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cc >> Tonight we're going to be exploring the answer to how, then, should I live, which the answer being by art, by the artistic life, by appreciating beauty. And our example is going to be looking at the pre-Raphaelites and their most distinguished

artist and political thinker

William Morris. I'm going to talk a little bit descriptively about the pre-Raphaelites and several of their artists and art this evening before I move into the

greatest of them

William Morris. The pre-Raphaelites were really an informal society of artists starting around the mid-century in Britain. And they saw themselves as artistic rebels who wanted a different form of art than what they saw as the stayed and artificial painting. Their focus was largely but not exclusively on painting. So they wanted to break from this stayed traditional view. And, of course, this is familiar to us as every major art movement in the history, I guess, of the world gets started with this framework of we want to get away from the traditional dead stuff and let's get something that really is so much better. Of course, they had no doubt about what was better. The pre-Raphaelites wanted to represent nature as they believed it really was, rather than in a very formal way. They were particularly interested in a whole series of different eras than the contemporary era. They were not enthusiastic about art that focused on their time. And so there was a considerable interest, as we will see, in pictures portraying or purporting to portray various medieval themes and personages. A great deal of interest in religious, Christian religious themes. And, above all, there as a tremendous interest in women. And if you want to have any keyword about the pre-Raphaelites, they loved painting women. And virtually all of their really "great" paintings are of women, and in the case of some of the key figures, it is, as they saw it, paintings of their women. Wives, lovers who, in their paintings, may be reappearing at -- growing up or in the middle ages or wherever. So there was this tremendous interest in looking elsewhere, but in the past, for models. And the favorite models were women who, some would argue, you can judge for yourself, were, shall we say, highly romanticized. The way the pre-Raphaelites, especially of the second generation, put it was they were looking for women for their pictures, and these women had to be, to use their term, "stunners." They didn't want anything else or any other women. Well, again, it's a matter of individual judgment as to whether they found those stunners. I'll let you judge for yourself. The kind of women they liked besides being stunners were women that were, if I can use this term, soulful looking. A sensitive, a deep. Was soulful. And very frequently there was, or their critics charged anyway, a hint of sexual energy, which, of course, the pre-Raphaelites said no, not in the Victorian era. Well, that's just a little bit about the movement. The movement went through several phases, several generations. As I say, it was very loose bounded activity in group. So some were part of it at one time and not at others. But, of course, it culminates in our subject for tonight, William Morris. But let me show you, if I can, a few examples of what we're dealing with. Well, Sir John Millais was a crucial figure of the first generation of the pre-Raphaelites and a widely admired painter. I'll show you. Here we see in Autumn Leaves. Again, what you expect, you have these women. You notice they're all women. They are engaged with nature, as was the approved procedure. This is one of the most famous

of Millais' paintings

Ophelia. She is lying in nature, and the emphasis on beauty is obvious with the flowers. Here was Millais with another theme that was quite common, as I mentioned. This painting caused quite a bit of controversy. In case this isn't immediately obvious to you, this is Mary with Jesus. And that raised criticisms, of course, that, well, I'm sorry, this isn't quite the way we had envisioned it. But, again, one of the things that critics suggested was, well, Jesus isn't really the center of the picture. It's once again a women who is central to it. But it just gives you a feeling for some of the works that he did. Now another first generation figure was this gentleman with the magnificent, absolutely

magnificent beard

William Holman Hunt. And you notice the dress, for example, that he has. This is part of their, why shouldn't all aspects of life be beautiful? Why shouldn't clothes be beautiful? Why do we have to wear those dreadful Victorian numbers? Now here is a famous painting by him where Christ is portrayed as the light of the world. He is, presumably, knocking at the door after his resurrection, and the door does not appear to have a way that he can enter. So it is meant to symbolize that they must, one must welcome Christ. Now, the irony here is that the pre-Raphaelites, on the whole, were not necessarily particularly religious. But the religious themes they thought were often beautiful and engaging. And so that's what really mattered. After all, the goal is art, is beauty, and wherever it might be present in the past, one should call on it, call it up. And, of course, they did. So Millais and Hunt were kind of two crucial figures of the first generation, if I can put it that way. The second generation of the pre-Raphaelites, and again keep in mind this is a very loose concept, but perhaps as time went on what was common was the style of their art. But the second generation brings us to Edward Burne-Jones. And he was very much in touch with Morris because Morris himself could be described as something of a second generation. I'll give you an example of his artwork. It's very characteristic. Here we have the three women, once again, and it is their faces reflected in the pool. This setting, of course, is not a contemporary setting, as you can see. It's meant to be a more or less medieval one. Now that brings us to the perhaps most famous of the second generation, and that's Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And we're going to look at several of his pictures here and talk a little bit about his story. Rossetti's sister, some of you may have read her poetry. She was a Victorian poet. In her case, a very devout Christian and wrote Christian poems. Her brother was a bit of a different story. There he is. And these people are generally self-portraits. He looks a little ominous, but he was an artistic genius. No question of that. But he had a very, very troubled life. And his first wife, who we'll see in a moment, he really liked to paint the women in his life. His first wife committed suicide, and he never fully recovered from that and spent a lot of his time afterward not just painting but a lot of time drinking and taking drugs and, in general, was a mess but a very creative mess. And he did stabilize his romantic life by having as his mistress William Morris' wife. So the relationships were rather close among these people. Of course, we understand because we are liberated. This was not a secret romance. Not at all. Not at all. And so, well, let's look a little bit at his magnificent art. Here we have, it says, "Behold the helper of God." And that's presumably Jesus, and I don't know whether that's Mary or not for sure. If you look at this, Jesus appears to be highly romanticized, if I may phrase it to you that way. But, again, really the key figure, at least as I look at it and I don't claim to be a great art historian, appears to be the helper who is carrying, of course, the lilies, the glory of sort of Christian nature. Okay, so now this is his first wife who he painted, the one who committed suicide. They did a lot of painting of each other. I think this is their version of the modern day selfie.

LAUGHTER

magnificent beard

If I can put it to you that way. And I do think, though, that very frequently this result is better than the realistic or the distortion that comes from modern day pictures. And here is The Beloved. I believe the setting for this is the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew scriptures, Jewish scriptures. And we have these beautiful women. And, again, they are dressed in, allegedly, indigenous costumes. But of course we have the flowers and the beautiful jewelry. It's pre-Raphaelite. Let's put it that way. All the way. And then we have Jane Morris. This is Jane Morris. Obviously, Dante Rossetti considered her a stunner and remarkable. Again you see the presence of nature, both in the fruit, the rich gown. It's a whole style. And here she is again. And she's portrayed here. You see the beads. She's portrayed here more in the medieval setting. We have the Roman numerals here and so on. But they're always in this soulful style. Almost always. I think it's, obviously I think the art is wonderful myself. Okay, well, let's just take one more Rossetti. And there she is again. And you can see everywhere there's this sense of richness of color and beauty. And people often say, well, where are the action pictures? And I'm afraid we're in the wrong realm of art. We don't want any action pictures here. And also, there's nothing of the, or very little I would say, of the pure nature type paintings that we can imagine, say, an Emerson or Thoreau might do were they painters. That's not really what we're concerned about. There is incredible beauty in so many ways in this world, but, clearly, the very acme of beauty is woman. And that was central to their meaning. Does anyone have any questions about the pre-Raphaelites before we move on to talk a little more about the master that is William Morris. Yeah? >>

INAUDIBLE

magnificent beard

>> That was a term they made up. >>

INAUDIBLE

magnificent beard

>> There's no significance of it. Some people have said, well, doesn't this refer to Raphael, the painter, and we're going back before that and so on. But they had no, and you can work that and some have, but it's a loose jointed movement. But the term is one that came from within. It isn't a critics term for it. But a lot of people have said, well, they want to go way back, and that's the expression of it. There's no constitution for the organization. It's difficult to be certain. Well, let me turn to William Morris. There are many expressions of Morris that you can get. You can even buy, today, you might be surprised at this, a William Morris coloring book. You can't buy a Horatio -- coloring book, a Thomas Carlyle, and you can't even buy an Emerson one, but you can buy this. And I haven't colored it, but it has his designs in there. I wouldn't want to color it because it would ruin it. But I just wanted to show you that. I'm not going to pass it out lest anyone else start coloring it. We don't want that. Not that you'd do that, of course, but, well, we have to be careful. So let's turn to... My view was that life itself must be lived as an art and lived for art and taken together, then, an expression of art as a way of life. I started out as a poet, like others in the movement, but fairly soon I developed an interest in drawing and in painting and, above all, in producing beautiful design. And don't you see, you do see, don't you, that that's a way of expressing what I'm all about. How then should we live? We should design beauty. We should live beauty. We should design it. And the concept of design is very important for you to understand because I'm not talking about the sort of raw celebration of spontaneity. When I think about art or when you think about designing a picture, a print, cloth, wallpaper, I did all of those things, you have to design it. I am not an anarchist. I don't want to think that way. I think that art requires spontaneous inventiveness, but then it requires design. And, my friends, so does the good society, of course. It must be about art. But it also must be about design. And I want you to keep that in mind. Now, I've already mentioned that things did not go very well with my wife. A very sad situation. And then they did not go well with my second wife, obviously. But they went very well in other areas of my life. Because you see, I was a businessman. I had a business. I supported myself. And it was quite a successful business called Morris and Company. And it was a lifelong business. An unquestioned success. We probably became known most for our textiles. And Morris textile prints are available today in your town. They were an enormous success. In my time, wallpaper was very big, and I produced some of the bestselling wallpaper designs, which I'll show you in a moment. So textiles, wallpaper, another area, as this is, was producing stained glass. In all cases, carefully designed but about beauty, as I understood it. And to enhance beauty and to get people to appreciate beauty. Now, while I was working my business, and, quite honestly, compared to a lot of other thinkers of my period, I felt I had a sort of down to Earth experience with the practicalities of life. And in my case, of course, that was specifically with the practicalities of business. Lots of complications there. But at the same time, it was through my business that questions first started coming up in my mind about the way commercial business activities were conducted in my time in England. Or as I would put it later, about how capitalism actually worked. Now, I saw a lot of things that I thought were terrible, in terms of the consequences of a lot of free wielding business. I saw a lot of free wielding business that wasn't ethical, also. But I'm sure you can realize nothing irritated me more, nothing made me more angry than what business produced in terms of goods and services. It wasn't about producing the beautiful. It wasn't about helping people to enter into, commercially or any other way, the beautiful. That was its greatest fault. It was a denial of beauty. Now, I recognize people could disagree about what's beautiful, but the point I want to make is the commercial and capitalist society was not interested in the subject whatsoever. And so given how I believe we should live, it was condemning itself. So I had business experience, I ran a business throughout my professional life really, but I saw a lot of things that I didn't like, above all the abandonment of beauty, of art. Now, I want to show you a few of my pieces of my artwork. Here we have a, more or less, Guinevere. We have a holy book here. By the way, I hope you all understand, if you were to say to me, well, did you and the people who preceded you in this very loose art movement, were you interested in returning to the middle ages or something? No, no. This is a subject and yet it takes us away from what was seen as the commercial, the deadly, the beauty denying world. To look at this is to inspire you to look elsewhere, to think elsewhere, to think about alternatives. And most of the pre-Raphaelites were not in any way political. But Morris' experience is leading him in this direction. Now, this is one of several prints we'll look at. These prints would be wallpaper, fabric. Of course, you observe the presence of flowers everywhere. There's a distinct style here, obviously, you recognize. One of the things that was characteristic of his wallpaper and his prints was that they had, as part of their aim, to sort of liven up the often drab, dark, and overstuffed middle class and upper middle class Victorian homes. And something like that covering a wall, I believe, would undoubtedly accomplish that goal. Well, somewhere in my history, as you may know, comes the development of my very prominent, in the late 19th century, socialism. By no means did I begin as a socialist, and, though I did not object to people calling me a socialist, I was a socialist of a very, very special kind. And perhaps it would be better if latter day commentators on me might have called me a beauty socialist because socialists, I felt, like a lot of other people with political agendas, could be very far away from the goal of living a life of beauty. The goal never changed. How, then, should we live doesn't change with me. It's always the same. The life of art and beauty. What begins to take shape is a social and political design that will promote, in my view, this beauty. In short, it's not enough for me to run a business and have complaints about the commercial world around me, the Victorian society with its failiure to appreciate beauty as I understand it, I really need to look at what in your time would be called the structures of society and ask, because there are so many beautiful people in the world, especially beautiful women, so the fault is not in us. People don't appreciate beauty, but I believe they could appreciate it and absolutely integral to the process of appreciating it, this is not going to museums, this is producing beauty. Because if one is a producer of beauty, recognizing the differences among us, then beauty has become part of our soul and we are really living beauty. By my middle age, let say the 1870s, I was definitely now committed to a kind of activism for a socialism. As I said, the love and practice of art made me a socialist. Not the analysis of some historical processes. You understand? I'm no Marx. What is that all about? It's the love and practice of art. The goal isn't to achieve state ownership of the means of production. The goal is not to achieve some kind of formal equality. Those may be, in other words, I'm really not in touch with a lot of the socialist movement in my time. Britain, the continent, the Marx and all the people fighting with Marx, sectarianism, I'm not really interested. In some general sense, they are allies, but I am a businessman and it's the practice of art that matters. Even as I began to work and think about a design, a socialist society where art could reign, because that's the goal, I continued to develop as a professional artist and businessman. And in my later years, I developed a artistically oriented printing press. And, for example, the works of Chaucer were produced as works of really exquisite beauty by me and my collaborators. So the words were beautiful but we set them in beautiful manuscripts because that's what

we're seeking

beauty. Now, as time went on I began to think about this design. And my most famous work that expresses this is called News From Nowhere. News From Nowhere. And as was common, as many of you know, and awful lot of what Marx would call the utopian socialists tended to present their views in a literary form. And so did I. No unspeakably turgid economic analysis as in Marx's Kapital. Instead, I wrote many individual essays about different particular issues from my socialist perspective. News from Nowhere was meant to be my literary expression, my literary design. Now, I want to tell you about my design, of course, and see if you think it is an expression. And while I emphasize that I was my own socialist, okay, obviously I associated with other people who had somewhat similar ideas. An example would be George Bernard Shaw. I used many of his plays to present kind of very soft anti-capitalist, pro, though you have to work at it, socialist views. But again, Shaw, like myself, was a humanist. This is not economic analysis. Not meant to be. And indeed, if you said to me, well, do you think there will be a revolution? Well, sure. Sure. Now let's move onto something important. Understand? If you said to me, is class conflict going to be important in this? Yeah, it is, but let's get going. So there was a kind of ritualistic endorsement of sort of some of the socialist ideas, but it wasn't very deep in my soul. Not at all. Well, what was? What did it look like? What was I looking for? I've said I'm a practical sort. So when we talk about designing a society, we're going to have to be practical. And besotted as I was by beauty and the creation of beauty, I knew, as I put it, that art does not go before the knife and the fork. Art does not go before the knife and the fork. So, again, we have to design a society that can sustain itself in very practical terms. And, therefore, we have to think about we can address the knife and the fork. And we will. Okay? We will. But I want you to have just a little bit of a feel for what it's all going to look like. What values is it going to embody? What's it going to be like? One thing for sure is it's going to be a very simple society. We need to operate in a world where we're not overwhelmed, and that means we have to drastically simplify. And, of course, you understand that means simplifying the production of goods as well as how we live personally. And yes it will also embody the value of equality, but not equality as some kind of doctrine, some kind of thing we measure. Equality, if it's alive, I believe, must be a communal value. And let me explain that. That is, equality cannot be measured by incomes or anything like that precisely, but equality is ultimately about a fundamental respect for each other within an artistic community. And so, for me, equality apart from community and community apart from equality will not work, and I do not want them. And I'm not interested in people who urge one or the other and seemingly not both. And that community is going to be built not just by this respect, but it's going to be built by, respect is a formal term, it's a formal relationship, and the way it's really built, as I understand it, is through sharing. And that we will be a sharing, interactive community. But first you may say, what about the knife and fork? Sharing community and so on. These words roll off tongue but where's the knife and fork? As you may know, all of us socialists in the 19th century from me to Marx were tremendously committed to the value of work. And valued people vary definitely by their commitment to work. And so my view is if we have a simply community where everyone understands as part of the reciprocity and sharing that we all have to work, then what the community will need will be far less than what people think as they look from our Victorian times. The knife and fork will need to be used but much less. Yes, well, yes there'll be farming. Of course. Yes we'll raise our own basic crops and live off them in terms of our food. Of course. And there'll be reciprocity with this. And at the same time, we will observe what is true, which is there is, for example, an art of husbandry and an art of farming. And we will be alert to those who see their work and their work expresses the art. But you do understand that the central part of our community will be the production of art, of beauty in a slightly different sense. That is, our community will be about the production of art. Now, you might say, wait a minute, that doesn't sound realistic. I'm practical. The art I'm talking about is useful art. After all, it's from me over the time that the famous arts and crafts movement develops. We're going to build furniture for us and for others. We're going to design fabrics. We'll use it but we'll sell them. Practical art. Practical crafts. And this is something which so many people can participate in and can play a role in and can share in and thus build an artistic community. So we'll be able to take care of ourselves in terms of our basic needs and, as appropriate, sell the practical things that we may make. Now, there are people out there, and I was well aware of it, who think, oh, well, I'm sorry, making some end table or beds, that's not beautiful. But it is beautiful if it's done, it's created as a work of art. Now, I know in your time you can go to, I don't know, Shopko and you can get bookcases and end tables and beds and stuff. That's not art. That's junk. But from my point of view, we can both have the practical and the art, and we must never ever in my community surrender that pairing. We must never let art become, if you will, fine art because then it leaves the community. At best it becomes something that a handful of people do in the community. But practical arts and crafts are beautiful and they're practical for us and for others. And how wonderful that the objects in people's homes on people's walls, the practical things that they will need in their lives will also be beautiful and created in a beautiful community devoted to the arts and crafts and to art itself. It's very, very exciting. Now, when we are working in the arts and crafts, we have a commitment to, as my predecessors of the Pre-Raphaelite movement did, we have a commitment to art that is natural. And so as much as possible we want to use natural materials, natural woods because part of being simple, and here you see an invocation of Emerson, is being close to nature. Morris felt a connection with Emerson and with Thoreau, whose line simplify, simplify, simplify, sums up his approach. Simplifying means getting back to what's natural and getting back to what's natural in us, which is we are creative people who can produce beauty in very practical objects. Now, you understand I'm not suggesting for a minute that everyone has the same capacity to produce beauty, but everyone has the capacity to participate in the process of producing beauty. And therefore, they are producing beauty. And we're doing it, we're going to do it together, which, of course, is what we did and continue to do in Morris and Company. Now, you all understand that while we're producing these objects of art, there'll be no factories. There'll be no mass production. It will be done by individual workers. We're going to get rid of the factory system. It's oppressive, it's exploitive, but above all you know my objection. In its results it does not produce art, but even worse in the actual production process it is not about art or the artistic community. So we reject it. Well, there's a few other nos that will give you a little sense of what we don't want, what we're not going to have. There'll be no private property. I'm a socialist. It's our property. Private property means mine and thine, means the drawing of lines. By definition, the drawing of property lines. We're not going to have property lines. We're going to have an artistic sharing of community. And, as my reference to farms should make clear, we aren't going to operate in the horrible, crowded, art-denying urban world of the big cities. I've seen those cities. They're getting bigger and bigger. There's precious little art to be found there but a great deal of suffering. So we want to move to an agrarian setting with plenty of space where we share common. And, of course, there'll be no authority in my society, needless to say. Now, you might say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wouldn't there be some because you may not have elected officials and all of that, and I assure you we're not going to have any of that, but isn't there a kind of authority that's going to exist through the community and community norms? And indeed you know in your time we have people who say, well, you know, all these people who celebrate these communities of equals and so on, that's very frightening because there's nothing to block a majority that oppresses. Well, my friends, I hope you understand that people who are really, really worried about this, I'm afraid they're not really going to succeed in our community. Our community is about people who trust others, who share with others, who accept our basic values. And if you think people are going to oppress each other, then, I'm sorry, you're not ready. You have been corrupted. But I think people aren't like that, if you give them half a chance. Yes, if you force them into a factory. Yes, if you have crowded cities. Yes, if you live under these exploited systems. And so here is my thought about Thomas Carlyle. You see, Thomas Carlyle is a man who understood. I, too, was influenced by him. Who wasn't in the second half of the 19th century in Britain? And I salute Carlyle because he sees what the costs of capitalism are. He faces the social question. And to tell you the truth, with his tremendous emphasis on a very strong state, a tremendous amount of regulation and control, he really is an unspoken socialist, in my mind. But the problem is, as I put it, he needs to have somebody once in a while go hit him in the head. Now, why does Carlyle need to be hit in the head? Because he thinks the answer is authority. It's called heroes. And a very strong top-down government. No. That's not the answer. Yes, it may address some of the social issues, but it will not transform society toward the artistic community, which I believe Carlyle really wanted. For me, Carlyle is a fundamentally, you might say, not religious but deeply spiritual. Now, what else are we going to be free of? Are we going to be free of so many things so we can be the artists we are? Well, there's not going to be any divorce. And since there's no divorce, and I'm sure you understand the reason there's not going to be any divorce in my society is not because we have strict laws against it, of course, but, of course, there's not going to be any marriage. Love itself should be an art. So we'll get rid of all of that. It stands in the way. And, of course, all you skeptics out there, I can assure you that we're not going to have any prisons either. We don't need prisons. Prisons and the number of people in prisons are a statement of a society's inadequacy. There should be no doubt about that in your mind. There certainly isn't in mine. But you see in our society we won't have people like that. We won't need prisons. And, more than that, we won't have the need to put people in prison, which is part of the authority complex that I don't think much of. In fact, you name an institution, government, religious institution, formal schooling. What we are going to have is people who are going to discover the incredible truth that they're artists, that they're beautiful, and that they can create beauty which, after all, is the purpose of living. That is William Morris.