground plan of progress in which he too justly plays a significant part’.48 He praised Ruskin and Morris for their moral principles yet noted: We want the man who eagerly seeks and finds, or blames himself if he fails to find, the beauty of this time; who distinctly accepts as a singer and a prophet; for no man may work while he waits or wait as he works in the sense that William Morris’ great work was legitimately done—in the sense that most art and craft of today is an echo; the time when such work was useful has gone.49 While Wright agreed with Morris that the machine should serve the needs of society, the important difference is this: in Wright’s conception, it is ‘the truest artistic inspiration’ which must direct the machine, the operators and the manufactures: ‘The artist to-day is the leader of an orchestra, where he once was the star performer’.50 Morris however, even in his most romantic phase as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, critiqued genius as a symptom of the separation of physical and mental labour. Wright did not address Morris’s contention that this fragmentation of labour serves capital, and it will not change until the whole of society changes. It was this reality that inspired Ellen Gates Starr and George M. R. Twose to found the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society on 22 October 1897. The formation of CACS marked a decidedly different attitude toward the current role of art education at Hull House. Before this, Starr, in line with most cultural philanthropists at the time, believed that exposure to great art alone was enough to redeem the middle class and elevate the lower class. Starr taught art history and founded the Chicago Public School Art Society (CPSAS) in 1894, modelled on the efforts of philanthropist T.C. Horsfall (1841–1932), who had been encouraged by Ruskin to provide art works to school children in Manchester. The aim of the CPSAS, an offshoot of the Chicago Women’s Club, was to promote art as a part of the life and environment of public schools. This included everything from painting the walls of classrooms an agreeable colour to providing these same rooms with good prints and original works of art. Starr was also instrumental in the conception of, and fundraising for, Hull House’s first building addition, which housed an art gallery, art studio, library and reading rooms.51 Starr’s efforts in this period reflect a long tradition of women in cultural philanthropy and social service but she also complicated this traditional role by becoming a labour organizer and candidate for political office, which was unusual for a member of the Chicago Women’s Club. Starr and Wright shared a belief in the political potential of art, and it could be argued that she had more in common with Wright in this regard than she did with her partner, Addams. Stankiewicz notes that Addams, who initiated the craft classes at Hull House in 1890, always saw them as recreational activities meant to ameliorate social tension.52 Starr, however, connected the need for creative activity with the need to disrupt the social order, to ‘raise the siege’.53 As she emphatically stated in 1895: ‘Into the prison-houses of the earth, its sweat-shops and underground lodging houses, art cannot follow’.54 The first Easter art exhibits were connected to a young women’s trade union, the Dorcas Federal Labor Union, which Starr helped establish at Hull House. Mary Jo Deegan and Ana-Maria Wahl maintain that the Labor Union and the Easter exhibits were the groundwork upon which CACS was built.55 The activities of the society included exhibitions, lectures, and evening classes for children and adults in woodworking, ceramics, and metalsmithing. Over the next four months 128 people joined the society, including Wright. The settlement’s involvement with the arts and crafts led, in November 1900, to the establishment of the highly successful Labor Museum at Hull House, envisioned as an attempt to ‘restore the organic unity of modern society. In a fragmented world, art could bridge the gap between young and old, immigrant and native, present and past’.56 In the museum, members of the immigrant population displayed the hand-working skills they had brought with them to Chicago. Children were then able to see their parents in an entirely different context to that of the degrading conditions in which most of them, including the children, worked and lived every day [5]. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Women spinning wool at the Hull-House Labor Museum c. 1902, Seven Settlement-Database of Photos, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections and University Archives. JAMC_0000_0177_0475 Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Women spinning wool at the Hull-House Labor Museum c. 1902, Seven Settlement-Database of Photos, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections and University Archives. JAMC_0000_0177_0475 ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’ is not just an emphatic philosophical statement; Wright laced it with some pointed advice for CACS. He advised dissolving the society altogether and starting again from scratch, with the exhibitions being the first to go. The members should educate themselves, and ‘prepare to make some good impression upon the Machine, the destroyer of their present ideals and tendencies, their salvation in disguise’.57 The Machine, he claimed, is beyond the understanding of ‘the artist or student of sociology’. He recommended they continue with social work, where there was work to be done, but warned: ‘In the field of art activity they will do distinct harm. Already they have wrought much miserable mischief’.58 For Wright, who still had Sullivan’s capital-lettered exhortations ringing in his ears, this would have sounded like visionary, forthright advice. But, of course, to those with the sound of actual machinery ringing in their ears, even by proxy, this would have sounded desperately tactless. Luckily, tact was not a requirement at Hull House. Starr, no model of tact herself, responded to Wright’s address in ‘The Renaissance of Handicraft’ published in the International Socialist Review 2, in February 1902. She began by clarifying that she did not object to the machine but that she was against its abuse of the worker. She did not want go back to in time, and she did not object to machine-made objects that were well-designed, beautiful and useful. However, nothing, she said, could take the place of the hand: ‘The fields are two’, she wrote ‘but each affects the other’.59 Starr asserted that the handcraft revival manifested itself in ways that reinforced uneven class relations. For the leisured, arts and crafts societies had become another way to alleviate boredom, akin to a literary club or charity ball, while for those on the other side of the class divide, craft had been instrumentalized. Almost everyone, claimed Starr, in every stratum of society, suffered from a dearth of personally satisfying, creative experiences. Starr also agreed with Wright that valuable, well-designed objects raised the quality of everyday items, yet stated that their true value was in how they raised the quality of labour time for the maker: ‘There is a feeling of weariness and futility about merely ornamental or decorative work, done in tooth and nail kind of way, as a means of livelihood’.60 She asserted that the ‘millennium of art and craft’ would have truly arrived when the machine eliminated toil to the point where each person had time to do community work.61 Taking her cue from Morris, Starr wondered why more people didn’t protest having to spend time labouring over the creation of worthless and even destructive things. In a concise critique of overproduction, she stated: ‘The product and the craftsman’s life must justify themselves’ [6].62 Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress Clearly, the issue that separated the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society and Frank Lloyd Wright, was not the machine and its appropriate use in manufacturing.63 The source of their disagreement originates in Wright’s metaphysical Machine. Wright identified art as the product of the ‘Will of Life’, working its way into the world through the ‘medium of man’, while Starr defined art as ‘doing the work one likes to do and expressing oneself through it’.64 Wright accused the arts and crafts of being too rational and disciplined, and suggested it could take a lesson from romanticism. In the arts and crafts, he argued: ‘. . . the problem is presented as a more or less fixed quantity, highly involved, requiring a surer touch, a more highly disciplined artistic nature to organize it as a work of art’.65 Wright’s vitalist notions about the Machine, creativity as a law of nature channeled through a sensitive conduit, informed his understanding that art is not a product of discipline but of intuition: ‘It is a matter of perceiving and portraying the harmony of organic tendencies’, which is ‘originally intuitive because the artistic nature is a prophetic gift that may sense these qualities from afar. The artist is he who can truthfully idealize the common sense of these tendencies in his chosen way’.66 As did Starr’s, Wright’s views also reflected urgent political imperatives. He admitted that while the machine began as a ‘terrible engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized world with a murderous ubiquity’, it was also ‘the great forerunner of democracy’, and that ‘genius must progressively dominate the work of the contrivance it has created . . . ‘.67 As time went on he became more emphatic: ‘The soul of that new life we are fond of calling American is liberty: liberty tolerant and so sincere that it must see all free or itself suffer. This freedom is the highest American ideal. To attain it, then, is inner-experience, because there is no “exterior” freedom’.68 He reiterated: ‘It is evident that free architecture must develop from within, —an integral, or as we now say in architecture, an “organic” affair’.69 For Starr, on the other hand, art is not the expression of a ‘prophetic gift’. ‘The artist’, she argued, lives art ‘as a life, in common with the life of his nation’.70 Starr understood the condition of art as being historically specific to the industrial period, defined by individual freedom but to be achieved collectively. Nevertheless, Starr agreed with Wright: ‘a civic or national art will never be manufactured in evening schools of design and handicraft, frequented by youths who have worked themselves sleepy all hours of daylight over some dreary business’.71 Starr concluded by doubting that, in the end, the demand for good craftsmanship would be enough to make real change. She struggled with this issue her entire time at Hull House: The mass of men are now subjected to the machine instead of subjecting it; and the personal problem for those who face the question at all is whether to join themselves to the number as such and try to modify the conditions, or to go out from among them and live a rational life, working ‘in the spirit of the future’—that future which shall make common the privilege now exclusive of doing the work one likes to do and expressing one’s self through it, which, as Morris so often said, is art.72 Neither Wright, Starr nor Morris believed that arts and crafts societies were adequate to the task of social, political, and creative emancipation. The difference in their perspectives plays out in their paradoxical responses to industrialization, which are, as Tom Crook points out, perfectly consistent with a dialogical understanding of modernity in which modernist ideals, processes, and so forth, generate meaning through active and open-ended engagement with their opposites.73 I suggest however, that Wright was not aware of the contradiction inherent in suggesting that the life force of democracy is eternal and originates in an ahistorical ideal. Nonetheless, he expressed modern ideas which brought these oppositions into dynamic and productive struggle. By contrast, Starr openly grappled with the contradiction of making expensive, labour-intensive craftwork, motivated by concern for a class of people who could not afford the time to make things nor the money to buy her work. As Bruce Kahler argues: ‘Her own manual labor was utterly inadequate to bridge the wide “chasm” between her life and that of the wage earner’. What Starr could justly say, continues Kahler, was that her efforts ‘were born of an “honest impulse”—and provided her with the financial means and free time to devote to other causes’.74 Kahler quotes from a typescript fragment in the Jane Addams Collection at the University of Chicago in which Starr admitted her naïveté in believing that ‘by practicing a charming handicraft one’s self, one could hope to have any effect whatever upon the hideousness and joylessness to which modern industrialism has brought the life of the worker of the rank and file’.75 Starr’s criticism, however, was not limited to bookbinding: she had equally trenchant criticisms of the other activities to which she was devoted, such as the Church, settlement houses and union movements.76 Starr fought on all fronts for a just society and was unafraid to criticize anyone, be it a powerful institution, or her own self. Not only is Starr’s disappointment in the arts and crafts movement consistent with, and not an exception to, her hopes for a regenerated society, it is also a manifestation of her advanced social consciousness. Her negativity is a form of negation that, in the leftist tradition, refuses to affirm current social reality.77 While it may have appeared that art and handcraft were inadequate to the task of emancipatory politics, they became integral to the realization of what Starr referred to as ‘—a new life, a freed life’.78 She did not ask how more people could possess art and craft objects but instead asked how more people could participate in the process of making art and craft objects. Starr’s high expectations for her book-binding practice came from Morris’s conviction that a sound, vital, and permanent art could only exist if labourers were given the same rights to their voices and imaginations as artists had, rising as an expression through, and not apart from, common life. Handcraft was integral to the formation of Starr’s understanding of these issues. At her bindery in Hull House, she attempted to realize her vision for an ideal made visible, through the imprint of labour worth doing [7]. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Ellen Gates Starr binding, courtesy of P. R. Bishop, Collection of Mosher Press Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Ellen Gates Starr binding, courtesy of P. R. Bishop, Collection of Mosher Press In 1900, Starr published ‘A Note of Explanation’ in the Hull-House Bulletin in which she explains that she took up bookbinding because she was interested in books ‘from several points of view’, and that it gave her the opportunity to prevail against ‘modern life [which] has been tending to separate the work of the mind and the work of the hands’. She felt: ‘it was not enough to talk about and explain beautiful and well-made things . . . instead of talking, it would be a great deal better to make something myself, ever so little, thoroughly well, and beautiful of its kind’.79 Starr not only learned from Ruskin and Morris that the condition of art and labour is directly connected to larger economic and political decisions but that she also had the right to enjoy the deeply sustaining pleasure of craftsmanship. Starr understood that by creating work with her own hands she was in solidarity with those who would work toward a ‘a new life’ which gave ‘the art power of a whole nation and race by enabling them to work in gladness and not in woe’.80 Morris’s insistence that joy is the inherent counterpart to creative labour gave Starr the courage to claim this joy not just for others but for herself. It prompted her to practise what she believed was possible and, as such, the process of binding itself became a product of her labour as important as the finished books. Starr’s emphasis on process prompted her to ask what social conditions must be met in order to democratize the art experience and then to participate in activism that worked toward the practical realization of this vision. As a result, Starr joined Morris’s call for socialized labour; in 1916 she became the chairman of the Nineteenth Ward Branch of the Cook County Socialist Party and ran a campaign to become an alderman. The Chicago Daily Tribune described Starr as a reluctant candidate who, during her one speech in support of her candidacy, claimed: ‘she did not expect to be elected and did not greatly desire election’. ‘However’, she told the reporter: ‘my only excuse not to run would be laziness, and one couldn’t make such an excuse. I don’t believe either a woman or a Socialist could be elected in this ward. The machine is too strong’. Starr’s stated objective was ‘to enter an educational campaign to raise the Socialist vote in the Ward’. 81 Starr’s bid was influenced by Morris’s example. Her lecture notes, ‘The Art and Socialism of William Morris’, break his life down into three periods, each characterized ‘by prodigious industry and productiveness’.82 For the third period her notes read: About 1887 M. became convinced that no social revolution was immediately practicable. His own faith did not waver, but ‘his hope became very forlorn’. Without abatement of his socialist belief he began again to give himself more fully to his older interests . . . . Also he formulates what now seems to him the true work of his party. Then, with each word underlined twice, she wrote: ‘Education toward Revolution by influence on opinion . . . Making socialists the only way to socialism’.83 Morris’s belief clearly impressed her pedagogical nature. He was not only her mentor in terms of her understanding of labour conditions under capital but she followed his example into politics as well. This emphasis on education allies both Starr and Morris to critical participants of Second International Marxism (1889–1914), who claimed that socialism is not the end product of a passive transformation of history but one that must be built through the creation and empowerment of class consciousness.84 This line of criticism relocates the agency for change in the form of labour embodied by the worker, or maker, under capitalism, without falling into the tendency to grant total agency to the individual. Starr and Morris both realized that socialism requires socialists and that socialists must be made. Starr’s bookbinding practice not only afforded her pleasure, a measure of financial independence, and recognition; it was inextricable from her activism. It would be a mistake to conclude that hand-binding was an ironic pastime for someone dedicated to democracy and labour rights. Arts and crafts bookbinding was integral to the formation of Starr’s understanding of these issues. This understanding, combined with Starr’s practical work in her neighbourhood, made her a rare figure in the arts and crafts movement. As sympathetic and as hardworking as Morris was, for example, he did not venture into the East End of London until 1884, well into his political career. Starr negotiated the ideals of the arts and crafts while living with and helping to organize the working class, being arrested on the picket lines, and by direct political action. Starr not only followed Morris’s example by becoming active in politics and Cobden-Sanderson’s in bookbinding but she also washed the bodies of her dead neighbours, looked after their babies, housed desperately ill—or just plain desperate—women in her tiny spare room, campaigned for strike money, as well as many other unglamorous and unsung chores. Each activity was aided and abetted by reading, teaching, and practising a demanding, time-consuming craft for nearly twenty years, until she became paralyzed by unsuccessful back surgery. Starr throve on the combination of community work and craft practice. Meeting the needs of others gave Starr the sense of purpose and momentum to practise bookbinding. Furthermore, Starr practised bookbinding despite its limitations, which allowed her to arrive at the understanding that it was the form of society that needed to be reformed, not just its arts. Conclusion Starr and Wright responded to a crisis in labour and manufacturing that had become visible in design and democracy, yet the potential of Wright’s Machine and Starr’s vision for socialism remained unrealized. Putting our finger on why entails a recognition that what they saw from their vantage point in history is not always immediately clear to us in the present, a point made apparent by the complexity of the intertwined meanings of the words ‘machine’ and ‘organic’ in the nineteenth century.85 I suggest that the twentieth-century tendency to literalize the machine overemphasized the aspect of Wright’s address in which he discussed it as an ethically superior tool that reduces wasted labour and, because of its nature, creates an object of formal simplicity. This misunderstanding continues to serve a long-standing narrative in which the arts and crafts movement failed because its practitioners made expensive, hand-crafted items, and stubbornly refused to embrace standardization and machine production. As we note with Starr, and as was generally true in the arts and crafts, its practitioners were engaged in a complex and multilayered dialogue with mechanization, or as Elizabeth Cumming phrases it: ‘skill-based Modernism’.86 Cumming analyses the movement as a deeply engaged and consistent cultural response to the rapid technological and social changes that characterize the period. She stresses that it was one of social practice, responding to the needs of a wide spectrum of society, the legacy of which ‘may be seen as part of a wider reassessment of the meaning and cultural value of tradition at a time that required reaffirmation of life’.87 The perceived inevitability that handcraft would fail to make a dent in the lives of industrial workers can either be used conservatively, as a way to close the door on these ideals, or as a task, inherited from both Starr and Wright, to work through the latent emancipatory potential of their shared history. If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail responses to the editorial board and other readers. Acknowledgments: I am indebted to Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design in North Carolina for support. I am also grateful for the insightful comments of Dr Janice Helland, Dr Maud Lavin, Joe Socki, Mary MacLachlan, and the anonymous reviewers. Notes 1 " Frank Lloyd Wright, Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1943), 132. 2 " The first four articles in the seven-part mandate of the CACS, as outlined in the December issue of the 1897 Hull House Bulletin, are variations on the need for educating craftspeople. The first being ‘to call attention of those engaged in the production of articles for everyday use to the possibility of developing in these articles the highest beauty through a vital harmony with the conditions of production’. 3 " Wright’s address is generally considered to be the foremost American articulation of a wide-spread shift in western architecture that moved away from ornamentation to such an extent that by World War II, the term ‘decorative art’ had become obsolete. Isabelle Frank, ed., The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings 1750–1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 4 " This particular historiographical strand owes its origins to Nikolaus Pevsner who roots the ‘reason and functionalism’ of the modern movement in the arts and crafts movement, and locates the transformative potential of both in the accessibility of their production and in the role design and architecture could play in the creation of a classless society. Pevsner strongly associates the accessibility of well-made products with standardization and machine production, thereby identifying the British arts and crafts movement’s failure to fully embrace the machine-made, as a fatal and elitist error. Even the most sympathetic accounts of arts and crafts throughout the twentieth century often interpret the contradictory elements of the movement as an inconsistency between the movement’s aspirations and its realization. Furthermore, as recently as 2013, Glen Adamson sums up Ruskin’s and Morris’s views as the rejection of ‘all’ factory labour and as a retrogressive recourse to preservation. Adamson, however, rejects Pevner’s rationalist characterization, as he literally finds the arts and crafts movement and subsequent iterations to be insane, and diagnoses the arts and crafts with trauma. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1960); Glen Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 182. 5 " Starr studied bookbinding with T.J. Cobden-Sanderson at Doves Bindery in 1897–98 and for three months in 1899. For more on Starr’s bookbinding practice: Ellen Gates Starr, ‘Bookbinding as an Art and as a Commercial Industry’, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., n.d.; Wallace Rice, ‘Miss Starr’s Bookbinding’, House Beautiful, vol. 12, June 1902, 11–14; Esther Griffin White, ‘Some American Bookbinders’, Brush and Pencil 13, no. 5, 1904, 373–378; M. Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders 1880–1920. Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press, 1996; Mary Jo Deegan and Ana-Maria Wahl, ‘Introduction: Ellen Gates Starr and Her Journey towards Social Justice and Beauty’ in On Art Labor and Religion: Ellen Gates Starr, ed. Mary Jo Deegan and Ana-Maria Wahl. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003; Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, ‘Craft Bookbinding in Chicago and Iowa: Ellen Gates Starr and the Hull House Bindery, the Hertzberg Bindery, and Bill Anthony’, Collection Management, 31, no. 1 (2007): 1–20. 6 " Art and craft recreational activities were among the first programs offered by Hull House. Their inclusion stemmed from a Ruskinian belief that access to art was humanizing and that female members of the upper and middle classes were obliged to exercise their civic duty by providing arts education to those who would otherwise not have access to it. It was also widely perceived that art and craft activities were morally sound uses of leisure time for the working classes who might be tempted to pursue vice in its stead. While many of these programs were indeed patronizing, they were also in high demand by the communities they served. For example, the Butler art gallery was the first addition to Hull House (1890) and was far more popular than the next facility Hull House opened, which was a public kitchen. Allen Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967; Herbert H. Stroup, Social Welfare Pioneers. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1885; Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, ‘Art at Hull House, 1889–1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’, Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (1989): 35–39; Anne Anderson, ‘Victorian High Society and Social Duty: The Promotion of Recreative Learning and Voluntary Teaching’, History of Education, 31, no. 4 (2002): 311–334; Diane. Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900:Beauty for the People. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 7 " E. G. Starr, ‘The Renaissance of Handcraft,’ in On Art, Labor, and Religion, op. cit. 83–87, 86. 8 " F. L. Wright, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, in Writings and Buildings, ed. Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn, (New York: Meridian Books Inc., 1960), 55–73, 65–66. 9 " Ibid., 62. 10 " Wright makes the distinction between material and metaphysical of simplicity throughout his career, and often values the latter over the former. In 1914, for example, Wright clarifies that an overemphasis on concrete simplicity results in a ‘False simplicity—simplicity as an affectation’. F. L. Wright, ‘Prairie Architecture’, in Kaufmann and Raeburn, op. cit., 38–55, 53. 11 " Wright, ‘Art and Craft’, op. cit., 71. 12 " Ibid., 65. 13 " Wright used a capital ‘M’ when referring to the metaphysical machine, and a small ‘m’ when discussing machines that are tools. 14 " Ibid., 57. 15 " Ibid., 73. 16 " Wright, ‘Roots’, in Kaufmann and Raeburn, op. cit., 18–36, 26. 17 " Wright records that his Froebel kindergarten education primed him for the T-Square, rendering him sympathetic to the machine. Norman Brosterman writes that Froebel’s educational goals were based on the interconnectedness of all things, ‘that humanity might gain consciousness of its own sublime power and fully realize its own spiritual potential’. Wright may have been primed to absorb Sullivan’s vitalist theories when he opened up his Kindergarten gifts. Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 32. 18 " Wright, ‘In the Cause of Architecture’, in Kaufmann and Raeburn, op. cit., 181–196, 183. 19 " Significant examples include: Sherman Paul, Louis H. Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962; Narciso G. Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980; Lauren S. Weingarden, ‘Louis H. Sullivan’s Metaphysics of Architecture (1885–1901): Sources and Correspondences with Symbolist Art Theories’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1981; Robert C. Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work. New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books-Viking, 1986; Paul Edward Sprague, ‘The Architectural Ornament of Louis Sullivan and His Chief Draftsmen’ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1989); David Van Zanten, Sullivan’s City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000; Lauren S. Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 20 " Louis H. Sullivan, ‘Kindergarten Chats’, in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, ed. I. Athey, 2nd ed., (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1979), 46. 21 " Ibid. 22 " Ibid., 47. 23 " Ibid., 48. 24 " L.H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1956), 248. 25 " Ibid., 249. 26 " L.H. Sullivan, ‘What is Architecture’, in Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers, ed. R. Twombly (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 239. 27 " Wright, ‘To the Young Man in Architecture’, in Kaufmann and Raeburn, op. cit., 232–252, 233. 28 " ‘Plate Transcriptions from: A System Of Architectural Ornament By Louis H. Sullivan. A series of 20 plates produced from 1922–1923’, transcribed by Giles Phillips, http://gilesphillips.com/sullivan-grammar/sullivan-soao/Sullivan-A_System_of_Architectural_Ornament-transcript.pdf, accessed 23 November 2015. 29 " Sullivan also refers ‘advanced students’ to E.B. Wilson’s The Cell in Development and Heredity (1896). 30 " Donald H. Pfister, ‘Asa Gray and Harvard Summer School’, Harvard Papers in Botany, 15, no. 2: 307. 31 " Asa Gray, Gray’s School and Field Book of Botany: Consisting of “Lessons in Botany,” and “Field, Forest, and Garden Botany,” Bound in One Volume: by Asa Gray, Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard University, (New York: Ivison, Blakeman & Co., New York, 1868), 5. 32 " Ibid., 497. 33 " Sullivan, Autobiography, op. cit., 173. 34 " Wright specifically addressed Le Corbusier’s aphorism that a house is a machine for living: ‘Oh yes, young man; consider well that a house is a machine in which to live, but architecture begins where that concept of a house ends. All life is machinery in the rudimentary sense, and yet machinery is the life of nothing. Machinery is machinery only because of life’. Wright, ‘To the Young Man in Architecture’, op. cit., 247. 35 " Wright, ‘Roots’, op. cit., 33. 36 " Barbara Whitney Keyser, ‘Ornament as Idea: Indirect Imitation of Nature in the Design Reform Movement’, Journal of Design History, 11, no. 2 (1998): 127–144, 127. 37 " Sullivan, Autobiography, op. cit., 290. 38 " Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 4th ed., (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1972), 157. 39 " David Brett, ‘Design Reform and the Laws of Nature’, Design Issues, 11, no. 3 (1995): 37–49; Keyser, op. cit., 127–144. 40 " Brett, op. cit., 39. 41 " Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. 42 " Christopher Dresser, The Art of Decorative Design (Day & Son, 1862), 146. 43 " Ibid., 49. 44 " Ibid., 289. 45 " Wright, ‘Art and Craft’, op. cit., 73. 46 " Ibid., 64. 47 " Ibid., 56. 48 " Ibid., 70. 49 " Ibid., 64. 50 " Ibid., 68, 69. 51 " Samuel Barnett came from Toynbee Hall to speak at its opening reception. Four thousand and seventy-nine people attended that first ten-day exhibition. 52 " Stankiewicz, op. cit., 35–39. 53 " E. G. Starr, ‘Art and Labor,’ in On Art, Labor, and Religion, op. cit., 65–73, 72. 54 " Ibid., 70. 55 " M. J. Deegan and A. Wahl, ‘Introduction: Ellen Gates Starr and Her Journey Toward Social Justice and Beauty’, op. cit., 1–35, 18. 56 " Bruce R. Kahler, ‘Art and Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, 1897–1910’, PhD diss., Purdue University, 1986, 116–117. 57 " Wright might not have been aware of the gender dynamics at play in his statements but they are certainly present. The membership of the CACS was mostly male professional architects, artists and artisans. Despite this, the work displayed in the exhibitions were made by women. By suggesting that the exhibitions be discontinued, he was suggesting that the CACS drop the activities done by the women in the organization. Wright, ‘Art and Craft’, op.cit., 68; Stankiewicz, ‘Art at Hull House’, op. cit., 37. 58 " Ibid., 64. 59 " Starr, ‘Renaissance of Handcraft’, op. cit., 86. 60 " Ibid., 84. 61 " Ibid., 86. 62 " Ibid. 63 " In his own practice, Wright did not use machines to make his designs more accessible. During most of his career, his furniture, for example, was available only to his clients and expensively produced by speciality firms using a combination of hand and machine methods. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/frank-lloyd-wright/, accessed 30 October, 2016. 64 " Ibid. 65 " Wright, ‘Art and Craft’, op. cit., 71. 66 " Ibid. 67 " Ibid., 56. 68 " Wright, ‘To the Young Man in Architecture’, op. cit., 240. 69 " Ibid., 242. 70 " Starr, ‘Art and Labor’, in Deegan and Wahl, op. cit., 65–73, 71. 71 " Starr, ‘Renaissance of Handcraft’, op. cit., 84. 72 " Ibid., 86. 73 " Tom Crook, ‘Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Journal of Modern Craft, 2, no. 1 (2009): 17–32. 74 " Kahler, op. cit., 144. 75 " Ibid. 76 " See Starr, ‘Settlements and the Church’s Duty’, in Deegan and Wahl, op. cit., 149–157. 77 " Leszek Kolakowski, ‘The Concept of the Left’, in Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, J. Zielonko Peel trans. (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1968), 67–83. 78 " Starr, ‘Renaissance of Handcraft’, op. cit., 86. 79 " Starr, ‘Hull-House Bookbindery,’ in Deegan and Wahl, op. cit. 79–81, 79. 80 " Starr, ‘Art and Labor’, op. cit., 72. 81 " ‘Miss Starr to Stick in Race’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 February 1916. 82 " Starr, ‘The Art and Socialism of William Morris’, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 1. 83 " Ibid., 3. 84 " György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingstone trans. Talgarth: The Merlin Press. 85 " As with Wright, coming to terms with the metaphysical aspects of arts and crafts will allow us to further explore the movement in the ideal realm. For example, Alan Powers notes that the motto of the Art Workers’ Guild, ‘Art is Unity’, could be as straightforward as the unity of different forms of art but it could also refer to Neo-Hegelianism or Emerson’s notion of the unity of the seen and unseen. For works that address this range of beliefs, see: Charles Robert Ashbee, An Endeavour Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris. London: Edward Arnold, 1901; Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, The Arts and Crafts Movement. London: Doves Press, 1905; Alan Crawford, C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Alan Powers, ‘1884 and the Arts and Crafts Movement’, Apollo 161, no. 518 (2005): 60–65; Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Anne Stewart O’Donnell, C.F.A. Voysey: Architect, Designer, Individualist. San Francisco: Pomegranate Publications, 2011. 86 " Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006, 192. 87 " Ibid., 217. Author notes " Sarah Alford graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies. She has exhibited across Canada and in the United States, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Alford has received grants to study craft and craft history from Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Canada-US Fulbright Program and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design in North Carolina. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. © The Author [2017]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.
TI - Ellen Gates Starr and Frank Lloyd Wright at Hull House: The Machine as the ‘Will of Life’
JF - Journal of Design History
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epx012
DA - 2017-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/ellen-gates-starr-and-frank-lloyd-wright-at-hull-house-the-machine-as-L91Wet3aFE
SP - 282
VL - 30
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -