Up until the mid-1700s, just about anything a person could own would have been made by hand. Every mug, every stitch of clothing, every table and chair would take hours and hours of DIY labor.
By 100 years later, the Industrial Revolution had changed that forever.
There are at least two different ways to look at this monumental shift. Tim Barringer, a Yale art history professor, summed one of them up during a Nevada Museum of Art Zoom lecture: “The 19th century said, ‘Everything before us was handmade, primitive, crude, old-fashioned, clumsy. And now, we make things which are brash and machine-made and identical and hygenic and powerful, moneymaking.’”
Artists, of course, pushed back. A touring exhibition from Birmingham, UK, Victorian Radicals, now on view at the NMA, presents their case. The show includes more than 145 works from 19th-century Brits who raged against the…
