IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris
NICK THORKELSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.8* of five
The Publisher Says: A vivid, full-colour graphic biography of the celebrated 19th-century designer and socialist William Morris (1834–1896), the celebrated designer, driven polymath and radical socialist.
Acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson moves through the events of Morris’s life weaving a rich tapestry of the major artistic, social and political questions which animated him.
He explores Morris’s politics and art, and how his hatred of class tyranny and love of humanity shaped his poetry, design and relationships.
The book brings to life the tension of Morris’s efforts to democratise art while creating pieces for the wealthy, his critique of Britain’s Empire, and his central place in socialist culture and propaganda.
Thorkelson’s striking and idiosyncratic drawings chime with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the humanising power of the handmade.
The book also features fourteen pages of immersive and dazzling illustrations by Sharon Rudahl, pioneer of women’s comics, honouring the literary work for which William Morris was best known during his lifetime.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: If there has ever been an illustrated biography of socialist artist, poet, and capitalism-fleecer William Morris, I did not hear about it. Now that I have it's hard for me to see why this is the first one (if it is). Morris's role in reviving and revamping Gothic architecture in the newly rich Victorian era, using the English hunger to memorialize their ill-got gains to redistribute huge sums of money from the kleptocrats to honest craftworkers.
Like Josiah Wedgwood a century earlier, Morris used the design and manufacture of gorgeous luxury goods to redress the income imbalance he saw plaguing and ruining his society as it turned from the United Kingdom into the British Empire.
In a clear and concise telling of the events and the beliefs that animated the events of his life, Author Thorkelson does something I both enjoy and admire: he uses the technique of Morris's métier to give we-the-reader extra, surprising insight into the forces Morris was so contemptuous of and adept at harnessing to the economic betterment of the craftworkers he employed, and the aesthetic improvement of the people who paid for it all.
It's only 128pp so you know how very much heavy lifting the illustrations are doing. Much time is saved, in a sense, by leaving us to look in the corners and backgrounds for the rest of the story. In a time where sequential-art storytelling is so very prevalent, finding it deployed well on a major culture-shaping visual artist and designer of built living environments is deeply refreshing.
And lo, behold! Morris made over a world that was not heading anywhere beautiful into a world that included public and private spaces with gravitas and grandeur...handcrafted by well-paid workers in an increasingly mass-produced, uninspired, enslaved by machines ethos. He made it possible for aesthetics to last into our own age.
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