Sew What?

The Art of Craft: Needlework in the Art and Craft Debate

October 01, 2020 Isabella Rosner Season 1 Episode 21
Sew What?
The Art of Craft: Needlework in the Art and Craft Debate
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Isabella discusses the history of the art and craft debate, as well as examples of needleworkers who have bridged that gap historically and in the 21st century. Expect discussions about art historians Giorgio Vasari and Rozsika Parker and artists ranging from Mary Linwood to Bisa Butler.

Whatsup stitches!! Welcome to episode 21! Thanks for joining me today as we get into more historic needlework goodness. This episode may get a bit *theoretical*, as it’s about the history of the whole art versus craft debate. But I do not love theory and actively try to avoid it in my life so this episode will still be super object focused because objects are my greatest loves and theory is absolutely not. 

 Basically, in this episode I’ll talk about the art versus craft debate and the history of the hierarchy of arts, speeding through centuries and going from Vasari to Roszika Parker. The first half of the episode is very historical context heavy. Stick with me though, because in the second half of the episode I’ll get into the thing we all love the most – the objects!! I’ll be looking at historic and contemporary examples of people who bridge that art and craft divide. I’ll be looking at some fabulous ladies, including Mary Delany, Margaret Macdonald, Faith Ringgold, and many other people. So many fabulous women artists, some of whom you have probably never heard of! As always, images and sources are on the Sew What? Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and if you don’t follow at least one of those at this point what are you doing? Has my mentioning them every single episode not enough? But hey, you do you. And now, on to the actual discussion! 

Before I begin, lemme just say that the art and craft debate is messy and complicated. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to the art and craft debate so who am I to delve into this already extremely crowded pool of people? I don’t know. Weeding through all of the discourse is a stressful time because of course everyone has their own thoughts and ideas and the imposter syndrome of like “OH, AM I EVEN LEGIT ENOUGH TO HAVE AN OPINION ON THIS?” is hitting very hard but basically I think it’s very important to the study of historic needlework to think about the art-craft debate both historically and in the present day. Basically, here are my thoughts – the distinction between art and craft is present now but shouldn’t be, as it creates a division that should no longer exist. Not only should that divide not exist because art and craft are complicated, intertwined concepts, but also because that divide has historically and I think presently still implies that the only worthy “artists” are white, male painters, sculptors, and architects. What I want to see is what has been considered craft in the past to be considered art, finally. I do think that the relatively new shift from craft to “decorative arts” is a really good move toward completely doing away with the largely defunct and irrelevant art-craft divide and subsequent hierarchy of the arts. 

This a BIG and complex issue and I am barely scratching the surface and I am not out here saying that my thoughts are the right thoughts or anything. This is just a chance for me to think about how needlework fits into this rigid structure I was taught to follow for so many years. My passion for historic needlework and women’s art and the decorative arts in general is a direct reaction to getting really frustrated only learning about paintings in every art history course in my undergrad and master’s so I am out here trying to flip that around and I hope you’re receptive to that. I’m a bit scared to delve into the boiling cauldron of art versus craft debate but it’s important so we’re getting into it!! 

 Let’s start with the debate itself, both historically and in the present day. Just a note, I sometimes don’t call that a debate and actually just straight up say the hierarchy of the arts, which I see written sometimes but honestly not that often. I call it that sometimes because historically, what comes out of the art versus craft debate is the idea that visual arts like painting and sculpture are “superior” to crafts such as needlework and metal work. We’ll get into that. Art historian Laura Morelli has a really good, short but clear video through TedEd explaining the history of that distinction between art and craft, which I am posting in case you want a good starting point for your own art versus craft exploration. 

So basically, the idea of artists as singular, exceptional superstars or prodigies did not always exist. It’s a creation of the Renaissance, basically. Before this, there were workshops for basically everything, populated by a group of workers who worked up through the ranks set out by guild statutes. Patrons, those who were out here commissioning and buying the stuff made at these workshops, viewed those who made their stuff as a unit rather than as individuals. But then, the Renaissance hits and everything changes. Renaissance thinking involved live laugh loving classical Greek and Roman art and putting more weight on individual creativity than collective production. Alongside this, a few painters in Florence, the centre of the Renaissance, asked their patrons to pay them directly for their skills instead of being paid by the square foot of painting. Renaissance thinking and the actions of these painters really shifted what people thought and very quickly, people were starting to think differently about objects and their makers. This was furthered in 1550, when Giorgio Vasari published The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Vasari is often considered the first art historian and his book really solidified the notion of celebrating individual artists. His book was full of biographies of artists and people got really on board with the new cult status of these dudes. Vasari focused on painters, sculptors, and architects, so of course, it was painters, sculptors, and architects who became “artists.” At the same time, the people who continued guild traditions and worked in workshops making things like candle holders or jewellery or tapestries were called artisans and their objects were considered minor or decorative. So the idea that those decorative arts were inferior was really thought up around 500 years ago and, in most instances, still defines the art historical canon in the western world. Because when you think of art, you think of the Mona Lisa or Starry Night or David, right? You go to museums for that stuff, right? The field of art history and the stuff associated with it, academia and museums and whatever, is still dictated by the art and hierarchy and therefore is still ruled by white male painters. Which like, uGH. I hate that!!! And that’s part of why I do what I do, because I am sick of those limitations. And what’s also bad and wrong about that is that in the western world, things like a Peruvian rug or a Chinese porcelain vase are considered decorative art or even craft, but in their original cultures they are considered the prime form of visual representation. So not only does the art versus craft debate really do a disservice to works made in the quote unquote west (which itself is a big ol’ problematic idea) it does a disservice to works made everywhere.  

And aaaaand this whole art versus craft thing got gnarlier in the 19th and early 20th century. These art history dudes, and let’s be real, they were ALWAYS dudes, saw that non-Western art forms didn’t change over hundreds of years and therefore thought the work was “primitive” and therefore suggesting that those makers were incapable of innovating and creating “advanced” art like paintings and sculpture. And therefore they were not really artists. Which, like, UGH AND YIKES AND UUUUUUGH AGAIN. So yes, the division between art and craft is antiquated and bad and discounts SO many types of art and artists. Sally J. Markowitz says it better in her article “The Distinction between Art and Craft.” She writes, “We use "arts" to refer, for example, to the products and practices of painting, sculpture, and printmaking and "crafts" to those of ceramics, weaving, and wood- and metalwork. We also assume that the arts and the crafts are similar in important ways (or else why would we routinely group them together?) but also somehow different (or else why would we need two terms?). To get clear about these similarities and differences, though, is another story. Part of the problem is that "art" has a positive evaluative connotation that "craft" lacks. Some critics, with good reason, claim that this difference in evaluative meaning reflects our culture's elitist values: what white European men make is dignified by the label "art," while what everyone else makes counts only as craft.” Yep!! Oof.  

But what is the art and craft debate situation today? Do we live in a time where that hierarchy is no longer relevant? Well, I think some definite moves are being made to do away with that art and craft divide and subsequent hierarchy of the arts. I think a good indicator of that is the use of the term and category “decorative arts.” That’s what I study, really. The decorative arts include Ceramics, glassware, basketry, jewelry, metalware, furniture, textiles, clothing, and other related stuff. The classic Encyclopedia Britannica states that many decorative arts are commonly considered to be craft. A lot of sources I’ve come across basically say that decorative arts = craft. Which is good, I think! Because that terminology recognizes these objects as actual art instead of just craft. So progress is being made! That doesn’t necessarily mean that the art-craft divide is dead and gone though, it just means that that division has shifted to fine art versus decorative art. That divide is no longer about artistic merit but rather about the purpose of an object itself. Baby steps!! 

A good marker of where needlework is in the art versus craft debate now is Rozsika Parker’s 1984 book The Subversive Stitch. It is an iconic text that re-evaluates the relationship between women and embroidery and art and craft and it helped inspire modern thinking about gender and making and craft. The entire book is very relevant to the discussion of needlework and it is really important scholarship in the field of women’s embroidery and if you haven’t read it the time is NOW. The Subversive Stitch hasn’t aged perfectly over 35 years but it’s aged quite well and I’d recommend you actually read Rozsika Parker’s words instead of listening to me give a very speedy overview of it which I am not gonna do. 

 Okay, back to the discussion about where the art and craft debate is today. Obviously that art and craft hierarchy is still there, even though there are lots of people trying to broaden the art historical canon by including people who aren’t just white, cisgender, straight male painters. But then you go to a museum and most of what you see are paintings by Picasso and Warhol and da Vinci and whoever else. Where are the works by women? By people of colour? By those who aren’t cis or straight? By artists who do something different than putting paint on a canvas? There are efforts being made to collect and display and celebrate more than just paintings and sculpture and architecture but there’s a long way to go and clearly it’s part of a vicious cycle. Paintings and sculptures are what we see in museums so it’s what we know best so it’s what we’re most interested in and it’s what we get taught in art history classes and then if you go into art history as a career chances are you go into studying paintings or sculptures because it’s what you see and what you’re taught et cetera et cetera! And that cycle continues. So basically, yes, I think that hierarchy where paintings and sculpture are considered superior to things like needlework and textiles and jewellery making and furniture making and whatever else is still alive and well. But what I hope and what I do think is happening is that the definitions of what is art and what is craft are shifting. From what I’m seeing, needlework is becoming increasingly considered art rather than craft or is at least being given the consideration and respect usually reserved for art. Of course, that’s only my opinion. I really hope that even if things continue to be considered craft they are afforded the respect and love art has been given for centuries. My really optimistic goal is that sampler makers will eventually be as loved and celebrated and maybe even as well-known as Van Gogh and Vermeer and Pollock! That’s my pipe dream right there. 

And now, after my big ol’ talk, let’s get into some actual objects. Here are some delightful and wonderful historic examples of people who bridged that divide through needlework. My favourite examples of people who managed to bridge the divide between art and craft are a trilogy of 18th-century Marys. Who? Weeeeell. In England in the 1770s, needleworkers Mary Linwood, Mary Delany, and Mary Knowles shot to fame. At that time, King George III and Queen Charlotte were getting deep into art of all types. The king was into historical paintings like those painted by Benjamin West, while Queen Charlotte was into art made by women, which like, yas! Literally yas queen. She was so into art made by the ladies she helped establish a needlework school for women in Ampthill, Buckinghamshire in 1768. This was pretty good timing, as at the same time a specific type of needlework was coming into fashion. This type of needlework was called “printwork” and it involved pictures drawn onto a silk or fine linen ground stitched with lines of very fine black silk to suggest engravings. From there needleworkers started to develop a new form art embroidery called needle painting, which involves using crewelwork embroidery to replicate paintings. The stitches mirrored brush strokes. So basically, in this case, needlework was becoming painting, so craft was becoming art. And the three Marys, Mary Linwood, Mary Delany, and Mary Knowles, were leading the needle painting charge. 

Mary Linwood, who was from Birmingham, made her first embroidered picture when she was 13 and by 1775 she had established herself as a needlework artist, when she was 20 years old. By the time she was 31, she had gotten the attention of the royal family. More on that later. So, for nearly 75 years, Mary Linwood embroidered. She created over 100 pictures, most of which were full size copies of old master paintings. Her work was such a big deal that she had several exhibitions, including one in Hanover Square Rooms in 1798 which then travelled to Leicester Square, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Some fun anecdotes: she once exhibited in Russia and Catherine the Great offered her £40,000 for the whole collection of her stuff. Which is so much money!!! She refused because she wanted her work to stay in England. One time, her needleworked rendition of a painting by artist Salvator Rosa sold more than the original painting. The exhibition of her pieces in Leicester Square lasted until her death in 1845. The exhibit was the first art show to be lit by gaslight. Her shows brought in approximately 40,000 people a year. Mary Linwood was clearly A REALLY BIG DEAL, so it makes sense that she is remembered as the most notable needle painter of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Needlework scholars say that it was Mary Linwood who inspired the trend of Berlin wool work, known as needlepoint today, which got super popular in the 1840s. Go Mary Linwood!! A hero, a queen, a lady who was not limited to the stupid art versus craft divide. 

Next, onto the second Mary, Mary Delany. One of my favourite Marys of all time. Mary Delany was a jack of all trades, really skilled in needlework and shellwork and collage and lots of other stuff. She was from Wiltshire and really hit her stride starting in her early 70s. She created Paper Mosaiks, images of flowers made of cut paper. Mary spent a lot of time at Bulstrode, the home of her friend and patroness, Margaret Bintinck, Dowager Duchess of Portland. When Margaret died, King George III and Queen Charlotte gave Mary Delany a house at Windsor and a yearly pension. Mary and Charlotte became friends, and Mary even ended up teaching Charlotte’s children about plants and needlework skills. Delany’s surviving needlework is very similar to her Paper Mosaiks – it involves detailed flowers stitched onto a black ground. Her stitching was on display at an exhibition called Mrs Delany and Her Circle, displayed at the Yale Centre for British Art in 2009, but I think they actually live in a private collection.  

And now, onto the last Mary. Mary Morris Knowles was a Quaker born in Staffordshire. She was, like the other two Marys, of course, was a needle painter. Somehow, either through connections with the painter Benjamin West or simply because she had a reputation for being extremely good at stitching, Queen Charlotte asked Mary Knowles to recreate a recent portrait of the king in embroidery. That portrait was by painter Johann Zoffany. Mary Knowles made her rendition on the same scale as the painting, which is wild because it is BIG. The king and queen were very satisfied with Knowles’s work, placing the needle painting on display at Kew Palace, where it remained for more than two centuries. Mary was given 800 pounds from Queen Charlotte for her work and became friends with the king and queen. Her political connections influenced the rest of her life – she moved to London and established connections with some very important literary and political figures.  

All three Marys were friends with Queen Charlotte, with Mary Delany being her favourite. Clearly, with the help of royal patronage, some women were able to move beyond that art/craft binary in a time when that distinction was very apparent. That division between art and craft was absolutely strengthened by the fact that gender roles were becoming increasingly concrete and separate in the 18th century. It was expected for women to stitch, so it’s exciting that the three Marys were able to take that typical form of women’s accomplishment and make a career and business out of it. Go Marys!! The examples of people being able to bridge art and craft historically are unfortunately pretty rare, but they do exist and Mary Linwood, Mary Delany, and Mary Knowles are good examples of that. And they’re of course not the only ones.  

There are also late 19th and early 20th-century examples like William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement and his daughter May Morris, who oversaw Morris and Company’s embroidery endeavours. And there was also the art embroidery of the Glasgow girls, including the stitchers Ann Macbeth, Jessie Newbery, and Margaret MacDonald. I call all these gals the women of art embroidery and they absolutely deserve their own episode, so expect one next season. But they’re very relevant to this episode, too, so I’ll talk about them a bit here, too. Clare Hunter, who I mention a lot because her book Threads of Life is excellent, writes this about the Glasgow Girls: “Unlike the female artists of earlier times, such as the needle painter Mary Linwood of the eighteenth century, the embroidery students of Glasgow School of Art were not interested in aping a male artistry. Instead, they were determined to have needlework accepted as a distinct art form, worthy of critical attention alongside painting and sculpture and removed from its limiting association with a constructed view of the “feminine.”” The embroideries of the Glasgow Girls are very Art Nouveau in style, with curving flowers and stylised female forms. Macbeth’s needleworked panels and hangings mix Christian imagery with stylised flowers and sinuous lines and female figures in floral garments. Under the Arts and Crafts style, needlework reached an unprecedented level of importance and became an art form as profitable and appreciated as things like painting and sculpture.  

Jumping forward more than a century, there are a number of textile artists alive and working today who I think bridge the gap between art and craft and I wanna focus on two who I really love. They are Faith Ringgold and Bisa Butler. 

 Faith Ringgold has come up before in this podcast, specifically in the interview with Rose Sinclair earlier this season. Ringgold is a painter, writer, sculptor, and performance artist best known for her quilt making. My favourites of her quilts are the 1996 Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles and the 1991 Dancing at the Louvre. The two quilts present both sides of the art and craft debate – the first includes a famous painter and the second is set in a museum. Ringgold brings together art and craft, creating large-scale quilts hung like painted canvases. In The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, famous Black women, including Madam C.J. Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and others, sit together and stitch. They are visited by Vincent Van Gogh, holding the sunflowers he painted so often. The women stitch collectively, sharing their stories and accomplishments, while Van Gogh represents the solitary male painter. He offers his sunflowers in respect and admiration to those legendary women. Ringgold uses quilts, typically relegated to the craft category, to display a narrative involving capital A art. And amidst all of this, the mixing of art and craft, Ringgold uses quilting, a medium often associated with the African American female experience, to celebrate African American women themselves. The other quilt, Dancing at the Louvre, is all about joyfully breaking the rules but what I feel is most relevant for this episode is that Ringgold uses this quote craft to depict art. Ringgold paints the Mona Lisa onto fabric and then quilts over it – art and craft are intertwined. Does Ringgold’s combining of art and craft make the divide disappear? Are art and craft one in her work? I’d sure like to think so and I truly love to see it.  

The other contemporary fiber artist who I think really combines art and craft is Bisa Butler who I think is my favourite contemporary artist. She brings historic photos of Black individuals, couples, families, and historic figures into bright, vibrant colour by turning them into quilts. Butler uses fabric to celebrate Black lives and, like Ringgold, she creates large scale quilts hung like painted canvases. Her work is hugely popular and has been the subject of solo exhibitions, which sure makes it feel like “art” rather than “craft” to me. Butler’s work is another indicator of why that art versus craft division no longer works. Her quilting is “craft” but I think almost everyone who sees her work would consider it “art.” That gets complicated when you consider that Butler uses historic photographs to replicate in quilt form. But where does photography sit on the art-craft spectrum? And does that affect whether Butler’s work is considered art or craft? I should think not, as I think that Butler’s work is another example of why the art and craft debate is tired and not entirely relevant to artmaking today (or ever, really). 

To me, the time to separate certain artistic media and art making processes is long past and is a misjustice of all forms of making and has really just been a roundabout way to cast aside the makers who are not white and straight and male. I think that needlework and woodworking and ceramics and metals and all that other stuff deserves to be placed on an equal playing field to paintings and sculpture and architecture, which I realise requires a fairly radical rethinking and restructuring of art, art history, museums, and a bunch of other stuff. We’re working on it, clearly, as lots of stuff that isn’t painting and sculpture is now called “decorative arts.” So it’s happening, which is so good!!! But my hope is that the world will get as excited about Mary Linwood or Faith Ringgold as they do about Klimt or Monet. Wouldn’t that be cool? But maybe that’s just me as someone who lives and breathes historic needlework. I just want a stitch to be as studied as a brushstroke. And I want the idea of art versus craft and this very apparent hierarchy to be a thing of the past, kept in Vasari’s books and the walls of the French Academy. 

So yeah, those are my thoughts. This episode is much more of a me on a soapbox moment than the other episodes have been. But I wanted to have an episode about art and craft because it is a really important consideration when studying and thinking about needlework and textiles and any form of artmaking that’s not painting or sculpture or architecture, really. That debate has for so long limited who we consider to be valid artists, which is such a bad time for art people and those who look at it and love it. And it’s really important, I think, to look at how far we’ve come from when this whole thing began almost 600 years ago. Because we have come a long way! It isn’t all bad news!! We get to see samplers on the walls of the Met and 18th-century court dresses in the Rijksmuseum and silver teapots in the MFA Boston and that is awesome. The stories of those relegated to craft are coming out of the shadows and are being put on an equal footing to those promoted to art. And that’s so exciting and illuminating and enlightening to all of us, whether we look at these objects on museum walls or on computer screens. More stories are getting told every day and we are really lucky that we get to see them and read about them and bring them into our 21st-century world. 

Ooh, big ideas in this episode. But hopefully some fun objects and people too?? And let’s be real, art and craft ideas are big ideas so I’m sure these themes will come up again in future episodes. And if you have thoughts on the whole art craft situation that you wanna share with me and other “Sew What?” listeners, lemme know and I’ll put them on the Sew What social media! Contact me there or at sewwhatpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening and for engaging with these big and fun and kinda hectic ideas with me! What an adventure. And dare I say even a delight. See you all next episode! Yeehaw.

 Now go out and stitch some stories and engage with some art and craft debate aaaaaand, if your name is Mary, get two other friends named Mary so you can be the three Marys. Okay, bye!!