The Arts and Crafts Movement, that began in nineteenth-century Britain, and the Bauhaus movement, that started in Germany in the 1920s, had many goals in common. Both movements were interested in uniting all the arts and crafts and giving them equal dignity. Both movements were also deeply concerned with the role of the artist as worker and with the nature of work in general. Most importantly, both movements believed in beautiful design and well-made work as an enhancement of life. The importance of industrialized production and its aesthetic effects was a central question for both movements, but this was also the main point on which they disagreed. Both movements held that the industrialized production of goods had transformed the world. But, while the original Arts and Crafts movement largely rejected the machine age and all its productions, the Bauhaus embraced the industrial atmosphere of its time and attempted to transcend it. Both movements agreed that their times were aesthetically impoverished and both agreed that this was largely the result of the rise of industrial civilization. But the Bauhaus, coming later, recognized the necessity (and the value) of accepting the fact and making the most of it. The early Arts and Crafts Movement, on the other hand, hoped for a return to an idealized past.
The Arts and Crafts Movement extended in many directions and to many countries. The term has come to apply to a variety of styles that were sometimes related primarily by the ethic of production behind them rather than by similarities in artistic choices. Some who adopted the basic ideas and aesthetic strategies of the movement, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, "positively relished the creative and social advantages of machine production." The various offshoots of the movement all shared, however, one basic principle, first elucidated by the British designer William Morris, and then "repeated constantly thereafter" by anyone as...