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Last Monday morning, I stood for some minutes in front of a glass box containing a pair of old sandals. These gnarled artefacts, sticky with use and as brittle as bark, once belonged to Edward Carpenter, the socialist writer and campaigner for homosexual rights. In the 1880s, a friend sent them from Kashmir, a gift that forever liberated their new owner from the “leather coffins” that were ordinary shoes. Wandering his smallholding in Millthorpe, a village on the high moorland between Chesterfield and Sheffield, Carpenter enjoyed the toe-wiggling feeling of freedom afforded by these sandals and, having learned how to make them from a local cobbler, he turned his new skill into a successful cottage industry. Advertisements for this business were placed in the Commonweal, the Socialist League newspaper edited by the designer, poet and thinker William Morris, who had visited Carpenter’s Derbyshire home in 1885, and thought its communitarianism “very pleasant”.
I saw these sandals at Anarchy & Beauty, the National Portrait Gallery’s marvellously stealthy new show about William Morris and his legacy, and I pick them out because, to me, they are the exhibition in microcosm. First, they charm you by making you smile. How funny that someone thought to preserve them; how pitiful that they’ve come to symbolise all that Carpenter stood for. But then, as they begin to tug at your heart, the smile fades. There’s something beautiful at work here: a simple idea animated by practical determination and passionate sincerity.
Look up and you see that beside the sandals hangs Roger Fry’s portrait of Carpenter from 1894. It is perhaps one of the most effective pictures Fry ever painted, for though his subject is wearing a rather drab overcoat, and the room in which he stands is attic-like and gloomy, his face seems to have been lit from within. His cheekbones are blades of highly polished silver; his temples have been tipped with gold. Here is courage, charisma, gentleness and vision. Here is a man you might follow to the ends of the earth or, at the very least, to Sheffield.
It’s the same story with Morris, the fat spider who sits at the heart of the web constructed by the exhibition’s curator, Fiona MacCarthy. In caricatures by his friend, Edward Burne-Jones, Morris is a rotund, antic figure, big-bottomed and excessively hairy (a drawing of him giving a weaving demonstration from 1888 made me laugh out loud). But then you look at GF Watts’s portrait of 1870, or Frederick Hollyer’s photograph from 1884, and you know that to titter is to make yourself ridiculous, not him. Oh, the energy and foresight in those eyes. (“The eyes of some dreaming beast,” said Yeats, who kept a copy of the Watts over his mantelpiece.) The historian EP Thompson characterised Morris as “one of those men whom history will never overtake”, a thesis this show seeks to explore by looking not only at his exhaustingly productive career, but at those designers and artists who followed him (the trail ends at 1960). It’s a brilliantly successful strategy. I can’t believe anyone will leave it without feeling that we need Morris’s guiding hand now more than ever.
MacCarthy comes at this both as a scholar (she is Morris’s biographer) and as someone who understands the power of a certain kind of modernity (she is the widow of the designer David Mellor). Thanks to this, Anarchy & Beauty tells its story with great wit and elegance; it is a lovely looking show, but it’s also utilitarian, in the best sense of that word, its instincts minimalist and informative. So we begin with Morris and his twin convictions: that good design should be available to everyone and that the learning of manual skills makes for a well-rounded human life. Naturally, a wall has been decorated with his “willow” wallpaper.
Also on display are Philip Webb’s sketches for the Red House, his home in Bexleyheath, Kent, and one of the “Sussex” armchairs sold by the Morris company from around 1860. But the modern eye will surely be drawn to his canvas satchel, a dead ringer for those that even now hang from the shoulders of bearded hipsters, and to the curvaceous tumblers Webb designed for the Red House, which might have come straight from Terence Conran’s restaurant, Bibendum.
After this, there’s a sense of a baton being passed. Next to Carpenter we find Mary Lowndes, a suffragette who became a leading stained glass artist, and Sylvia Pankhurst, whose Angel of Freedom design can be seen, in purple, white and green, on a tea service from 1913. A section on the arts and crafts movement includes a gloriously gleaming lustreware vase by William De Morgan, the son of a mathematics professor whom Morris encouraged to become a working potter, and designs by CR Ashbee, the architect who established a Guild and School of Handicraft in the East End, whose history he later hand-printed in his own Endeavour type.
A section on garden cities – Morris first talked of “little communities… among green fields” in 1874 – includes extraordinary footage of the 1928 funeral of Ebenezer Howard, founding father of Letchworth, crowds of the town’s residents having turned out to catch sight of the hearse. Between the wars, there is Eric Gill, whose carved Adam and Eve garden roller (1933) makes explicit the link between sexual health and happiness, manual labour and art, and the potter Bernard Leach, doggedly at his wheel in shirt and tie.
Pleasingly, Anarchy & Beauty is also stuffed full of excellent women, from Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, who led the 1920s revival of hand-block-printed textiles, to (a little later) Lucienne Day, an exuberant swath of whose 1951 fabric, Calyx, can be found next to a Cone Chair by Terence Conran in the section dedicated to the Festival of Britain and after.
This is an intensely absorbing exhibition. It makes you think about Morris and his abiding achievements, about social history, art, even Britishness. But it is also wonderfully inspiring, stirring the visitor into a shaky hopefulness, a feeling that we must all do better, work harder, be kinder both to one another and to the landscapes in which we live.
George Bernard Shaw described Howard as “one of those heroic simpletons who do big things while our prominent wordlings are explaining why they are utopian and impossible”. This is, above all, a show that celebrates the genius of the heroic simpleton and I guarantee you will feel better for having seen it.
- Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960 is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 until 11 January 2015
