Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic There are two exhibits in Morris Mania, an exhibition opening April 5 at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, which embody the absolutely bizarre range across which the designer’s work has been employed. One is a photograph of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg after its storming in 1917, its broken door beside a wall papered with a Morris design — perhaps “Garden Tulip”. The other is a seat cushion from HMS Valiant, a nuclear submarine used at the height of the cold war, covered in Morris’s “Rose” pattern which was, apparently, very popular in the Royal Navy. William Morris (1834-1896), founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, has an influence that is far-ranging in the extreme. But, as this exhibition shows, it is what makes him such an enduringly compelling designer. The curators have gathered more than 200 items featuring Morris’s distinctive designs, from radios and mugs to Wellington boots and chopsticks, manufactured up until the present day. Many of these items were donated or loaned from members of the public after a callout, and donations will continue for the show’s duration.His work is the backdrop to what was once called “midcult”— aka middlebrow culture — now the aesthetic of the museum shop, the elderly parents’ house, the twee mail-order catalogue and the country-house tea room. It is too often said that the designer would have abhorred what has been done with his work. But it doesn’t make it less true. Morris was a polymath whose range was admirable, but who was not necessarily good at everything he did. In his time, he was perhaps best known as a poet, and through his essays he made socialism palatable for a Britain still wary of Marx’s Continental intellectualism. He was a winsome sub-Pre-Raphaelite painter; he never made it as an architect (lasting less than a year at the offices of GE Street, designer of London’s Royal Courts of Justice). His books and essays were influential without being particularly well written. He did, however, find his niche in pattern. Aged 16, Morris refused to enter the Great Exhibition of 1851 with his parents “on the grounds of taste”. He loathed Britain’s industrially produced, overdecorated consumer goods, predicated on the exploitation of labour and resources and an ever-increasing appetite encouraged by changes in fashion. The mass-produced wallpaper industry was booming in the 1860s, and Morris saw it as ripe for reinvention, creating more artisanal designs with hand-cut wood blocks and natural dyes. His complex, nature-influenced patterns were introduced during an era of bourgeois bohemianism that emerged as a reaction to the growing number of factories, and the pollution and slums they created. He also founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the body that laid the groundwork for the modern notion that conservation should not be a complete rebuilding in a historic style (the default Victorian model) but care for the original material. Architecture, in Morris’s eyes, was a palimpsest marked by changes in taste, use and time. That is an attitude that is profoundly contemporary.With his financier father’s fortune behind him, Morris built a business fitting out the homes of the wealthy and fashionable, including Queen Victoria, for whom he designed a monogrammed wallpaper for Balmoral (which inspired the Tsarina in the Winter Palace). He loved his craft; he hated his clientele. Morris griped about “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich” — but swinish luxury served him well. Morris & Co, the successor to the company he founded in 1861, is still making wallpapers and fabric in the UK. Morris’s patterns have proved more durable than his politics. His designs now feature on everything from knickers to tea trays, but these items are frequently made without his concern for the ethics of production. “We see what capitalism has done to his work,” says the show’s curator, Hadrian Garrard. Yet, “It’s wonderful that his work is now so accessible and so well-loved.”Sam Jacob, the architect who designed the exhibition, talks of Morris’s “patterns having escaped into the gallery and the world”. In 2022 the gallery held a solo show by acclaimed US artist Kehinde Wiley, who has spent more than 15 years sourcing William Morris prints for the backgrounds of his vivid portraits. He loved his craft; he hated his clientele. Morris griped about ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’ — but swinish luxury served him wellThis new show does not distinguish between brows, high or low, and is not snobbish about products that would have horrified Morris: his carefully wrought patterns are applied to mass-produced secateurs, oven gloves, hand cream sets, Brompton bikes, phone cases and washbags (I did once read of Morris bondage panties, though I never saw them). “Where things are made, the waste, the excess and the democratisation of his work are all part of what we’re looking at,” says Garrard, “as well as the affection people have for it.”Today the web is populated by “William Morris” prints that have been “enhanced” by AI so that they look familiar, but slightly wrong. The William Morris Society still issues licences for his designs. But they have spread to a point where few bother with licensing. AI is stretching the boundaries further still.Morris abhorred kitsch but has come to embody it — perhaps it was always present in his work. His most famous aphorism, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”, is now a cliché. Of course, secateurs and oven gloves are useful.In choosing to celebrate the spread and longevity of his work, rather than to rage against the dying of Arts and Crafts’ moral teachings, the William Morris Gallery is doing us a favour. It is allowing us to just enjoy the sheer ridiculous, even absurd variety of applications of the great bearded man’s designs. In the Morris-print Dr Martens and the twee submarine seat on a vessel capable of destroying a city, we see that idea of Britishness constantly reinterpreted: tongue-in-cheek or irony-free; self-conscious; sly or stupid. In his legacy, Morris has achieved what the expense of his designs prevented him from doing in life — accessibility, affordability and ubiquity.“Morris Mania” at the William Morris Gallery; April 5-September 21; wmgallery.org.ukEdwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design criticFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
