C.F.A. Voysey: Arts & Crafts Designer

摘要

The English architect and designer Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941) has long been considered a kind of bridge between nineteenth-century British design reforms and the modernist project of the early twentieth century, thanks largely to Nikolaus Pevsner's influential assessment in Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). Motivated commentators could certainly find in Voysey's own writings an impatience with historicizing design; in Individuality (1915), he asserts that 'if we cast behind us all preconceived styles, our work will still possess a style, but it will be a living natural and true expression of modern needs and ideals: not an insincere imitation of other nations or other times'.1 David Cole's 2015 monograph viewed Voysey through an explicit modernist lens, but as two recent books remind us, he was equally rooted in the decorative, vernacularizing impulses of the Arts and Crafts Movement.2 C.F.A. Voysey: Arts and Crafts Designer, by a team of current and former Victoria & Albert Museum curators, and a newly revised edition of Stuart Durant's The Decorative Designs of C.F.A. Voysey, differ in their scope and source material, but together provide an important corrective to modernist accounts of Voysey's work.