Janice Helland Livres

Focusing on the revival of cottage crafts in Britain and Ireland, this book examines three key regional craft associations led by British women: the Donegal Industrial Fund, the Irish Industries Association, and Highland Home Industries. It highlights how these organizations balanced moral values with the importance of consumption and marketing. The patrons recognized the power of spectacle, advertising, and exhibitions in promoting their crafts, providing insight into the strategies that shaped the arts and crafts movement during this period.

Focusing on the contributions of women artists from the period, the author highlights their roles as independent creators, educators, and travelers. These women were responsive to evolving tastes and fashion, finding joy in their artistry and the collaborative support they provided each other. The book emphasizes their agency and the positive impact of community among female artists.

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.