The Arts and Crafts movement was an international movement in the decorative and fine arts that flourished in Europe and North America between 1880 and 1910, emerging later in Japan in the 1920s. It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms and it often used medieval, romantic or folk styles of decoration.
It advocated economic and social reform and has been said to be essentially anti-industrial. Its influence was felt in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s and continued among craft makers, designers and town planners long afterwards.
The Arts and Crafts philosophy derived partly from Ruskin's social criticism, which related the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of work. Ruskin considered the sort of mechanized production and division of labour that had been created in the industrial revolution to be "servile labour" and he thought that a healthy and moral society required independent workers who designed the things they made.
His followers in the Arts and Crafts movement favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about the loss of traditional skills, but they were arguably more troubled by effects of the factory system than by machinery itself and William Morris's idea of "handicraft" was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery.
