Arts and crafts.(Report from Europe.)(Brief Article)

The arts and crafts movement began in Britain in reaction to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. The idea behind the movement was to teach the common man to design and make his own goods, rather than rely on machine-made mass-produced objects. This theory was first expressed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and John Ruskin, but it was William Morris who became the main translator of these notions into reality. He wrote voluminously on the subject and founded workshops to produce objects for domestic interiors. Ironically, his products were so expensive that the ordinary working man, for whom they were intended, could not come near to being able to afford them.

The movement inspired artists and architects in Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Scandinavia, and Russia, and each country produced its own indigenous variations. In Austria, for example, the major workshop in Vienna, the Wiener Werkstatte, made objects less naive and more stylized than the British.

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