Art reborn: Painting, politics, and decoration in the work of Walter Crane, 1870--1900

This dissertation is the first scholarly consideration of Walter Crane's long and prolific career as a painter, locating his work in this medium within a consideration of his practice as a decorative artist and his socialist politics. Crane's paintings, executed throughout his lifetime in concert with his decorative work and political agitation, emerge as radical statements that destabilize the codification of "fine art" and "decorative art" to politicize the detached aesthetic object in both form and content. By restoring Walter Crane as a key figure in late nineteenth century art, this dissertation challenges accepted definitions of Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts, and opens debates about the location of political awareness in these movements. Each chapter takes an important painting or a group of paintings as its central motif, explicating these works and then resituating them within Crane's decorative design and his role as "the artist of socialism." The first half of the dissertation examines Crane's paintings before his public avowal of socialism in 1884 to understand the ways in which the complementary spheres of political and artistic radicalism intersected in his work. The final three chapters consider Crane's art as a direct engagement with socialist politics to understand the way in which painting emerges as the nexus of decoration and socialism in the creation of a public, political art. This examination of Crane's work and the emergent discourse of decorative painting repositions the relationship between art and politics as it posits a "decorative" alternative to social realist painting.