Page 125 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Edward William Godwin: Anglo-Japanese Style Sideboard 1870
Here we are are the very beginnings of Modern design. Godwin, his vision catalysed by the recent influx of Japanese craft products, and absorbing the aesthetic impact of an entirely alien oriental visuo-spatial style (evidenced readily in the different perspectives of Japanese Ukiyo-e (Floating World) colour wood-block prints; and in the radically different form and surface decoration of Japanese ceramics and furniture - and images of Japanese interiors that appeared in London and Western cities from the 1850s onwards. Artists of the calibre of Degas, Whistler, Beardsley and Van Gogh began to absorb this oriental influence and, kick-started by Godwin, an ‘Anglo-Japanese’ fusion of form and style emerges in the 1870s, and contributes to the emerging Aesthetic Movement. Godwin’s work in architecture, furniture and interior design heralded the important ‘aesthetic’ movement of the fin de siecle. In print and publishing, this Anglo-Japanese style is most obvious in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, and James McNeill Whistler. In Literature and Art, main evangelisers and patrons of the Anglo-Japanese style were Oscar Wilde and Whistler, who both employed Godwin to design their London houses (Whistler and Godwin: The White House, Tite Street, Chelsea 1878).
Godwin was a remarkable architect and designer - influenced at first by Ruskin and the Pre- Raphaelites, by the 1860s he was responding to the aesthetic insurgency of Japanese arts and crafts styles from the 1850s onwards (following the opening of Japan's foreign trade after 1851). The clean (and to a mid-Victorian mind) completely undecorated form, the unconventional explorations of spatial conformation and representation - were recognised by Godwin (and a few contemporaries, like Walter Crane, Owen Jones, William Morris, and later, younger designers like Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, Charles Voysey, Charles Rennie Macintosh and Charles Robert Ashbee) all of whom contributed to the design and craft revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and later influenced the emergence of modern industrial design at the Bauhaus. It is worth noting that Godwin, though a vain and rather fickle man, was surprisingly unconventional in his personal life - beginning with his very public and at the time shocking affair with the young actress Ellen Terry (who bore two of his children out of wedlock, and was herself a proto-Modern, emancipated woman).