Exhibit of the week: Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts From Britain to Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

Through Jan. 31

A century and a half ago, Britain gave birth to a revolutionary decorative aesthetic­ that turned away from utilitarianism to embrace “sincerity, faithfulness, and pleasure,” said Shiloh Aderhold in Newcity Chicago. Led by furniture and fabric maker William Morris, a generation of crafts­people began to incorporate elaborate natural motifs, Asian influences, and echoes of “religion and medievalism” into everything from paintings to dinner plates. “A short-lived but crucial development of modernism,” the British Arts and Crafts movement also had a deep influence in the United States. A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago traces the look from English drawing rooms straight through to the Prairie School architecture of Chicagoans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

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The Arts and Crafts movement was primarily a “response to the deadening effect of industrialism,” said Howard Kissel in the New York Daily News. Exquisite, handmade furniture, decorations, and designs were “a way to make the home—or at least the upper-middle-class home—a refuge from the increasingly mass-produced world” outside. Most of this exhibition’s “rarely shown” masterpieces are usually hidden away in “museum storerooms” or private homes, said Eve M. Kahn in The New York Times. The Art Institute has convinced the city’s biggest collectors—as well as “private clubhouses like the Fortnightly of Chicago and the Cliff Dwellers Club”—to lend their prized possessions. Together they tell the whole story of Arts and Crafts, “from Gustav Stickley’s austere slat-sided oak armchairs to Morris’ fabric embroidered with silk poppies and anemones.”

Trying to shoehorn so many disparate artists into a single narrative can make the connections between them seem tenuous, said Laura Pearson in Time Out Chicago. A room devoted to late-19th-century pictorialist photography, while full of beautiful images, seems out of place. More to the point is the exhibition’s exploration of Japonisme—the widespread imitation of that country’s art and motifs. Clara Driscoll’s “exquisitely handcrafted” Hanging Head Dragonfly Shade illustrates how such elements showed up in metalwork and stained glass. “The American fascination with Japanese ukiyo-e landscapes,” in particular, is illustrated with prints from Frank Lloyd Wright’s own collection. “If William Morris were alive today,” he might not recognize all these works as emblematic of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. But the best of them fulfill his aims by being both “beautiful and useful.”