Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890 by Morna O’Neill (review)

If readers of this journal were asked to envision Victorian socialist art, they would probably be much more likely to call to mind the prints of William Morris than Walter Crane’s paintings. Yet Morna O’Neill’s new study, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890, cogently and persuasively argues that Crane’s paintings were essential vehicles for his socialist beliefs and embodied his conviction that decoration could become a viable form of public art. The decorative, as conceived by Crane, allowed for figuration as well as symbols, emblems, and allegories. The result was what Crane described as “picture-writing,” a concept rooted in contemporaneous discussions of evolution, particularly the theories of Herbert Spencer. Spencer, in First Principles (1862), had explained the origins of written language in “the political-religious decorations of ancient temples and palaces” (qtd. in O’Neill 47). Crane explicitly linked his painting practice to Spencer in his essay “On the Position and Aims of Decorative Art” (1881) in which he opined, as O’Neill summarizes, that decoration could constitute “an alphabet to communicate ideals, beautify the world, and battle an enemy,” that is, capitalism (47).

The basic parameters of this argument—for example, Crane’s search for natural symbolism, engagement with evolutionist theories, and commitment to public art expressed through allegory—can be found in Greg Smith’s essay “Developing a Public Language of Art,” for the exhibition catalogue Walter Crane 1845–1915: Artist, Designer, and Socialist (1989). O’Neill’s book-length study allows her to explore these topics in much greater depth. Her treatment is also distinguished by her methodological sophistication and close readings of primary sources that include leading voices of the Victorian age, such as Spencer, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and A. C. Swinburne. Particularly satisfying is her attention to the rich complexities of Crane’s canvases, which are at the heart of her study. She convincingly decodes Crane’s picture-writing, and also attends closely to the material aspects of his paintings. Building on Crane’s own precept that “the medium was intricately bound up with the purpose and intent of the work,” O’Neill demonstrates that form was inseparable from meaning for him (27).

O’Neill begins with an analysis of terms key to her study. Most welcome is her exegesis of the term “decoration,” which can pejoratively suggest frivolousness, surface prettiness, and an absence of intellectual rigor. O’Neill reveals how wrongheaded such assumptions are. Crane aimed for decorative painting to take up the work of history painting, regarded as the most intellectual form of art. In investigating how Crane could conjoin the decorative and the political with such firm conviction, O’Neill challenges T. J. Clark’s reading of Crane’s Triumph of Labour (1891) as “a pretend solution to Modernism’s problems” (13). Drawing on Fredric Jameson, O’Neill takes seriously Crane’s contention that expressing ideal beauty was a political argument. In sum, “the decorative has the power to imagine an artistic ideal and envision a utopian society” (14). This utopian future, inspired by visions of an idealized past, lay at the heart of British socialism.

O’Neill continues her critical analysis of decoration in her first chapter, devoted to Crane’s mythological paintings Renaissance of Venus (1877) and The Fate of Persephone (1878). She argues these canvases “are among the foundational images of an artistic practice that created the visual culture of English socialism,” although they were produced before Crane’s conversion to socialism in 1884 (20). Moreover, they establish Crane’s deep engagement with aestheticism, which O’Neill reveals to have been a tenable mode of political expression. Aestheticism’s search for beauty was both a critique of industrial capitalism and the path to a utopian (and socialist) future. Furthermore, O’Neill establishes that Crane’s female figures represented in Renaissance of Venus and The Fate of Persephone...