More than just a pretty swatch

THE textiles of William Morris were one of the first global brands. His densely patterned floral papers and chintzes have graced bourgeois interiors since the 1860s; they remain instantly recognisable signs of taste and wealth today. The irony would not be lost on the Victorian designer, whose ultimate aim was the reverse. “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few,” he said in 1877, while decorating an industrialist’s manor. His life so far, he observed with horror, had been spent “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich”.

Morris was a Victorian craftsman, businessman, poet, printer and social activist; the sort of man who comes along “once or twice a century,” says a recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy. How fortunate then that the equally rare spectacle of a British Olympics should prompt the refitting of the only public gallery to take the full measure of the man.

The William Morris Gallery opened in 1950 on the site of the artist’s teenaged home in Walthamstow, a corner of Essex that is now one of the most deprived parts of north-east London. It has recently reopened after a £5m ($8.1m) renovation. The setting could hardly be more fitting for a man who came to believe that beauty was a birthright for all: a world-class museum with free entry in a public park, cheek by jowl with shabby brick terraced houses, curry restaurants and thrift shops.

If other sites hold pieces of the Morris legacy, Walthamstow can claim to be the jewel. The gallery’s collection of 10,000 artefacts, many more of which can now be displayed, is unrivalled. The Georgian manor, which local residents had thought was abandoned or had been turned into an old-folks’ home, has become an inviting entryway to the gardens where the artist once spent his school holidays. The house itself has been transformed into nine bright galleries that present, facet by facet, the extraordinary variety of his creative output. Assembling a complete portrait of such a man is tricky, says the curator, Anna Mason. “Every area of his life has been extensively researched, but by different people. It rarely comes together.”

An idealist, inspired by the handcrafted arts of the Middle Ages, Morris rejected the cheap production and consumption ethos of the industrial revolution. With Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with whom he founded a firm later known as Morris & Co, he discovered a genius for interior design. The firm’s products on view at the Morris Gallery include a silk damask wall covering commissioned by Queen Victoria for St James’s Palace, Morris’s first “Trellis” wallpaper, and stained glass for churches. The next room, “The Workshop”, reveals the autodidact craftsman, quintessential Morris. The gallery entices visitors to explore (literally hands-on) displays of dyeing, weaving, fabric printing, rug-knotting and stained-glass techniques. An unfurled bolt of chintz is draped overhead down the room’s whole length, leading to “The Shop”, stuffed with these decorative products for Victorian burghers.

By the late 1870s however, Morris’s life took a radical turn. He recognised that the objects he made “were completely unaffordable for the people he wanted to help,” according to Ruth Kinna, a Morris scholar. Alone among his Pre-Raphaelite fellows, he crossed what he himself termed “the river of fire” and threw himself into the socialist cause. The exhibit neatly mirrors this break: one leaves the stuffy “Shop”, ascending to a sparer gallery that details his activism in socialist, environmentalist and preservationist battles. Another Morris emerges here: in political pamphlets, Utopian novels, the fine printing of his Kelmscott Press, and in campaigns to protect the Thames, Epping Forest, and London’s historic buildings.

The endlessly surprising Morris is well served by this marvel at the end of the Victoria underground line. A much thinner version is on view in a new exhibition at Tate Britain that looks more widely at the Victorian avant-garde. This show proves just how difficult it is to present such a protean creator and thinker like Morris through the narrow lens of art history. The Tate’s curators, while availing themselves of the famous brand to draw visitors in to the show, fail to identify the craftsman of the group as the most revolutionary of those who waged a “campaign against the age”. Yet his legacy was arguably greater.

Morris’s ideas on beautiful utility would, in time, inspire the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright. In his preoccupation with the tension between art and commerce, too, he is strikingly modern. It is hard not to hear a contemporary echo in his comment from the 1860s: “It is the allowing of machines to be our masters, and not our servants, that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.”

^{The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow is open Wednesday-Sunday, from 10am until 5pm. “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” is at Tate Britain until January 13th 2013}