Floored masterpiece uncovered

People don't usually go to an art gallery to look at the floor, but the South London Gallery in Camberwell is a special case. At its centre is a spectacular, inlaid wooden panel designed by Arts and Crafts artist Walter Crane. It is being uncovered temporarily to coincide with London's Open House architecture weekend, the first time it will have been on public view for nearly half a century. Designed in 1891, the panel was part of the original building. By the 1950s, however, as gallery curator Christopher Jordan explains, "tea dances and stilettos" were putting the inlay work at risk and a new floor was laid over it.

This was Crane's only design in marquetry. It is a dramatic composition of stylised motifs, swans, dolphins, shells and flowers in a bold pattern with a hint of the Egyptian. At the centre is a panel with the words: "The source of art is in the life of a people." The Victorians liked to put improving texts on buildings, but this one sets a more radical tone than "home sweet home".

Crane, much influenced by William Morris, was a keen socialist and an early supporter of the South London Fine Art Gallery, as it was then known. It began as the kind of community project, familiar today but rare in the 19th century, to promote art and art education in a poor and predominantly working-class part of London. Philanthropist William Rossiter bought land for the gallery, while artists Edward Burne-Jones and John Ruskin were among others who supported the effort or donated work. Crane gave an engraving, The Triumph of Labour, which now hangs two doors up the road in the office of the leader of Southwark Council.

The intention then, as now, was to promote contemporary work. The main gallery is a perfect double cube, a white space that regularly features the work of established modern artists and up-and-coming younger ones. For the next week, however, the focus will be on Walter Crane and the art that was modern at the turn of the last century. Jordan has brought together work from public and private collections, including that of Crane's grandson Anthony, much of it never seen before, for a major exhibition about the life and work of this versatile, curious artist.

Crane, born in 1845, was not only a painter and illustrator. He designed ceramics, textiles and wallpaper, all of which feature in the exhibition and show the rich style of the late Arts and Crafts turning in his hands into something more delicate with a hint of Art Nouveau. Like Morris, Crane had trouble living by his socialist

principles and among engravings such as the The Workers' Maypole there is a fetching advertisement for the Economic Life office: "Mutual life assurance at low premiums".

A figure in the Aesthetic Movement and a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and James Whistler, Crane and his wife were renowned for their fancy-dress parties. These were so popular that police had to divert traffic as guests arrived to be greeted by Laura Crane dressed as a giant sunflower. One of the coups of the exhibition is a recently discovered trunk full of original flower costumes inspired by, and perhaps made for, Crane. They survive in all their eccentric brilliance, confections of green, red and purple silk, the petal headdresses framed on millinery wire, along with some notverytight tights.

Professionally, Crane was best known as an illustrator of children's books. There is a proof sheet for one of his alphabet books, a masterpiece of colour and pattern. The scenes take place as if in a medieval manuscript - all in the same plane but the characters unaware of each other. Simple Simon, under S, cannot see Venus who hovers a little further along the winding path. With titles such as Flower Wedding and The Baby's Opera, these are books that teeter on the edge of sickliness but are always saved from it by Crane's pure, fresh line.

"The word 'charming' keeps coming up when people talk about him," says Jordan, and in his lifetime Crane was, he felt, cursed by his charm. He wanted to be taken more seriously as a theorist and as a painter of ambitious allegorical pictures. But, in that, he never succeeded. His style always had something dainty about it, just as there was always a hint of Never-Never Land in his Socialist Utopia. The exhibition evokes the charmed and charming fin-de-si?cle world that he both inhabited and helped create. It was a world in which dressing-up was both an escape and a form of social criticism, and which could, as in Wilde's case, go too far. But for Crane, who died in 1915, it never lost its enchantment.

? Walter Crane Floor at South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, SE5, until 23 September (020 7703 6120).