RosettaStone: CRAFT A primary, secondary, and annotated source reader for functional craft. By: Randi O'Brien

This is an annotated evaluation of the following:
The History of Craft By: Paul Greenhalgh
Paul Greenhalgh, “ The History of Craft” in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, ed. Peter Dormer, 20-52 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997)


Paul Greenhalgh’s The History of Craft reviews the critical transitions of the word craft through the seventeenth century origination of the word craft to twenty-first century fragmentation of the word. Greenhalgh addresses the fundamental problems with the word craft and further “suggests that ‘craft’ as a naming-word is an unstable compound at this time (1997) because there is a disjuncture between its etymology and the constituency it is expected to represent” .


Greenhalgh summarizes the development of the word craft through several publications and usages: Caleb D’Anvers The Country Journal or The Craftsman (1729), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1773), the use of the word by Freemasons, Gustave Stickley The Craftsman (1901), and Paul and Angie Boyer Craftsman (1981). Greenhalgh addresses each publication and usage through the publications political and social agendas of their time and further address that taken collectively the “most striking feature about all of these publications is the shift in meaning of the word [craft] itself”.


“The ‘craftsman’ implied by Caleb’s title, in so far as he can be characterized, was a confident, arrogant, self reliant, free-living Englishman. A century after his belligerence, Gustav Stickley’s craftsman wan an ethical aesthete. He clearly understood craft to a principally relate to process of making, but there was no limitations on what techniques or genres the word applied to. Craft for him was a broad, generic signifier that might be applied to any area of the arts or humanities; it could be used in the context of theology, opera or easel painting. Paul and Angie Boyer do not share this vision. For them, craft implies a particular type of person, environment, genre, technique and market. Pottery weaving, basket-making, metal-smithing, stick-making; their craftsman makes things by hand using pre-industrial technologies and sells them to make a living. He is an eco friendly small businessman.”


Greenhalgh further emphasizes a shift in craft meaning by observing historical definitions as three distinct threads: decorative art, the vernacular, and the politics of work. Greenhalgh defines these three separate threads and the motivations behind the separation of terms and further argues that in the last two decades of the nineteenth century these separate threads were brought together by makers and thinkers of the arts and crafts movement. By the early twentieth century craft was holistically invented, “in the sense that their came into being a generally recognized sense of craft as a thing in itself”.


However after the first World War the “Arts and Craft Movement had dwindled in to confusion and decline and made its next a possible final move, by entering into common usage”. Greenhalgh states that after 1918 craft began to “simultaneously expand, fragment, and fractionalize” and this “degenerative process is the key to the condition of craft as we have it at the end of the twentieth century”.


Greenhalgh demonstrates “the actual forces which gave craft cultural meaning in the nineteenth century, [how they] were split in the twentieth century and were exploited in isolation. The original combination of decorative arts, the vernacular, and the politics of work had a dynamism which proved important on a global basis. They had an ideological power that was generated from within. In our own times, that power has been lost and replaced by one from without”. Greenhalgh concludes that craft “needs to become internally dynamic once more, rather than allow itself to become externally constrained”.


Personal Conclusion and Evaluation


Greenhalgh article is a perfect jumping off point for someone interested in the basics of craft history. He reviews and addresses several centuries of craft and art philosophy. Due to the vast time frame he is dealing with if you are looking for the specifics of any one movement this may not be the article to support your research. However this article gives a clear linage to the separation of terminology within the craft fields. Greenhalgh proposes intellectual critical questions and pushes Art historians to expose the “actuality of history” not only through a measurement of fine art standards, yet through a holistic approach that engages craft from all of its defining characteristics (decorative, vernacular, and the politics of work).