1917

That you could make your living off of your own art is the goal of many glassblowers. That you must also, in order to eat, produce glasses, vases, lighting, and Christmas ornaments is the truth. That this production element is non-compatible with an artistic identity is an issue that should be addressed.

C.R. Ashbee saw that the relationship between independent artists and their buyer/patrons was parasitical, but the relationship between the factory worker and the factory owner was no better, so he sought to find a middle ground. The worker would form a small democratic guild to produce artisan craft through. They would retain creative control of the production and they would teach each other the handicraft skills. This would create a slow revolution towards a more equal society.
"The Guild was, in short, original. It was shaped by a young man of twenty-five, working without any professional or much family support, trying to give a practical shape to four or five years of speculation. [...] 'I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's', he quoted [Blake]."

"The element of culture is not uppermost in the workshops of the Guild, for Ashbee would insist, and rightly, that they were about craft and earning a living, and not, like an art gallery, about works of art and improving leisure. But essentially the Guild was an attempt to enrich the lives of working men through the values of art in the broadest sense."

Crawford, Alan. "C.R. Ashbee: architect, designer, and romantic socialist." Yale University, 2005. http://books.google.com/books?id=1lOjhlQuGPQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false

1917 C.R. Ashbee:

"The Pre-Raphaelite inspiration, when it touched other things than painting, led inevitably to the Arts and Crafts movement. But to make this movement, as the men of the eighties of the last century understood it, an effective movement, there was needed also a strong social impetus. Thus it had altruism as well as aesthetics behind it.

The men who preached its gospel were not less strong for the enthusiasm that inspired their work. The working craftsman, said they, the man who could make beautiful things with his hands, was down-trodden; give him a chance, he would make beautiful things again. Talent only needed to be brought to light. Let the craftsman be his own designer, let there be no more 'ghost work,' no more sham Art produced in factories. There was a great want for the beautiful and simple products of the hand again; and if a society, 'The Arts and Crafts Society,' could only be formed having this principle, it would revolutionize Modern Industry.

The society was formed--it did not revolutionize Industry. It was formed not in England only, but in Europe and America. One of its most successful outcomes was the 'Boston Arts and Crafts' in Massachusetts. Its most logical and consistent development has been the co-ordinated workshops of Munich and Vienna. Numbers of men and women who would have been easel painters on the one hand, or absorbed into factory production on the other, turned their attention to what were discovered to be new materials--wood, stone, clay, glass, silver, iron. There was a fresh and vigorous creative outburst. Heywood Sumner's Hunting Tapestry, woven on the Meron looms, is an example of this, or Lawrie's delightful grotesques at West Point in Virginia [...] They are the work of men and women who were made by the Arts and Crafts movement, or were inspired by its principles.

But the Arts and Crafts movement, though it did not revolutionize Modern Industry, made a great social discovery: it rediscovered the small workshop. In so doing it gave us a new historical generalization.

We used to be taught as children that the real dividing line in history was for us in England the Norman Conquest, for the French the Revolution, for the Americans the War of Independence; but the real division between the past and future has been the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution was being worked out. It was then that the social order that had been in existence for over a thousand years--the order that still exists in the Orient--was destroyed. With the coming of mechanical power and the displacement of the hand by the machine, the conditions of human life were changed--the home and woman's portion of it, man's labour, his relation to society, his conception of right and wrong. The history of every country for a thousand years has no fact so important as the change from domestic to factory industry. The disappearance of the small workshop, with the Guild system that regulated human labour and set its standards of quality of life and in the work of man's hands, is more far-reaching than any religious or dynastic change. But the Arts and Crafts movement made the discovery that it was only in the small hand workshop that those things could be had again for which that movement stood.

It is not alone the Elizabethan translator of the Bible who points to the significance of the workshop structure of society. What the seventeenth century found as a fact had been a fact also in the ages of Solomon. It is not the intellectual things only that count. The man that puts his trust in his hand is of them who maintain the fabric of the world. 'So is every artificer and workmaster, that passeth his time by night as by day; they that cut gravings of signets, and his diligence is to make great variety, he will set his hear to preserve likeness in his portraiture, and will be thankful to finish his work. So is the smith standing by the anvil and considering the unwrught furnace will he wrestle with his work; the noise of the hammer will set his heart upon perfecting his works, and he will be thankful to adorn them perfectly. So is the potter sitting at his work, and turning his wheel about with his feet, who is always anxiously set at his work, and all his handiwork is by number; he will fashion the clay with his arms, and will bend its strength in front of his feet; he will apply his heart to finish the glazing, and he will be wakeful to make clean the furnace. All these put their trust in their hands and each becometh wise in his own work. Without them shall no city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn nor walk up and down therein. They shall no be sougth for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high; they shall not sit in the seat of the judge, and they shall not understand the covenant and where parables are shall they not be found. But they shall maintain the fabric of the world; and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer.' (Ecclesiasticus xxxviii, 27-34)

The nineteenth century, in destroying the workshop structure of society, changed all this, and the Arts and Crafts movement set itself to undermining the work of the nineteenth century. It sought to bring back again the quality of prayer, to find out what the new fabric of the world was to be."

Ashbee, C.R. "Where the Great City Stands." 1917 The Essex House Press, London. pp 11-13. transcripted by ABJ seattleglassonline.