Museums all over the world may be closed because of Coronavirus, but quite a few of them have arranged digital tours and special online exhibitions that allow visitors to enjoy their archives and collections from the safety of their homes.
Messums Wiltshire (Place Farm, Court Street, Tisbury, Wiltshire, UK), a multi-purpose gallery and arts centre, offers the chance to digitally visit a new installment of their "Material: Textile" series, dedicated this time to "Modern British Female Designers". Organised in collaboration with the gallery Gray M.C.A, the online event features historically important textiles.
The works on display - by Lucienne Day, Marian Mahler, Jacqueline Groag and Barbara Brown among the others - are strongly linked with Britain's history. They represent a vision of the textile production from the 1950s to the '70s and were manufactured by British companies such as Heal Fabrics, David Whitehead, Edinburgh Weavers, Liberty and Hull Traders.
The catalogue accompanying the event poses a key question - why did so many women develop textiles with such beautiful graphic designs rather than creating fine art works? The answer is almost too easy to guess: during the first half of the 20th century, women didn't have many opportunities. Women artists faced educational restrictions and financial constraints and they were discouraged from pursuing a career in the arts because of prejudice in the male-dominated art world.
Female art students were therefore often suggested to work in applied arts, such as textiles. Lesley Jackson tells us in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue that a common gender stereotype believed indeed "that women had a natural propensity for designing fabrics because of a supposed predisposition towards fashion".
Despite being obliged in some ways to follow a path indicated by a gender stereotype, women flourished in textile design, introducing innovations and leaving a mark in this field.
Enid Marx developed for example bold Modernist textiles also employed for the London Underground upholstery fabrics; American-born Marion Dorn became instead known for her abstract carpets for hotels, liners and private houses and Modernist furnishing fabrics featuring a wide range of figurative motifs.
Lucienne Day is considered Dorn's successor and she is featured in this digital exhibition with another of her contemporaries, Mary White (whose textiles were commissioned for RMS Queen Mary and Heathrow Airport) as well. Day's most famous pattern is her ground-breaking screen-printed textile "Calyx", presented at the 1951 Festival of Britain and included in this exhibition.
This iconic textile with its cup-shaped floral forms proves that award-winning Day was infludenced by art and in particular by Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Alexander Calder.
These artists actually influenced other textile designers such as Czech-born Jacqueline Groag and Austrian Marian Mahler. Groag had a strong connection with fashion: she studied in Vienna and designed for the Wiener Werkstätte, before moving to Paris in 1929, where she worked on dress fabrics for fashion houses such as Chanel. After moving to London in 1939, Groag worked with some textile manufacturers and retailers of the era in Britain and America, creating a large number of vibrant textile designs for the "Britain Can Make It" exhibition at The Victoria & Albert Museum in 1946.
Mahler moved to Britain in 1937 and in the '50s she worked for Allan Walton, Edinburgh Weavers and Donald Brothers. She produced sophisticated yet affordable and popular rayon and cotton textiles for David Whitehead Ltd. and her creations appealed to a younger clientele.
New generations arrived on the scene after the '50s: Althea McNish, a British textile designer of Trinidadian origin, earned an an international reputation for her designs for Liberty, Heal Fabrics and Hull Traders in bright Caribbean colours. McNish was taught by Eduardo Paolozzi at the Central School and was commissioned by Liberty, Ascher for Dior, Hull Traders and Cavendish Textiles.
Some of these textiles had a great merit as they managed to popularise new art movements and genres such as Op Art. This was the case with Barbara Brown's abstract geometric designs for Heal Fabrics that embodied the mood of the '60s. Among them we can remember "Recurrence" (1962), that echoes Victor Vasarely's works, or the dynamic "Frequency" (1969) and "Spiral" (1969). Her designs are highly recommended to all the fans of computer-generated design art.
Impenitent fashionistas with a passion for colour clashes will instead enjoy more Zandra Rhodes. She designed the "Top Brass" textile featured in this exhibition in 1964 for her first year degree show at the Royal College of Art.
The textile is inspired by the Swinging Sixties: at the time colourful military jackets were favoured by young people (think about The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album).
Rhodes chose medals as her theme (she sketched them at the Wellington Museum and Imperial War Museum in preparation for the design) and was influenced by third year student David Hockney's work "A Grand Procession of Dignitaries" (1961) that featured medal-like shapes along the border.
Those digital visitors who have a little bit of time may also investigate certain techniques behind some of these textiles, such as sgraffito (employed to make Mary Warren's "Nautilius") or do their own personal research on the textile manufacturers such as Hull Traders, who made sensitive use of pigments to create intense and flat expanses of colouration and interesting impasto-like effects on some of its fabrics.
Art and textile collectors will have an additional reason for checking out this exhibition: it is indeed possible to purchase these highly collectable works that show the strong and wonderful connection between contemporary art and textiles.
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