Harrod, Tanya

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HARROD, Tanya

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: University of Oxford, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, England.

CAREER:

University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, visiting fellow; Royal College of Art, London, England, visiting professor, 1999—. Exhibit organizer; advisor to Craft Lives Project, British Library National Sound Archive.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Scholarship prize, Design History Society, 2001, for The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century.

WRITINGS:

Alison Britton: Ceramics in Studio, Bellew (London, England), 1990.

Factfile on the History of the Crafts Council, edited by Charles Bourne, Crafts Council (London, England), 1994.

Obscure Objects of Desire?: Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century (conference papers), Crafts Council (London, England), 1996.

(Editor, with Mary La Trobe-Bateman) Contemporary Applied Arts: Fifty Years of Craft, Contemporary Applied Arts (London, England), 1998.

The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (companion book to the exhibit The Pleasures of Peace: Mid-Century Craft and Art in Britain), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

(With RoseLee Goldberg) Carol McNicoll, City Gallery (Leicester, England), 2003.

Also author of introduction to Art for Life: The Story of Peggy Angus, by Carolyn Trant, Incline Press (Oldham, England). Contributor to books, including Contemporary Art and the Home, edited by Colin Painter, Berg, 2002. Contributor to periodicals, including Burlington and Times Literary Supplement. Member of advisory panels for Journal of Design History and Interpreting Ceramics.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A biography of potter Michael Cardew for Yale University Press; research into the meaning of the handmade for Reaktion Books.

SIDELIGHTS:

Tanya Harrod is an art historian who, since 1999, has taught courses on the social, political, and philosophical debates associated with the crafts in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Harrod wrote The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century, a companion book to an exhibit at the University of East Anglia titled "The Pleasures of Peace: Mid-Century Craft and Art in Britain," that embraces a broader historical period. The exhibit included objects that ranged from metalwork, textiles, ceramics, silverware, and stained glass to the pop art-influenced creations of the 1960s. The earliest items, from 1939, were examples of how crafts were used to reinforce British morale.

Mechanization changed manufacturing during the nineteenth century at a cost to quality. The Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800s revived interest in craftsmanship, but by World War I, the movement was failing. Times Literary Supplement contributor Rosemary Hill commented, "Yet the idea that handwork was of value persisted, and persists. Those who took up a craft and made it their principal occupation, whether they rejected the ideals of the nineteenth century, or, as in many cases, were simply unaware of them, nevertheless found themselves involved in a philosophical enterprise. To make objects by hand in an industrial society, to work slowly and uneconomically against the grain, is to offer, however inadvertently, a critique of that society."

Harrod documents the history of crafts during the period, including the establishment of groups such as the Red Rose Guild, which was organized by crafts workers in 1921. "She is especially illuminating on the importance of the women among them, who found in the workshop ideal a place on the respectable side of Bohemianism, where they could nevertheless enjoy economic and sexual freedom," noted Hill. "Harrod is unfailingly sympathetic to her subjects, but not indulgent. She is acute about the irony of middle-class men and women, many of whom had private incomes, struggling to master crude techniques and live lives of elaborate simplicity."

The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century follows the crafts revival and the impact of World War I, modernism, the great depression, and World War II. Following World War II, crafts essentially became art, since they were no longer needed for their functional use. And the middle class adopted new forms of craft only as the lower classes no longer used them as everyday objects. During the 1980s, crafts such as ironwork, stained glass, and smithing gained favor with architects who incorporated them into their designs. Many Britishcraftsmen found support and direction in the Crafts Council. The government looked at craftsmen as small businesses, but the craftspeople did not oblige by fitting the stereotype. They preferred to remain small, refusing loans and other avenues of expansion. Harrod brings crafts into the present, noting the nearly complete transition from utility to design. Hill concluded that this volume "accomplishes more in one stride than might have been expected of a dozen books. Tanya Harrod never loses her lightness of touch."

The volume includes over five hundred illustrations, "all beautifully reproduced and many either rare images in their own right or carefully selected to illuminate less obvious aspects of various crafts," noted Stuart James in Reference Reviews. James felt that "Harrod's canvas is enormous, her subject matter varied and sometimes elusive, and to have produced a coherent and compelling analysis out of such disparate and complex material and sources testifies to her enormous achievement."