Labourers in Art

Gordon Fyfe Keele University

A major purpose of this paper is to focus a trade."2 In holding this belief men un- attention on the way in which institutions of wittingly conspire in their own aesthetic 38 art (academies, art galleries, museums etc.) impoverishment. confer a creative role on some men, whilst A proper understanding of this problem denying it to other men. If societies distri- of aesthetic impoverishment is a matter, not bute unequal life-chances through their of locating the instrinsic characteristics of mechanisms of political and economic con- the consumer (bad art education) but of trol, then one important aspect of those grasping the way in which such charac- life-chances is to do with the production and teristics are given in the relations of artistic consumption of art. However, the values of production and consumption. Likewise the art are so often projected as being funda- characteristics of the producer are to be mentally antagonistic to the core values of understood in terms of his/her orientations industrial living, that their function as agents as occupant of an artistic role. Thus, the role of social and cultural differentiation is of the contemporary artist as an auto- usually obscured. The values of art 'appear' nomous creative ego is the end product of a as antagonistic to those of rational bourgeios process of atomization amongst art pro- culture: art is a 'superior reality' en- ducers that has been going on since the countered in opposition to the experiences beginning of the last century. That atomi- of our daily lives at home and in the zation has been brought about by massive industrial sphere. Such an opposition is changes in the focus of power within the art sustained in the advice of one contemporary world (structured by external social pro- art historian on the matter of collecting cesses) and by the pro Iiferation of agents works of art: and functionaries who live off the artist's 'alienation' and the public's 'ignorance'. "One of the great mistakes new col- Viewed in this way art institutions can be lectors can make is to try conscientiously seen correctly in their function as mecha- to find a work of art that will match nisms of control and legitimation in relation colors in a particular room ... Works of to the existing division of artistic labour. art are meant to speak for themselves. At any given moment an existing division They should function independently in of artistic labour has emergent properties. their own surroundings, and becausethey These can only be grasped through a recog- are unique creations that will probably nition of the systemic character of its outlive man and man-produced wares, relations, and the way they are articulated to should take unquestioned precedence.'" the broader spheres of social power and culture. Pierre Bourdieu has drawn attention And it is also sustained in the view that the artist is a special person, apart, whose to the way in which one such emergent property can be the pattern of competition province is beyond the mundane world and amongst artists for "intellectual consecration whose works are (sooner or later) sanctified and legitimacy" in the eyes of the consumer; in the inner recessesof museums, galleries and also to the way in which the artist is and academies. defined not only by his in the The hiatus between artist and publ ic, position relations of artistic production, but also by culturally defined as a matter of the con- the authority that he exercises or claims to sumer's ignorance or philistinism is in itself a exercise over the publ ic. division of artistic labour that underscores the most fundamental values of industrial "This authority represents both the capitalism. As Fernand Leger put it: people prize and at the sametime to some extent "bel ieve in art makers becausethey too have the empire of the competition for intel- lectual consecration and legitimacy. It matters, where the consumer tends to exer- 39 may be the upper classes who, by their cise only intellectual deference, and those social standing, sanction the rank of the art forms where an independent aesthetic works they consume in the hierarchy of with portals guarded by artists, critics and legitimate works. AI~o, it may be specific teachers has failed to emerge. It frequently institutions such as the educational happens that the failure of a particular art system and academies which by their form to achieye intellectual autonomy is at authority and their teaching consecrate a least partly a consequence of the fact that its certain kind of work and a certain type of practitioners find access to major avenues of cultivated man. Equally it may be literary power and prestige blocked by an artistic or artistic groups, coteries, critical circles, elite. 'salons' or 'cafes' which have a recognised In some cases this may well depend on role as cultural guides or 'taste-makers'.3 the fact that an established el ite simply Now the relationship between that autho- wishes to insulate its artistic image from that rity and patterns of creative activity is a of 'inferior' activities. The distinction matter of considerable interest. From the· between different kinds of artistic activities point of view of its social organisation an art (arts and crafts) may well be inscribed in world can be viewed as a system which broader cultural distinctions (theoretical and confers different degrees of access to the practical knowledge) from which the artistic creative principles of a particular epoch. elite draws its identity and shibboleths. The Some men may have the right to interpret elite may well fear the direct competition of those principles, others only to learn and the less 'consecrated' art, and seek to limit acknowledge their validity. Some men may its power by denying it access to the have the power to change them, whilst institutions of patronage and the market. Or others can do nothing but conform. Some the elite may have extended its power and men may have the autonomy enabling them authority directly into the sphere of pro- to escape or remain uninfll,Jenced, others duction of another art-form, exercising a may find themselves sucked in and crushed kind of aesthetic domi nation in that region. by them. And some men may believe in The history of an institution like the them, uphold them and celebrate them in London Royal Academy is punctuated with their day-to-day activities as artists or critics, incidents which are expressions of these whilst others deny their validity and even kinds of relations - competition, domi- execrate them. nation, conflict and rebellion - between If artistic relations are structured in this artistic groupings holding different amounts manner, then the way in which various kinds of power and authority in relation to the of artists possess differential access to power public. In this context art institutions like and authority is also a matter of con- academies, colleges, galleries and journals siderable interest. As Bourdieu points out: can be seen in one of their key functions as not all art forms enjoy the same position of distributors of artistic life-chances. It is cultural legitimacy, and if some artists necessary to focus attention on four aspects within "the entirely consecrated arts" of, of this role. say, painting or sculpture fail to gain ·the a. The institutional ization of particular intellectual of the public, so too do all the definitions of art which confer an producers of some art forms. aesthetic structure on the world. Thus art We must, therefore, distinguish between is found here and not there; it is, for art forms where artistic elites have success- example, opposed to and excluded by a fully arrogated authority in aesthetic machine culture, or popular culture. b. The differential transmiSSion of the aesthetic of the painter, and to transmit the knowledge of those definitions and of the properties of paint. principles that underly them. The idea that engraving was an art in its c. The celebration of certain kinds of men own right with special properties and a as artists. special aesthetic was a challenge to the d. The hierarchical regulation of access to artistic assumptions of the Academy, closely power and privilege so that some men are allied as they were to the pre-eminent status totally excluded from what is publically of painting. But the association between recognized as the artistic community, engraving and reproduction tended to en- whilst others are given only a qual ified courage the intellectual subordination of the membership. engraver, and to sustain a view that he was bereft of intellect. It is in the relationship between painting and engraving that we must locate many of the properties that were thought to be intrinsic characteristics From its foundation in 1768 the London of the latter activity, particularly its in- Royal Academy was dominated by parti- feriority as an art. cular groups of artists - painters, sculptors Whatever we think of his indictment on and architects. Rather than viewing them Victorian art, whatever we think of his primarily as artists, it is better to see them as remedy, it remains true that the writings of men who successfully claimed that role and William Morris provide us with crucial in- had access to certain creative principles. The sights into the social context of creativity. Academy was an institution in which the so For he recognized that the "flattering- called Fine Arts were enshrined, and craving flunkey" in the artist, and the amongst these painting had a particularly "brutal tail-worn slave" in the artisan were prominent position. both emanations of the division of labour in And yet these artists depended on crafts- art and society.4 He sought to identify the men for much of their influence in what was artist and the artisan, not as isolated pheno- a growing market. An important basis for mena, but in terms of their mutual relations the power and authority of painters was the within artistic production. William Morris widespread dissemination of their ideas and wrote: work through the medium of reproductive "The artist came out from the handi- engraving. A major function of the engraver craftsmen, and left them without hope of in this period (prior to the development of, elevation, while he himself was left with- and adequate technical advances in photo- out the help of intelligent, industrious .graphy) was in fact the reproduction of sympathy. Both have suffered; the artist paintings. However, this was no happy co- no less than the workman. ,,5 operation between artist .and artisan. There were conflicts and tensions between them, flowing from their mutual interaction within the relations of artistic production. The picture that emerges from an exami- The earliest techniques of engraving - nation of the inter-actions between these woodcutting, copper engraving and etch~ng two groups is one of artistic domination. - were developed in the workshops of The art of the engraver was subordinated to painters, sculptors, woodcarvers and gold- that of the painter. The function of the smiths in the fifteenth century. It is known engraver was essentially to reproduce the that painters such as Pollaiuolo, Mantegna, were all directly involved in the making of "To write the biography of an en- 41 prints. The sixteenth-century treatise on graver, is as a rule, to tell the story of a goldsmithing and sculpture by the Italian stay-at-home ... an engraver generally Benvenuto Cellini contains a chapter on the leads a humdrum existence. He learns his manufacture of acids, "one for parting, the craft in his master's studio, and there other engraving and etching". And of course after practises it from morning to night, our own William Hogarth was apprenticed to almost year in year out, on his own. Few a silver-plate engraver. stirring incidents. come his way, and his But by the close of the eighteenth cen- circle is limited to the artists whose work tury, with certain important exceptions, the he interprets, his brother craftsmen activities of painting and engraving had whose society he enjoys, and the print become largely insulated from each other. sellers who profit by his labours."6 Early symptoms of this situation can be Half a century earlier, in 1853, Ruskin traced back as far as the time of Durer and had drawn less attention to the fact that the Raphael. In England, in the second half of occupation was bereft of interest and excite- the seventeenth century, the diarist John ment, than to its sheer squalor. If you buy Evelyn lamented the reluctance of painters an engraving, he informed his Edinburgh to take up engraving. In the following audience, you pay a man to work in dirty century the engraver George Vertue noted conditions whilst he breathes noxious fumes that as soon as people with a training in and laboriously copies another man's work. engraving got a start in painting or sculpture, Both descriptions were fundamentally they ignored their first calling. true of the lives and working conditions of a Throughout the nineteenth century, des- large number of nineteenth-century crafts- pite the fact that there were painters who men who worked in the name of Art. Theirs practised engraving, the status of "artist" was the fate of the "brutal tail-worn slave" was something only begrudgingly conferred condemned to the most sycophantic of roles on men who made their living from engrav- in their relations with painters and to a ing. In the minds of maiw nineteenth- growing exploitation by the entrepeneurial century commentators the artist might be an interests of the market. engraver, but it did not. follow that the engraver was an artist. And the claim that an engraver was an artist was Iikely to draw ridicule, irony, or at the very least a side- One feature of industrialization was the ways glance. development of new forms of occupational Thus, in Mark Rutherford's Clara Hop- control and authority. This is most obvious good, the character Frederick Dennis is in those occupations most directly linked to sarcastically introduced as a wood-engraver the industrial process, for example, in the who "preferred to call himself, an artist". A development of the textile industry outside meeting at the Royal Academy was once the authority of the guilds. But the creation reduced to laughter by the very suggestion of new wealth, both great and moderate, had that a monument be erected in Westmi nster an impact on a range of occupations. Law, Abbey to the memory of the engr~ver medicine and art are examples of occu- William Woollett. pations which had been largely under the If biographers ever have their readers hegemony of aristocratic and ecclesiastical yawning about their subject by the first elites. With industrialization, however, the page, first prize for this achievement must demand for these services was diffused to surely go to the author of Charles Turner, new sectors of society, particularly to the Engraver. middle classes. There were several symptoms of this copyist, the growth of relatively large work- development with respect to the visual arts. shops, and the appearance of powerful entre- 42 One was the emergence and growing popu- peneurs - middle men - who had the larity of public exhibitions from the middle contacts with painters and a specialized decades of the eighteenth century. The knowledge of the market. growth of art journalism was another sign. It is important to stress the nature of the The declared intention of policy by the growing demand for art. It was a demand editor of" The Art Journal in December of structured in terms of certain received 1849, clearly reflects a new force in the aesthetic categories. These categories were visual arts - the small purchaser. He wrote: themselves an expression of the division of "We shall commence the year 1850 labour in art which had emerged in asso- with renewed vigour and augmented ciation with academies. and had made resources. We shall endeavour, by render- painters, sculptors and architects members ing 'good Art cheap', to place its most of a liberal profession. meritorious examples in the hands of 'the Thus, although the relationship between many' so to become sources of pleasure the Academy, its ideals and an increasingly and instruction ... " differentiated purchasing power became one focus of change in English aesthetics~ one And this was to be done through the thing tended to remain relatively stable. This publication of engravings after paintings was the central role played by the portable located in famous collections. By 1855 The painting, either in the form of a direct Art Journal had worked its way through the demand for this kind of art, or for infor- collection of Robert Vernon, and was mak- mation about it. It was the relatively high ing a start on pictures from the Royal consensus on the importance of painting in Collection. an expanding art world (expanding parti- In the second half of the eighteenth cularly with respect to the small purchaser) century the world of engraving had become that favoured the reproduction of paintings a world of big business and capital invest- through engraving. ment. The market for engravingsof all sorts, From the point of view of the painter an illustrations, portraits, maps, landscapes and engraved reproduction of his painting could reproductions of paintings had grown. be of paramount importance in spreading his According to one authority, prior to 1725, fame and providing money. For example, in there were only two print shops in London. 1822 the engraving firm Robinson and Hurst By the 1840s there were about twenty print agreed to pay Thomas Lawrence £3,000 per sellers in London with turnovers averaging year for the exclusive right of engraving his £16,000 per annum. One business was said paintings.8 7 to have reached £22,000. So, one feature of the economic and It was through engraving that a growing social developments associated with indus- middle class demand for information about trialization was the growth in size and paintings and the art world was satisfied. It: complexity of the institutions servicing the was through engraving that painters could needs of 'fine art', exhibitions, journals, hope to reach new publ ics, and develop a critics, dealers, publ ishers and the specialists broader interest in their art. This inter- in reproduction. dependence between painter and public mediated via the engraver, provided the basis A~onymous artisans for the emergence of new functions, roles and institutions. In particular it favoured the It is true that everyone who turned his emergence of the engraver as a mechanical hand to engraving during the nineteenth century was not an artisan reduced to monious relationships with his engravers 43 mechanical servitude by painters and the were a direct expression of the painter's view machinery of the market.9 But one effect of that he knew best. the way in which the academic ideologies Employment in an engraving workshop intersected with the changing patterns of was associatp.dwith a drudgery that confinp.d consumption in art was the creation of a the artisan to narrow areasof engraving, and kind of engraver of whom this was true. even denied him the public recognition of Such men were to be found in the line his own sigoature on his own work. On one engraving shops like that of James Heath occasion the engraver John pye managed to (1757-1834), or the wood engraving shops carry through some work on his own, only of men like the Dalziel brothers in the to discover that his employer's name had second half of the last century. been added to the plate. On another occa- The engraving workshops were highly sion he found that an agreement that he efficient, rationalized organizations, with should do a piece of work had been revoked, production carried on in a kind of semi- and the job taken over by his boss. It seems factory fashion. There was a division' of that Heath intended using a team of assis- labour (already apparent in the fact that the tants, one of whom was to be Pye. pye engraver was copying another man's design) refused to co-operate on these terms and such that pupils and assistants would even managed to whip up some support specialize in engraving particular portions of from his fellow assistants. a picture, and might never reach the stage tious and certainly not prepared to be where they could engrave a whole plate exploited by men like James Heath. But for themselves. The subjection of engravers to very many engraving workers there can have this kind of work was made possible by the been little alternative to their lives as de- routinization of the engraving process itself. pressed wage earners. Later in the century In extreme situations this went far enough one of the wood engraving firms attempted for the necessary skills to be directly trans- to give its apprentices some sort of art ferable from other kinds of production. For training in the evenings, and thus mitigate example, in 1839 one commentator reported the worst effects of the production methods. a case where the labpur for mezzotint But with a working day of nine hours it is engraving had been recruited from a pool of hardly surprising that the experiment was unemployed buckle workers.10 In the wood unsuccessful. engraving shops of the 1800s the block But more important than the length of might be broken up into several pieces, and the working day was the intellectual sub- each given to a different engraver. ordination of many engravers. At its most extreme the relationship was one of com- Even where the worst excessesof speciali- plete subordination. The personality of the zation did not exist, the engraver had nothing approaching the intellectual auto- engraver found no expression in the end nomy of the painter. At best the engraver product. Some of the worst excesseswere tended to be a virtuoso performer interpret- reached with wood engraving where the ing the painter's composition. In only a few picture (transferred to the block by hand or later by photographic means) had to be cases can the relationship between painters protected from the very sweat and breath of and their engravers be seen as a truly the engraver. As the artist Hubert Herkomer collaborative one, for example those of John put it in 1882: Constable and David Lucas or J.M.W. Turner and his engravers. But Constable and Lucas " ... the lines are all drawn by the had their problems, and Turner's acri- artist, and if the engraver renders them well, the drawing should bear no trace of merings of light, and the mysteries of his hand."11 shadow; so that only a pretty good price 44 The developments which took place in would yield journeyman's wages,"12 the production of wood engravings during If a market dominated by the Academy the second half of the last century are a very was unfavourable to the designer who good illustration of the way in which the worked the plate himself, there were corners growth of commercial interests combined of the art world, groups of artists and with academic interests to eliminate creati- traditions, where signs of resistance are to be vity. spotted. If we go back to the founder members of the Academy, Paul Sandby and Design, creativity and power Thomas Gainsborough are examples, we can find men who did their own etchings. And The point has already been made that all certain illustrators like George Cruickshank nineteenth century engravers did not con- were publicly known through work they form to the stereotyped image of the etched themselves. In the middle decadesof humble craftsman. There were men who the century a group of Academicians, includ· carried through orjginal work in one or other ing Thomas Creswick (1811-1869) and of the engraving media. There were men who Charles West Cope (1811-1899) carried out attempted to combine the functions of original etching. However, in the caseof the design and execution. illustrators market forces favoured a division But even in the case of a man like Blake, of labour in the long run. And in the caseof trained as an engraver and anxious to the Academicians it was an interest that was execute his own designs, the production of pushed into the most private and intimate his prints might be taken out of his hands areas of their lives. The art for which and placed in those of a specialist engraver. Creswick, Cope, and others were known was This happened with his designs for Blair's oil painting, and it was as such that they Grave, when the publisher Cromeck passed obtained academic honours.13 them on to the engraver Schiarvonetti. The And, if we look at the Royal Academy difficulties that faced men who tried to draw more closely, it is difficult to seehow things a living from original work as engravers are could have been otherwise. The single most amply illustrated in the life of Samuel prestigious and powerful institution of Palmer. He would have liked to have been an English art (its prestige confirmed by a oil painter, but found the medium difficult. King's charter, its power flowing from a His real apptitudes lay with water colour particular configuration of aristocratic and painting and etching, particularly with the bourgeios support) defined engravers as in- latter. Isolated from high status art and the ferior artists. rewards associated with it, Palmer was left The position of engravers as members of vulnerable to the vagaries.of an impersonal the Royal Academy was inferior to the one market with its unscrupulous dealers and they had enjoyed in earlier art institutions. print sellers. The difficulties that faced a It was also less than they must have ex- man who brought to engraving the same pected from the sorts of plans that had been creative powers that other men reserved for put forward for the founding of an Academy painting are well illustrated in his obser- in the 1750s and '60s. Yet, in 1768 vation that: engravers were totally excluded, and only "It is my misfortune to work slowly, admitted as inferior artists (associate not from any wish to niggle, but because members) in 1769. Over the years a re- I cannot otherwise get certain shim- current feature of academic politics was to do with the debate about the relative status by the unequal struggle, we abandoned 45 of engraving and engravers. further effort, and formed the present In reply to an engravers' petition of 1812, society."15 seeking an improvement in their status, the leaders of the Royal Academy replied that: In 1883 he had delivered a paper to the Royal Society of Arts in which he asserted " ... the relative pre-eminence of the that etching and engraving were fine arts, Arts has ever been estimated accordingly and that thei~ practitioners ought to have an as they more or less abound in those appropriate ,status within the Academy. He intellectual qualities of Invention and had, however, already formed a society in Composition. which Painting, Sculpture 1880 (eventually to become the Royal and Architecture so eminently possess, Society of Painter-Etchers) in order to ex- but of which Engraving is wholly devoid. tend public knowledge of original etching, "14 particularly through the organization of ex- But dissident engravers initiated a debate hibitions. Thus, a group of artists success- that could not be ignored. Their case was fully fought for the publ ic recognition as art carried before successive monarchs, into of work where the functions of design and Parliament and into the art press, and it was execution were not separated. Such a success argued both privately and publ icly by men was a fundamental denial of the legitimacy such as John Landseer and John Pye. of the Academy's definitions of artistic worth. How was this success possible? On a much more external front, the It is not possible to give a detailed answer Academy found itself (in the last quarter of here, but the major condition of the etchers' the nineteenth century) in confrontation success lay in the fact that relations between with another group of engravers - the them and the Academy were increasingly etchers. It is important to recognize the structured by factors which were outside the distinctive features of this relationship, for orbit of academic influence. the challenge presented by ~he etchers was Hierarchical, elitist and powerful, the of a more fundamental nature. Royal Academy had originally managed to The demands of John Landseer' and edge competing societies out of business and others in the first half of the last century to absorb those elements that threatened its had been for a limited autonomy within the pre-eminence. However, the continued hierarchy of academic values, for some growth of a loosely organized purchasing recognition of their creative, but nonetheless power for fine art (originally one of the subordinate role. But in the case of the factors that had preserved the independence etchers, led by Francis Seymour Haden; the of academic artists from aristocratic demand was the uncompromising one of full controlj16 ,increasingly accommodated recognition as an independent and original artistic interests and institutions that art. In Haden recalled how, 1890 threatened its dominance in matters of art. "For twenty years we sent in to the The kind of domination exerted by the Royal Academy original etchings which Academy in the market created contradic- have since acquired a European repu- tions and tensions which helped 'to gavlanise tation ... In the Royal Academy' they new forms of artistic consciousness. In parti- met with no encouragement whatever. cular, the elitist and exclusive policies of the When a vacancy occurred among its Academy, combined with a growth in both members, it was supplied by the election the numbers of producers and consumers, of the copyist engraver, and not by the and forced many artists (in some cases original etcher; so that at last, worn out painters in other cases engravers) to seek alternative forms of institutional support. But still, seventy-five years after that One possibility was the creation of separate observation, there is evidence that the old 46 professional organizations, another was to distinctions persist and that some of old associate with specialist agents in the mar- imperialistic claims of the fine arts continue keting of art - art dealers - who played an to be made. In 1967 the print maker Michael increasingly important role in the nine- Rothenstein maintained that: teenth-century artistic career. But, so far as engraving was concerned these developments "In painting and sculpture we are long were the bases of change in the relationship past the day when study was broken between painting and engraving that were to down purely on the basis of different bring fruit only in the last quarter of the techniques ... In print making alone this nineteenth century. During the nineteenth attitude tends to persist; each area, etch- century the relationship between creativity ing, lithography and so on, boxed in with and power was such that engraving tended minimal overlap with related areas and either to be subordinated to painting, or with the school of fine art."18 publically unrecognized as an independent Even more recently, the contemporary art. debate about the 'polytechnicization' of the It would be naive to believe that painters art colleges has sharpened the old lines of were acting consciously and crudely in their conflict. In attacking the Government's own interests. Rather the evidence suggests policy of integrating the art schools with that painters and engravers were locked in a polytechnics, the painter Patrick Heron has system of artistic production that sustained argued that the fundamental autonomy of both the fact of the engraver's intellectual the art schools (a condition of the dynamism impoverishment (through his weak economic of British art during the past decade) is now position) and the image of his inferiority threatened. And in making this attack Heron (through the hierarchical status system of has brought traditional artistic quarrels to the Academy). the attention of the public. He argues that it is the non-fine-art departments that have been partly to blame, that they "become Trojan horse enthusiasts for poly- Do the old fine arts still exist and exercise technicization" and helped to bring this the rights of artistic privilege that they great calamity down upon the fine arts.19 possessed historically?' Without a doubt the But, as Heron argues, correctly, it is not power and privileges of the fine arts have they but painting and sculpture which have been eroded, the old boundaries of subject been at the focus of artistic activity in the and medium have become blurred, losing past. Other activities, such as graphics, tex- much of their legitimacy. In 1900 the art tile and ceramics have always "crystalised" master of Harrow could write: around painting and sculpture. Heron is right to situate the problem in its historical "Painting and sculpture no longer context. Indeed his own arguments and arrogate to themselves the whole of beliefs have a long and respected pedigree, the kingdom of Art."17 reaching back hundreds of years. Nearly two And without a doubt that comment re- hundred years ago James Barry, Professor of flected a relative change in the balance of Painting and the Royal Academy, subscribed power within the art world, of which the to the same views when he asserted that growing importance of etching in the pre- "our tapestry workers do nothing excellent vious decades was one symptom. without a painted exemplar".20 It is difficult to avoid taking seriously, at the role of passive consumer, even if it is 47 least the possibil ity, that the 'fine art' view only consumption of reproductions. Much feeds on some contemporary educational more recent evidence suggests that things practices in our schools. Readers of this may be different in comprehensive Journal will be familiar with the equivocal schools,25 although it is also clear that in position occupied by craft courses in the England many different kinds of educational curricula of our schools. A recent article has practice can. go on behind walls with a raised some critical issues concerning the common new 'Sign posted up. academic status of crafts, their usefulness in the curriculum, and their relationship to design education. The author gives a brief report on the recruitment patterns into craft teaching, suggesting· that craft and its 1. Jeffrey Loria, Collecting Original Art, Harper teachers are denied a "basic equality" with and Row, New York and London (1965), other kinds of subjects and teachers. page 7. Furthermore, 2. Fernand Leger,. "The Machine Aesthetic ... " " ... the growing failure of college and in Leger and Purist Paris, Tate Gallery, education departments to attract ade- London (1970), page 87. quately qualified entrants indicates that 3. Pierre Bourdieu, "Intellectual Field and pupils and therefore parents and advisers Creative Project" in Knowledge and Control, who influence them, do not rate craft and Michael F.D. Young (editor) Collier· Macmillan, London (1971), page 174. craft teaching as sufficiently worthwhile acti vities,"21 4. William Morris, "Artist and the Artisan: As an Artist Sees It" in William Morris: Artist Writer It would be a mistake to reduce the Socialist by May Morris, Oxford (1936), page complexities of the situation to any simple 495. formula. In some contexts art and craft are 5. William Morris, "The Lesser Arts" in Col- lumped together22 and seem to suffer lected Works of William Morris, volume 22, almost equally under the vagaries edu- page 9. cational decision making and the school 6. Alfred Whitman, Charles Turner, Engraver, time-table. On the other 'hand it is pretty (1907), page 1.

clear that the education system does func- 7. See John Pye, Patronage of British Art. tion as a transmitter of the distinction (1845). He quotes evidence that in the second between the two spheres.23 At the very Ieast. half of the eighteenth century "foreign trade children are socialized into definitions which in British prints, brought into this country at one time 200,0001. per annum" (page 244). may be grist for other educational mills. Also see page 210n. It may be that a latent function of the school curriculum is to socialize children out 8. John Pye, Ibid., (pages 243-2441. of active artistic roles. The "Crowther" 9. The point cannot be developed here in a full report showed how under the pressure of way, but the forces of the market tended to overcrowded timetables grammar school favour both the emergence of entrepeneurial functions and the growth of an army of children were encouraged to abandon parts depressed wage earners. Men like John of the available curriculum. It also

14. Quoted in Sidney C. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy 1768- 1968, Chapman & Hall, London, (1968), page90.

15. Francis Seymour Haden, "The Art of the Painter-Etcher" The Nineteeth Century, May' 1890, volume 27, pages 756-757. . 16. An attempt in 1755 to set up an academy with the co-operation of the Society of Dilettanti failed, because the latter, whilst offering financial support, wanted to playa major role in running the proposed body.

17. Quoted in Gordon Sutton, Artisan or Artist, PergamonPress,London (1967), page229.