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The Arts and Crafts Movement was concerned with the ethics as much as with the aesthetics of design. Its supporters were inspired by the idealism of Ruskin and Morris to campaign for a world that was fit to live in; in such a world men would enjoy the freedom to be creative, and this freedom would be expressed, in the words of William Morris, in the development of "a decorative, noble, popular art" - design by the people for the people. This then was the ideal, and in their attempts to achieve it, British designers so revitalized the arts of architecture and design that their efforts were admired and emulated throughout Europe and in America. A program that implied social and moral as well as aesthetic reform, however, had its ambiguities.



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