William Morris : L'art Dans Tout

Exhibition at La Piscine, Roubaix, 8 October 2022 - 8 January 2023

Textile designer, writer, poet, painter, draughtsman, architect, manufacturer, socialist activist, environmentalist and amazing theorist, William Morris (1834-1896) developed a complex body of work and campaigned for a new way of looking at art, craft and the artists and craftsmen of late 19th century Victorian England, marked by the emergence of an industrial society.

In reaction to the industrial revolution that marked the Victorian era, William Morris affirmed the importance of all art forms - painting, architecture, graphics, crafts, literature... His formal and historical research into Celtic culture and the Middle Ages inspired him and his artist friends, many of whom were Pre-Raphaelites - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais...

This catalogue of the first exhibition devoted in France to William Morris offers a panorama of his world. It presents tapestries, wall hangings, furniture, paintings and drawings, and tells the story of a work that had a strong impact on its time by theorising a social, political, ecological and artistic utopia and by laying the foundations of what would later be called Arts & Crafts.