Lecture 9: Manufacturing Art in 18th-Century Britain

Key Ideas (2)

1. Artistic hierarchies tell us about society in general

   • Art has always been literally manufactured (made by human hands)

   • Ultimately, the degree to which this is admitted/rejected tells us a lot about what a society values

     • Ideas about class, status, value, freedom

2. The borderlines of what is called art have always been porous

   • While many have attempted to break them down, even more have been anxious to reinforce them

   • Because there is so much at stake

Problems in studying Manufactured Art (3)

1. Assumptions about the nature of ‘fine art’ vs. ‘decorative art’

   • Fine art: made in a studio, by a single (known) person, as a form of self-expression (NOT made to primarily be functional)

   • Decorative art: made in a factory, by several people/a team, to be used for a specific function

2. As a result, the decorative arts are rarely studied in the discipline of Art History

3. BUT is there actually a justifiable distinction between Art & Craft/Manufacturing?

   • Existing ideas about ‘fine art’ are actually entangled w/ other forms of making

Historical context (4)

18th-century Britain

• Global empire was expanding

• Wealth was rising

Led to:

1. Highly commercialised, consumerist society

   • Beginnings of industrialisation

2. Intense, nationalistic competition for trade

   • Health of the nation seen to depend on exports

   • Standard of art & manufacturing in Britain was seen as crucial for its performance on the international stage (offered both financial & cultural power)

     • E.g. vs. France, which was believed to have had domination in terms of taste = had financial consequences

3. Belief that the key to restoring British supremacy was through the study of drawing & design

   • Would not only increase the standard of British products

   • But also improve the taste of British consumers

4. Hierarchical division was emerging between fine art & manufacturing (both closer & further away from each other than they had ever been)

Ideal: development of categorisations of Art (antiquity to 18th century)

Art-Craft divide

Classical Greco-Roman antiquity: painting & sculpture EXCLUDED from liberal arts

• Liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric, etc.

  • Special category of skill/knowledge that is more intellectual & elevated than the rest

  • Associated w/ freedom:

    (1) Contributed to the freedom of the mind

    (2) Considered necessary for a free citizen to participate in civic life (politics)

    • I.e. only for men (NOT women & slaves)

Middle ages: painting & sculpture seen as mechanical arts

• Follows physical/manual (mechanical) principles

• Not much differentiation within the category of art itself (e.g. architect = builder = painter)

Renaissance: artists tried to raise their status by claiming that painting, sculpture, & architecture were liberal arts

• Required BOTH intellectual & manual skills

• An good artist needs a broad program of study

  • E.g. anatomy, philosophy, history

By the 18th century: painting, sculpture, & architecture were often referred to as fine arts

• BUT still were NOT highly regarded in general

  • Some elevation of status, but NOT a straightforward process

• Artists struggled to be seen as liberal artists

• Due to issues of class ⭐

  • Most artists came from families of artisans, NOT from the gentry/nobility

• Nonetheless, there was an increasing desire to achieve this status

Reality: blurred lines between Art & Manufacturing

Named example

• Historical context

• Description

• Interpretation

Drawing as a link between the fine & mechanical arts

Named example: Thomas Johnson

Historical context

• Was a furniture carver in London

• Working in Rococo style

  • Asymmetric profusion of decorative motifs

  • Eclectic mix of influences

  • Sometimes to an excessive degree

Description

• Published his drawings

  • Emphasised his own authorship on the printing plate by signing it

  • Drawings were then used by himself & other craftsmen to make actual objects in carved & gilded wood

    • E.g. girandoles (sconces attached to the wall that can have candles put in them)

    • Very decorative = can’t strictly be considered purely functional

    • Were often simplified from the drawings, which depicted designs that were far too complicated/difficult to execute

Interpretation

• Craftsman presenting himself as a draftsman/artist

  • Using the medium of engraving to advertise his skill & show how inventive his mind is ⭐

  • Asserting that his work is NOT just manual craft, BUT assumes the status of ‘art’

Attempts to distinguish between Art & Manufacturing

Named example

• Historical context

• Interpretation (3)

Named example: The Royal Academy of Arts

Historical context

• Founded in 1768

  • Key founding member & 1st President: Joshua Reynolds

    • Painter

    • ‘The value & rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade.’ ⭐

    • Privileged history painting as the most important form of art

• Purpose: to improve the standards of British taste & design (Nationalistic project)

  • Believed that by doing so with regards to the fine arts would have a trickle down effect on the rest of the arts

• Focus on the fine arts

  • Painting, sculpture & architecture only

  • Crafts & amateur art were excluded

    • Anything fundamentally reproductive

    • E.g. needlework, copies of artworks

• Underwritten by the King (‘Royal’)

  = testament to the elevated status of artists

• Academic structure:

  • History painting was privileged

    • ‘Elevated’ subject matter (e.g. mythology, religion, history)

    • Elevated style (idealised, classical style, ‘the grand manner’)

    • Was considered a liberal art

  • Students studying history painting in the RAOA had to study a range of other subjects e.g. philosophy, history, classics

  • Pathway:

    1. Studying & copying existing classical sculptures

    2. Then studied & drew from nude models (life drawing)

  • Ultimate goal: to create art that could instruct, inspire, and elevate the minds of the citizens who saw them

    • Far from art as a mere skill/trade

Interpretation

1. Assumption that fine arts are fundamentally superior to the rest

   • Conclusive separation of education pathways

     • E.g. no more belief that an education in drawing could enable one to both make art and design furniture

2. Idea of art as:

   • Founded on the tradition of antiquity, the old masters & the human body

   • Original, unique

   • Intellectually engaged & engaging

3. Hierarchy even within the fine art category

   • History painting → portraiture → landscape → everyday scenes → still life

   • Existed since the Renaissance BUT newly embraced by the RAOA

   • Due to beliefs about how much intellectual engagement was required to produce & appreciate each kind of painting

     • E.g. whether the painting was a result of the artist’s ideal conceptions or just a copy of nature

Reality: bread and butter concerns (2)

1. There wasn’t much of a market for history painting in Britain

   • Grand, monumental, expensive

   • Hard for such artists to make a living

     = Reynolds’s bread & butter was portraiture instead, although he strongly pushed for history painting in his teaching

   • Tried to manage this conundrum by incorporating elements of history painting into his portraits

     • E.g. Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773)

2. Artists like Reynolds still worked for profit

   • Employed other artists & assistants to help complete his paintings

     • Had been common practice for hundreds of years

   • Typically, in 18th century Britain:

     • Patrons would go to big name artist

     • Artist would devise composition & execute portrait face

     • Fabrics/clothes would be executed by a specialist drapery painter in another studio

     • Studio assistants might execute background

• Subverts Romantic notions of the individual artist working alone in his studio

  • Created in the late 18th-early 19th centuries

  • To shore up the reputation of artists & protect them from associations with manufacturing, commerce, & manual labour ⭐

Named example: Josiah Wedgwood

Historical context

• The most successful ceramics manufacturer in Britain (and even internationally)

  • Not only a driver of taste in the nation, but also spearheaded important changes in industrial production

• Set up a factory producing ceramics in Staffordshire in 1769

  • The year after the RAOA was founded

  • Made useful things like plates, teapots, teacups

  • For a broad middle-class market

  • BUT also made more artistic, ornamental objects

    • To be aesthetically pleasing and attest to their owner’s good taste

• Believed that manufacturing & art should be united, and seen as having 1 single point of origin

Problems

Customers were wary of paying high prices for objects made in ceramics

• Even if cost of product development & manufacturing them was genuinely quite high

1. Ceramics was associated w/ tableware

   • Even lower category vs. silverware

2. Busts & medallions were made using molds

   • Prejudice against reproductions = not highly valued

Solutions

1. Wedgwood introduced many innovations in his factory that were historically important

   • E.g. effective use of production lines

   • E.g. quality control → so he could use catalogues to sell his works

   • Talked about ‘making machines of men’

2. Wedgwood launched a campaign to show that ceramics could be more than a low mechanical art and that consumers, in fact, should expect to pay higher prices for these objects

   (1) Employed artists from the RAOA to raise the quality of the molds he used

   • E.g. John Flaxman: commissioned to make low relief models in the style of classical subjects, often directly imitating classical vase paintings → could then be applied to any no. of objects

   (2) Ensured his in-house factory modelers achieved a high level of finish on each ornamental piece after it came out of its mold

   • Adding of details

   • E.g. undercut areas only emphasised after an object was de-molded

     = gave the impression of an individual, unique work, rather than merely a cast

   (3) HOWEVER, Wedgwood never used the names of commissioned artists/mentioned academic associations in his catalogues/promotional material

   • Conversely, stamped his own name onto his products ⭐

     • As a sort of signature/certificate of authenticity that raised their prestige

     • Discouraged the individual modelers/makers from putting their mark on the things they made in the factory

   • Beginning to apply the principles of artistic authorship to manufacturing?

     • Artwork would be priced based on the prestige of the great artist’s name alone

       • In fact, would devalue the artwork if other names were mentioned

Consequences & Later Developments

Progress in the merging of the fine & mechanical arts:

1. Arts & Crafts movement in the 19th century

   • Advocated for handcrafted items and a return to traditional craftsmanship

   • A reaction against:

     (1) The commodification of art & the industrialisation of craftsmanship

     (2) The RAOA’s attempt to separate the fine & decorative arts

2. Rise of readymades in art

   • Claimed artistic status for mass-produced objects

   • E.g. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: urinal made out of industrially-produced ceramic

     • Explains why it was so shocking

3. Andy Warhol

   • Played w/ the contentious divide between art & manufacturing

     • Studio was called ‘The Factory’

     • Spoke of wanting to make himself work like a machine

   • Silkscreen printing

     • Itself a reproductive technology

     • Produced en masse by his studio assistants, not necessarily touched by his hands

4. Artists like Jeff Koons/Damien Hirst

   • Artistic production is mostly outsourced a team working in their factory-like studio

   • Produced on enormous scales, for enormous profits

Although Wedgwood made much unprecedented progress, attitudes about the distinctions between fine & mechanical arts ultimately persisted:

1. Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

   • Was writing about photography

     • A different kind of mechanical reproduction

     • But equally felt to threaten the very basis of art

   • Claimed that art had lost its ‘aura’

     • Special properties of an individual, unique, original work of art

     • This idea emerged in the 18th century

       • When artists were most anxious to distinguish their work from that of mere manufacturers

     • BUT Benjamin sees this as a potentially liberating force

2. Goethe’s essay on Art & Handicraft (1797)

   • By then, Wedgwood’s classically-inspired objects had become famous across Europe

   • Goethe was horrified at both his commercial success & social ascent

   • ‘The original/true artist makes original, not reproductive works and bestows upon his material an eternal, inward value’ vs the mechanical artist just repeats himself, ‘his thousandth work is like his first’

   • Such developments ‘[bid] fair to be the utter downfall of art’

The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771-72), Johan Joseph Zoffany

Historical context

• Group portrait of the founding academicians of the RAOA

Analysis

• Men in conversation/debate/study of the live model

  • The most highly-prized Renaissance & classical sculptures in the background

• Central figures:

  • Joshua Reynolds (1st President of the RAOA)

  • William Hunter (anatomist)

    • Pictured in conversation - compositional reference to Raphael’s School of Athens

      • Plato pointing up @ the world of ideas = Reynolds

      • Aristotle pointing down @ the world of particulars = Hunter

• Only 2 women present in the form of portraits on the wall

  • 2 founding members of the RAOA

    • Drawing from nude models considered immodest for women (even in an imagined scene like this)

  • Vs. their abundant presence at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce

Interpretation

• Proclaims the principles of the RAOA

  • Foundation of art on the study of antiquity, old masters, & the human body

• Witty & elevated references to famous works of art

= the ideal kind of artwork that the RAOA would promote

Thomas Johnson’s Girandoles (1750s)

Historical context

• Thomas Johnson

  • Was a furniture carver in London

  • Working in Rococo style

    • Asymmetric profusion of decorative motifs

    • Eclectic mix of influences

    • Sometimes to an excessive degree

• Published his drawings

  • Drawings were then used by himself & other craftsmen to make actual objects in carved & gilded wood

    • E.g. girandoles (sconces attached to the wall that can have candles put in them)

    • Were often simplified from the drawings, which depicted designs that were far too complicated/difficult to execute

Analysis

• Emphasised his own authorship on the printing plate by signing it

• Very decorative = can’t strictly be considered purely functional

Interpretation

• Craftsman presenting himself as a draftsman/artist

  • Using the medium of engraving to advertise his skill & show how inventive his mind is ⭐

    • Asserting that his work is not just manual craft, but assumes the status of ‘art’

Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773), Sir Joshua Reynolds

Historical context

• There wasn’t much of a market for history painting in Britain

• Grand, monumental, expensive

• Hard for such artists to make a living

  = Reynolds’s bread & butter was portraiture instead, although he strongly pushed for history painting in his teaching

• Tried to manage this conundrum by incorporating elements of history painting into his portraits

Analysis

• 3 sisters adorning a bust of Hymen (the God of marriage)

Interpretation

• Reynolds creates a narrative, turning his human figures into characters enacting a story

  • Makes the patron feel intellectually superior for understanding the reference

Pegasus Vase (ca. 1786), Wedgwood factory, with reliefs by John Flaxman

Description

• Pale blue jasper

• White reliefs

• Domed cover w/ figure of Pegasus on top, resting on a pale blue cloud

• Other iconography: olive wreath on the neck of the vase, Medusa heads beneath handles (Greek myth)

Analysis

1. In-house modellers added a high level of finish after objects were removed from their moulds

   • Degree of detail was limited by moulding

   • BUT fine details were then hand-carved

     = gave the impression of a unique work of sculpture

2. Commissioned John Flaxman to make low-relief models in the style of classical subjects

   • Sculptor who had trained at the Royal Academy

   • Designs often directly imitated classical vase paintings

     • In this case: Main scene was The Apotheosis of Homer

       • From an engraving of a Greek vase of the 4th century BCE

   • BUT Wedgwood never credited Flaxman in his products/promotional material

     • + discouraged individual modellers from putting their mark on the products they made at his factory

     • Instead, stamped his own name at the bottom of the vase

       = certificate of authenticity that raised their prestige

Interpretation

• Wedgwood created & capitalised on an entirely new middle-class market

  • Couldn’t afford a Grand Tour/real antiquities themselves

  • BUT were still enthusiastic to follow classical trends in fashion & decor

• Wedgwood was beginning to apply the principles of artistic authorship to manufacturing

  • His products would command a price based on the prestige of Wedgwood’s name alone

  • Similar to how artists signed their artworks since the Renaissance (15th century)
    

• Wedgwood actively trying to claim a higher status for his crafts as art

  • Through classicism & authorship

  • Despite traditional assumptions

    • E.g. ceramics were traditionally viewed as low-status: were a functional form of dishware, and weren’t made of a precious material (e.g. silverware)