William morris

William Morris (Walthamstow, March 24, 1834 - London, October 3, 1896) was a British architect, designer and textile teacher, translator, poet, novelist and socialist activist. Associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement, he was one of the main promoters of the revival of traditional textile art, maintaining, recovering and improving artisan production methods as opposed to chain and industrial production. He was a great defender of the conservation of religious and civil architectural heritage. His literary contributions helped to spread the modern genre of fantasy. He played an important and very active role in the propaganda and dissemination, through writings, meetings and conferences, of the incipient British socialist movement.

Biography

He was born in Walthamstow, near London. Belonging to a wealthy family, in 1848 he began her education at Marlborough College and completed it at Exeter College, Oxford University, where he studied architecture, art and religion. At this time he met the critic John Ruskin, who would have a lasting influence on him, and artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and Philip Webb. It was also during these years that he met Jane Burden, a working-class young woman whose auburn hair and pale skin were considered by Morris and her friends to be the ultimate expression of feminine beauty, leading to her being chosen as the model for numerous plays. Morris and Burden married in 1859.

Morris was closely linked to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that rejected industrial production in the decorative arts and architecture, and advocated a return to medieval crafts, considering that artisans deserved the rank of artist.

After completing his studies, he began working in 1856 at the architectural firm of G.E. Street. With Webb he built the Red House, which was his wedding gift to Jane Burden. In the following years (1857-62) he became a professional painter. With his background in art and architecture he founded, in 1861, along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown and Philip Webb, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & amp; Co., an architecture and industrial design firm that he personally financed. Through this enterprise, Morris created a cultural renaissance in Victorian England that drew on the arts and crafts of medieval times as a paradigm of the primacy of man over machine and work done to the highest standards. of artistic expression.

This movement attracted people from all over the world and in 1875 the company was renamed Morris and Co., with Morris as sole owner. For much of his life, Morris was intensely concerned with preserving medieval arts and crafts while abhorring modern forms of mass production.

Morris considered himself a Marxist and influenced by anarchism, in the 1880s Morris became a committed revolutionary socialist activist. In 1883 he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SF), the labor party of England. Later, in 1884, it split along with a part of it and they organized the Socialist League, where non-Marxist socialists (Jacobins, Christians and anarchists) were active, although they broke with that organization again in 1890.

William Morris founded in 1891 Kelmscott Press where he produced original works (The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, The fall of the Nibelungs, etc.), as well as reprints of the classics, his best-known work being the edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, illustrated by Burne-Jones and printed at the Kelmscott Press in 1896. Morris studied the book in detail. art of the medieval period and so it is not surprising that his famous initials and borders on the books he edited were based on the works of Peter Löslein and Bernhard Maler who worked for the Augsburg printer and type designer Erhard Ratdolt (1474-84).

William Morris was undoubtedly a major historical influence on the visual arts and industrial design of the 19th century.

The arts and crafts movement sought to return to artisan manufacturing contrasted with the industrial production of the time and thus bring culture to less affluent areas of society. He was reproached for the fact that the products, due to their complexity in manufacturing and quality, could only be purchased mainly by the upper classes, although their workers had control and a "dignified and humane" participation. in production.

His criticism of industrial production was not due so much to the ability to manufacture many objects but to the condition that the worker acquired as a 'mere tool' since the creative, artisan and 'human' part disappeared. Morris considered that the worker was transformed into a machine and this aspect was for him the essence of the socialist and also romantic critique of the capitalist labor process.

His utopian novel News from nowhere achieved great popularity, in it he narrates the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Works

The beautiful Isolda (1858), better known - incorrectly- as Queen GenevaIt is the only preserved oil painting by William Morris (Tate Gallery). The model is Jane Burden.

• The Red House (1859)
• The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems (1858)
• The Life and Death of Jason (1867)
• The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)
• Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond (1872)
• The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs (1876)
• A Dream of John Ball (1886)
• The House of the Wolfings (1888)
• The Roots of the Mountains (1889)
• News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest (1890). In Spanish: News from nowhere.
• The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890). In Spanish: History of the Splendid Plain.
• The Well at the World's End (1892)
• The Wood Beyond the World (1892)

In Spanish

• Despite the ravages of time, El Desvelo, Cantabria, 2018. Translation by Tomás García Lavín, edition of Andrea Constanza Ferrari and Javier Fernández Rubio.
• News from nowhereScience New, 1968.
• The Age of Succession and Other Texts Against Modern CivilizationPepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2016. Translation by Javier Rodríguez Hidalgo and editing, notes and prologue by Olivier Barancy ISBN 978-84-15862-51-2
• How we live and how we could live. Useful work or useless effort. Art under plutocracyPepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2013 (Third Edition). Translation by Federico Corriente and prologue by Estela Schindel ISBN 978-84-940296-7
• The good, the useful and the beautiful, Mochuelo Libros, Buenos Aires, 2014. ISBN 978-987-45381-0-9
• Labour and Communism, Maia Editions, 2014. Introduction translation and notes by José María Duran Medraño ISBN 978-84-92724-57-4
• History of the Splendid Plain, Chair, 2014. Javier Martín Lalanda Edition

Fonts

History of Graphic Design - Philip B. Meggs Ronah is a great fan of William Morris.