Next weekend, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London will unveil an ambitious exhibition exploring the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement in its widest international context. More than 5,000, miles away, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues to present a similar show. "Elsewhere, a more focused survey of William Morris and Arts and Crafts, which drew 1,500 visitors a day on its tour of Japan and Taiwan, ends its run today.
Such is the groundswell of interest in this era, particularly in the US and Japan, that thousands of enthusiasts flock to conferences on the subject each year, while the Brighton-based website, the Arts and Crafts Home, notches up 70m hits a year.
Reproduction Arts and Crafts furniture and works of art, available through both high-end retailers and manufacturers such as Mastercraft or mainstream retailers such as Pottery Barn, have become a multimillion dollar business. Collectors will pay top dollar for first-rate originals, such as the $2m for a table lamp in leaded glass and bronze designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The greatest of the US Arts and Crafts architects and designers took a trend with roots in Victorian England and turned it into America's first indigenous national style.
Even in Britain, where patriotic collectors are more spoilt for choice and prices are considerably lower, an iconic and probably unique diamond-shaped teapot designed by Christopher Dresser from around 1896 is expected to sell for more than £250,000 when it is offered at auction by Lyon and Turnbull of Edinburgh on April 19.
Odds are that this particular trophy will go to an overseas collector interested in pioneering modern design. After all, this is a movement - less an aesthetic than a philosophy - that recognises few national boundaries, and its collectors tend to look at the broader international picture. Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and actor Brad Pitt, for instance, are passionate devotees of the formal geometries of early 20th century Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) design, while the world's second largest assemblage of the works of John Ruskin - the spiritual father of the movement along with Augustus Pugin - happens to belong to Japan's Mikimoto family.
Is there a reason why this movement should have so much resonance around the world today? Peyton Skipwith, of pioneering London dealer The Fine Art Society, says: "The philosophy underlying the Arts and Crafts movement is the first Green philosophy. The message of Ruskin and Morris is as relevant today as it was in the 1860s." Max Palevsky, collector and founder of one of the earliest US computer companies and the catalyst behind the Los Angeles show, would appear to agree: "What began as an attraction to Arts and Crafts aesthetics soon became an admiration for its ideology."
The movement, its name derives from "The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society" founded in 1888, was a natural reaction to the Industrial Revolution and was a clarion call for the return to traditional handicrafts and techniques in an age dominated by dehumanising machines and factory conditions, as well as an attempt to improve contemporary design. And, says Palevsky, those ideas still resonate today. "Just as the Arts and Crafts movement took issue with the alienation of people from 'pleasure in labour' and the resulting loss in human creativity, I oppose the depersonalisation that comes from the hypnotic quality of computer games, the substitution of a Google search for genuine inquiry, the instant messaging that has replaced social discourse."
Another reason for the lasting popularity of Arts and Crafts may be its initial geographic reach. Across Europe and America its underlying principles were adapted to suit the local soil. In Ireland, Scotland, Norway and Hungary, for instance, the movement was subverted into a form of covert nationalism and had a strong element of folk art revival. In Germany and Austria, there was none of Morris or Charles Ashbee's aversion to the machine or mass production. Overall, it was half looking back, half looking forward; escapist and nostalgic. It was also the root of Bauhaus and functionalism.
It is revealing that both the "Romantic" John Betjeman and the "Modernist" Nikolaus Pevsner were among the first to rekindle interest in the movement in Britain in the late 1950s. Peter Rose, who began collecting almost half a century ago, remembers those pioneering early days: "The 19th century was a despised century. It was all considered a huge joke." But he decided to build a collection around the reappraisal of the 19th-century design-reform movements. "The one unifying principle is the idea of originality in design and the pioneering spirit at work," he explains. "I admire the proto-Modern aspect of the movement. Other people like it for the opposite reason."
For Rose, the objects themselves trigger interest and research: "Collecting is my way of understanding," he says. A pivotal figure in the re-evaluation of Christopher Dresser, he is now involved in the first comprehensive monograph on William Benson, the English architect, metalworker and designer best known for his bold copper lighting. "I have always felt I was too late to get the real bargain, but that is not really true. If you keep sharp, and keep ahead with scholarship you can still keep ahead of the market even when a subject becomes more fashionable and expensive," says Rose.
For John Bryan, a US businessman, the initial prompt to collect arts and Crafts pieces was practical. Buying a farm in Lake Bluff, north of Chicago, he found himself with a range of derelict outbuildings. Determined to restore them to some purpose, he asked an architect which decorative arts were contemporaneous to the building. Arts and Crafts was the answer. At the time he had no idea what that was but, as a seasoned antiques buyer, he decided to start at the top. Locating the leading dealer in America, Beth Cathers, he made his first purchase - for $15,000 - of a leather-top library table by the pre-eminent American Arts and Crafts furniture-maker, Gustav Stickley.
That was 18 years ago. Today he has 30 rooms full of American and English Arts and Crafts, notably by Stickley and the English architect Charles Voysey, he of "simplicity requires perfection - perfection in all its details". Bryan has also built a Stickley-furnished bungalow designed by Harvey Ellis, who worked with Stickley, in 1903, but not built at the time.
"The aesthetic appeal of Arts and Crafts furniture is enormous," says Bryan, "it has simplicity, restraint and and honesty, but I also love the notion that it is not just a style, but was part of a movement that was deeply rooted in the social and political life of the times, that art was being used to reform society." He adds: "I can't think of another moment when so many designers were working so closely together. It changed the course of architectural and design history."
For the banker Sir Angus Grossart, the appeal is also related to an interest in materials and craftsmanship. Although he began collecting in this field 30 years ago, buying Liberty chairs and metalwork designed by Archibald Knox, he began in earnest with the restoration of a 16th-century Scottish tower house. "As a Scottish banker, [it's] the only interesting way I have found to lose money," he says.
"Arts and Crafts seem to suit the architecture enormously well," he adds. "The pieces are wonderfully made, robust and appropriately plain. With rough stone walls you cannot hang paintings, and we used of polychrome tiles and needlework, particularly crewel-work which, unlike early pieces, are in fantastic condition." Lining the floor are Celtic Revival Scottish Arts and Crafts carpets.
"Everything I have I use," he says. And that includes his office desk: a piece acquired 25 years ago that was designed by the Austrian Secessionist Otto Wagner, and something his shareholders would certainly call a sound investment.
Avant-garde Viennese design of around 1900 was virtually bred in the bone for the third-generation Viennese dealer, collector and scholar Paul Asenbaum. Growing up in the former studio of a Secessionist painter and surrounded by the objects - and the descendants of the artists and patrons - of the Wiener Werkstätte led to "an intense study of functionalist and constructivist modern design from 1900 through to the designs of Arne Jacobsen". According to Asenbaum, the international exhibitions of the 1980s sparked active museum buying, huge prices and the beginning of high-profile American collecting (Steven Spielberg has kept his; Barbra Streisand has sold hers). "In the 1990s, the situation changed," he says: "Only high-quality objects which are landmarks in the history of design and which have only been produced once or twice now reach high prices. The market for such iconic pieces has also passed from the auction houses to the specialist dealers."
What concerns collectors of the Peter Rose generation is the scarcity of high-end furniture, if not objects, available on the market, and the fact that relatively few younger people in Europe are interested in 19th-century design. (Fortysomething collectors in the US are less rare - the 44-year-old John Bryan Jr, for instance, has amassed a collection of British design from Pugin to Gordon Russell and, unlike his father, actually lives with it.)
But London dealer Martin Levy, of Blairman & Sons, is confident of Arts and Crafts' contemporary appeal: "Arts and Crafts furniture is well-designed, unfussy and made of beautiful timber. It is informal, comfortable and child-resistant, and a younger generation can afford to live with it."
