Was William Morris actually just a pious bore?

By presenting the artist as a hero of the left, the National Portrait Gallery’s new show utterly misses the point about his true revolutionary spirit

Jonathan Jones

Was William Morris a great designer? Or just the father of floral wallpaper? Was his socialist vision of the life beautiful anything more than a nostalgia for medieval craft skills? This exhibition fails to acknowledge that such questions might even be asked, and considers it as so axiomatic that Morris is an inspiring hero that it forgets to set out a coherent case for his creative achievement. There are more anecdotes than art here, and many of those are about long-forgotten Marxists and anarchists.

The British left is currently secluded in a comfort zone where the proper “values” are unquestionably good and moral superiority is all. That may sound like a digression into the affairs of the Labour party, but it applies precisely to this exhibition. The revolutionary beliefs of William Morris are presented here as if they make him, by definition, important and wonderful. His links with the likes of Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, his personal copy of Marx’s Capital, and his influence on British radicals from EP Thompson to Jeremy Deller are complacently wheeled out, as if we were all folk-song enthusiasts for whom the ethical imperatives of eating hand-woven food were beyond argument. Is this how the left ends, cooing over Morris’s utopian tract News from Nowhere while Ukip worms away at the book’s fine binding?

This is a small show, in a limiting space, but compact exhibits can be great if they are intense, precise and well-selected. This one, however, jumps all over the place. No sooner do we meet Morris than we’re being introduced to his social circle, shown cartoons of him and then, hey presto, told that he influenced everything from Robin Day chairs to the festival of Britain and Terence Conran’s Habitat.

Isn’t the problem with Morris precisely that his belief in craft led in so many directions that it became politically nebulous? He was a Marxist, yet he created majestic prints that set decorative standards for affluent middle-class homes. He never seems to have understood that his bids to set up alternative, small-scale workshops making things that were unquestionably luxuries would not threaten capitalism at all, but give ideas to entrepreneurs.

Does that make Morris a fool? Not in the least. It only makes him a failure by the criteria this exhibition insists on applying. Its nostalgic assumption that he must be cherished as a hero of the left invites the obvious – yet here never contemplated – response that his social vision failed. There is a sentimental section about the festival of Britain, apparently influenced by Morris, which presents it a triumph of communal utopianism. In reality it was an entertaining sideshow to the rise of consumer society that was the real story of modern Britain.

So is William Morris irrelevant to our plastic-fantastic world? No. But his real importance is that he helped to build modernism. The repeated, abstracted patterns of his textile and wall prints looked forward to the visionary new order of modern design. Morris was a true revolutionary, but his vision led not so much to the Red Flag as to Matisse’s Red Studio. By failing to reveal that creative brilliance, this exhibition reduces him to a pious bore.

• Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy, 1860-1960 runs until 11 January at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
• National Portrait Gallery explores William Morris’s belief in art for all