Crafts
Craft Classics since the 1940s (Crafts Council Gallery, till 8 January)
Post-war dreams
Tanya Harrod
This exhibition sets out to do something rather magnificent — to introduce a youn- ger generation to some 30 'classic' makers whose careers had reached maturity by the first post-war decades. They fall into two groups: the pioneers like the furniture- maker Edward Barnsley, the potter Ber- nard Leach and the weaver Ethel Mairet whose main thrust was anti-industrial (and who had tenuous and not so tenuous links with the Arts and Crafts movement) and younger men and women like the weaver Peter Collingwood, the jeweller Gerda FlOckinger and the furniture-maker John Makepeace who were able to create work by constructing their own personal aesthe- tic, often through a canny observation of other art forms.
There are some extraordinarily lovely individual pieces on display and the show is accompanied by an excel- lent anthology selected by John Houston (published by the Crafts Council, £3.95). This includes some of the classic texts of the craft movement together with illumi- nating snippets from a catholic range of sources — for example, some very period extracts from Arnold Wesker's soulful failure I'm Talking About Jerusalem.
In wartime propaganda the crafts, along with a neo-Romantic response to our landscape tradition, were among the things we were supposedly fighting for. This message is implicit in Powell and Pressber- ger's 1944 film A Canterbury Tale and in the British Council's decision to send an exhibition of British crafts to tour the United States. Throughout the war Tho- mas Hennell contributed a nostalgic series, published in the Architectural Review, on anonymous craftsmen — 'The Windmil- ler', 'The Basket Maker' and 'The Potter'. It was all a bit of a dream. As John Houston points out, 'The Potter' was no country artisan but a Confucius-quoting refugee from the mandarin classes, Michael Cardew.
Fired by a post-war spirit which was egalitarian, idealistic and anxious to bring art to all, the 1950s were a time of large-scale gatherings of craft enthusiasts. During the war a little magazine published by the Red Rose Guild of Manchester had stressed again and again that the crafts must have a vital place in post-war Britain. War, not surprisingly, had created a long- ing for individuality in daily life and made the holistic crafts-as-a-way-of-life doctrines of Bernard Leach seem deeply attractive. Afterwards, as both Craftsmen and ordin- ary people tried to piece together their lives, the crafts really did seem to hold the promise of a better future. Bernard Leach himself explained how the Dartington Conference of 1952, with potters and weavers from all over the world, answered a need for new links and brotherhood and he went on to describe, without any irony, how after a week of talks and discussions `the great hall was cleared and everyone danced'. The crafts in the Fifties had powerful allies and espoused individuality in a grey world. No wonder they were loosely associated with all kinds of progres- sive organisations and with movements in jazz, folk and film. Not all the work was good but the ideals were fine ones and the conferences and .the dancing were all part of the utopian dream.
The period feeling is vividly conveyed by the extracts in Houston's anthology — and we also learn about counter-movements like the activities of the Picassoists' at the Central, who with the support of Dora Billington were attempting to forge a modernist style of pottery. But I am not entirely sure that the exhibition itself con- veys the excitements of those post-war years, mostly because of the understand- able decision to follow the careers of the chosen 30 'classics' decade by decade from the Forties to the Eighties. There is un- doubtedly a certain fascination in seeing how some found a beautiful formula and stuck to it, like the lustre-ware potter Alan Caiger-Smith, whilst others started off fairly sedately, like Tadek Beutlich with his pan-folk tapestry Snowbird, only to tax our sympathies with vast bobbly tapestry `sculptures' in the Seventies (ideal for the hallways of the new universities) and final- ly to go all minimal and reclusive in the Eighties. But I think we would have learnt more and, more important, been more impressed, if the show had concentrated on the Fifties and Sixties in detail.
John Houston rightly suggests that the crafts movement is what's left of the Arts and Crafts movement after the architects had defected to modernism. But this show gives no hint of the desperate attempts to get craftsmanship back into the structure of buildings. Coventry Cathedral, a very craf- ty affair with altar furniture by Hans Coper and John Hutton's extraordinary glass screen, proved a false dawn, but people kept on trying, and, for instance, when driving past the Sisters of Sion Convent in Chepstow Villas it is possible to see Eileen Lewenstein's lovely ceramic screen of 1968.
As Houston points out, the crafts, like Arts and Crafts, should be seen as a Hans Coper's 1972 'Large pot' and Peter Collingwood's `Macrogauze' linen wall hanging of 1973.
social movement with aesthetic consequ- ences. So whilst all the objects in the show up to a point speak for themselves (Coper more bell-like than Beutlich) it might have been more illuminating to have backed them up with documentary material — the key books, the manuscripts, the maga- zines, photographs of those historic gather- ings, films and tapes of the 'classics' talking and at work. For we may look at Cardew's Bowl of 1948 and at Gordon Baldwin's Warrior of 1953, both in the first section, and ponder. One was made in Africa in a pottery in the jungle by a man racked with illness and on the run from his class, his country and his century. The other was made at the Central School of Art in London by a young pupil of the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi. I suppose we are meant to be so well informed that we can take all this in at a glance, but I don't quite see why.
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