ARTIST TEXTILES Picasso to Warhol is a touring exhibition from the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. It has just opened as the first exhibition in the redeveloped Exhibition Gallery at New Lanark. It is well worth a visit.
The exhibition brings together over 200 fabric designs from an impressive roster of artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. The exhibition charts the history of 20th-century art in textiles, weaving its path through Fauvism, Cubism, Constructivism, Abstraction, Surrealism and Pop Art.
Given that the building in which the New Lanark Exhibition Gallery is housed was once a textile mill, this is the perfect show with which to launch the development. The industrial space also provides a fitting context in which to display artifacts from a business initiative that was, after all, intended to mass-produce high art for the masses.
The marriage of printmaking and fabric design
The marriage of printmaking and fabric design had been made in Victorian times by, among others, William Morris; so, by the early years of the twentieth century, artists appreciated textile design as a legitimate medium in which to work. It especially appealed to avant-garde artists because it eliminated the conventional boundary they were challenging between fine and applied art.
Bloomsbury Group stalwarts, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, opened the Omega Workshops, in London in 1913. Under the supervision Roger Fry, the Workshops’ mission was to introduce ‘the spirit of fun’ into furniture and fabrics. The Omega became an artistic design centre for vibrant and colourful domestic decoration. Among the exhibits, screen-printed velvet upholstery designs by Duncan Grant sit alongside whimsical pink and blue abstract fabrics design by Vanessa Bell.
The Bloomsbury fascination with colourful homeware and soft furnishings was born of an aesthetic impulse against staid and stolid Victorianism. It was informed both by the desire of modernist art to enhance the ‘plastic’ quality of material objects and by the British Arts and Crafts Movement’s challenge to the conventional claim that an object’s aesthetic value is distinct from and opposed to its utility.
Post-war commercialism
Initially, the dominant partners in the marriage were the artists, who experimented with fabric design as an extension of their art. During the war and post-war depression of the 1940s, however, a serious focus was placed on modernist art for the first time by the textiles industry in an attempt to boost British trade during a time of austerity and deprivation. The industry established a Centre for Colour, Design and Style in Manchester in 1940, and throughout the 1940s textile manufacturers commissioned designs from prominent artists in joint commercial and creative ventures.
In 1947, the Czech fabric designer, Zika Ascher, produced a silk scarf with a blue and white design by Matisse. Ascher went on to commission designs from Andre Derain, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, Cecil Beaton and Henry Moore. These designs were the central feature of a 1946 British expo called ‘Britain Can Make It’.
Meanwhile, in America…
Wesley Simpson, a New York textile converter, commissioned designs from Salvador Dalí and Marcel Vertes to print on silk scarves. These designs epitomize johnny-come-lately American modernism.
In 1955, Life magazine ran a story about the American fabric producer, Fuller Fabrics, and its new ‘Modern Master Prints’ range, in which models wore dresses featuring designs by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Fernand Leger, and Raoul Dufy.
Pop art
These fabric designs were gradually turned into mass-produced clothing. Mass production meant that art could be produced at $5 per yard, and yards and yards of it flew off the screens and presses. Soon, anyone could wear a Miró dress or a Dalí tie.
In the late 1950s, a commercial graphic artist, Andy Warhol, began using ‘found’ iconic images from popular and commercial culture in place of the ‘signature’ images of the ‘Modern Masters’ designs. These proved hugely appealing to the ‘disaffected’ baby boomers and contributed to the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.
While the use of images imported from fine art as fabric motifs did not disappear, it was superseded in avant-garde design by Punk and Conceptual Chic in the latter half of the 1970s. This development was led, in Britain at least, by Zandra Rhodes, who, like Warhol, used ‘found’ rather than ‘signature’ images. However, Rhode’s ‘found’ designs were taken from nature and ‘ethnic’ cultural materials rather than from popular culture or high art, however, and she also incorporated those images into the structure as well as the decoration of her garment designs.
Ironically, Rhodes is the founder of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London which is touring this exhibition of the movement she overcame. It is a colourful, visually pleasing, and comprehensive collection, illustrating how the involvement of modernist artists in 20th-century textile revolutionised the textile industry.
ARTIST TEXTILES Picasso to Warhol is showing at the Exhibition Gallery in Mill 3, New Lanark. It runs until 29th April.
AMBOSS FUNKEN 