The Great Exhibition of London Lights Early Spark of the Arts & Crafts Movement

Industrialization and Technology meet Art According to Frank Popper, “one can only speak of the direct influence of technology on art since the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly when its effects entered everyday life at the end of the 19th century through the progressive design movements known as Art Nouveau and its precedent, the Arts and Crafts movement, in England.” The first world’s fair, The Great Exhibition of London, kicks off the Modern Era of our Timeline due to its association with industrialization and its impact on the Arts and Crafts movement. The fair captured a world on the brink of a paradigm shift, the beginning of a new era in which technology and art would join and grow ever closer. Organized by Henry Cole, the legendary founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the fair’s showcase of poorly crafted manufactured goods with ornate Victorian design inspired backlash in the form of England’s Arts and Crafts movement. The event would inspire Arts & Crafts artists and designers to incorporate craftsmanship and traditional techniques into new technologies, ultimately leading to the development of both modern graphic and industrial design. In the coming decades, Arts and Crafts would usher in the era of technology impacting art which led to Art Nouveau and the Bauhaus. This moment is thus the spark that lit the fuse of the modern era of generative art with its criticisms, adjustments to and embrace of rapidly industrializing societies and new technologies in art.