E2
M1 M2 M3 M4 V1 V2 V3 V4
K
KLMNO
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010
COURTESY OF JILL A. WILTSE AND H. KIRK BROWN III COLLECTION OF BRITISH TEXTILES
Lucienne Day: The fabric of fine art
day from E1 “Calyx” is the name of that piece
that Day designed in 1951, when her husband, the furniture design- er Robin Day, said he couldn’t find any truly modern textiles. In one classic version, “Calyx” is a swarm of bizarre shapes, in yellow and or- ange and black, that crawl across the olive-brown linen they’re silk- screened onto. Dotted white lines connect some forms, as though we’re looking at a diagram from a science text. Other forms seem to be floating, like jellyfish trailing tentacles in a brown sea. Still oth- ers might almost be hybrid flow- ers blooming on the finest of stalks. All of them look more like something from a dream than from a living room. Spread out across a swath of sofa, or hanging
from a curtain rod, they must have been unnerving. Remember, we’re talking Eng-
land. Even today, the most sophis- ticated homes can still be swamped in tea-rose wallpaper, Blue Willow china and Laura Ash- ley curtains. In 1951, as that coun- try was barely recovering from the privations and destruction of war, “Calyx” must have come across as sitting somewhere between raging folly and a blast of fresh air. Day, who trained at the Royal
College of Art, had already been taking commissions for textiles from a forward-looking British firm called Heal Fabrics. When she showed “Calyx” to her boss there, he said he’d print it — mostly as a favor to her and her well-known husband — but could pay her only half the usual fee, “because he was
certain they wouldn’t sell a yard of it,” Day once said. “Calyx” won the American In- stitute of Decorators award, and became a smash hit in Britain as well. It was the first of many Day had there. The Days labored to make work with an appeal for all classes and within the budgets of most people. (Reprints of some of Day’s fabrics are available in the Textile Museum shop — but at de- luxe prices.) For a while in the 1950s and ’60s, the couple achieved celebrity status. They were in an ad for Smirnoff vodka and another for a car. They helped move Britain from design no- wheresville to being the world- famous source of Carnaby Street cool.
What makes Day’s textiles so
particularly great is that they don’t much read as textiles, at least right away. For any design to unroll by the yard, it has no choice but to repeat. Usually, that’s one of its most prominent features: Look at almost any classic wallpaper, and it ends up being all about its symmetries and repetitions. But with Day’s best fabrics, you feel much more as though you’re looking at a stretch of picture that’s been worked on edge-to- edge by hand, like a doodle — or a fine painting — spreading out in all directions. It feels as though
Disney and CAMERON
MACKINTOSH present
there’s detail worth ex- amining all over a Day fabric, with the kind of atten- tion that you might bring to a pas- sage in a painting by Paul Klee or Joan Miró. Those are two obvious sources for the abstracted surrealism in Day’s work, and she didn’t deny it. But I think the path of influence is more complex than that. Klee, es- pecially, might himself have been influenced by textiles — by the way their patterns extend all across a field, as his abstractions do, rather than sitting primly in the middle. A lot of early abstrac- tion came closer to such fabriclike “all-over-ism” than Old Master pictures ever had. With Day, it’s almost as though
she’s returning to the roots of ab- straction by putting it back down on cloth. In the process, she keeps some of the handmade feel of clas- sic painted abstraction. In “Calyx,” her forms aren’t solid and clean, like the cutouts or stencils that de- signs are often built around. In- stead, they’re messy and fractured, with one color showing through another like brushstrokes laid down in layers. “What I was aim- ing for was much nearer to fine art . . . [to] produce textiles as though I were a painter,” she says in the show’s documentary. In other works such as “Trio” or
decade before “concep-
tual art” became an offi- cial movement, Day designed
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP-LEFT
“RUNIC,” a 1959 work whose print is inspired by medieval runes, resembles a yet-to-be- invented computer printout.
“SMALL HOURS” is a screenprinted linen that Day created in 1952.
“PARKLAND” (1974), splashes white trees and plants on a leafy background.
“DUCATOON” (1959), a roller-printed cotton crepe, has forms and colors that are playful yet sophisticated.
“Larch,” Day first puts down a clean geometric background of colored stripes or rectangles. Those then become a foil for brushy or scribbled marks that seem to sit on top, breaking away from the geometry’s clean edges and messing them up. The tidy backgrounds stand for the tradi- tional repeating order of textile design, and that lets the hand- made patterns that Day layers over them seem even more dis- orderly, and less repeated and symmetrical, than they would on their own. There are moments when her
work gets so complex it seems al- most conceptual. In 1959, about a
NOW THRU AUGUST 1• ALL TICKETS $30!
“Charles Ross is a winning entertainment machine.” –THE WASHINGTON POST
Written&Performed by Charles Ross Directed by TJ Dawe
a textile called “Runic” that is just a plain blue field covered edge to edge with strange, alphabetical marks in white. (Day had derived them from medieval runes.) The fabric looks almost like a modern computer printout, before such things existed. And it seems to re- veal meaning even as it conceals it, in a trick typical of text-based art from the 1970s. It hints at later works by “fine artists” such as Sol LeWitt, who deconstructed geo- metric outlines, and Mel Bochner, who did the same with words. By 1975, Day had done so well
that she could quit commercial work and devote herself to the “fine art” of a collage technique that she called “silk mosaic,” none of which is in this show. (It also has only a very few pieces from the wonderful china settings she de- signed for Rosenthal’s Studio Line.) Day died this year, shortly before her survey opened in Wash- ington but after earlier versions had been mounted in Colorado — where most of its objects normally live, in the Denver collection of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown III. Had Day lived to visit the Textile
Museum, what would she have made of the Yves Klein show across town? Would she have seen Klein as a wild man, as a kindred spirit or as an artist lost in the clouds — as she was busy re- forming the British interior, one chintz couch at a time?
gopnikb@washpost.com
Art by the Yard: Women
Design Mid-Century Britain at the Textile Museum, 2320 S St. NW, through Sept. 12. Call 202-667-0441 or visit
www.textilemuseum.org. Admission is by donation, suggested at $5.
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM See some of the fine works from
Lucienne Day at
washingtonpost.com/ museums.
WOOLLYMAMMOTH.NET 202-393-3939
NOWONSTAGE! THRU AUGUST 22 ONLY! OPERA HOUSE
ONLINE:
kennedy-center.org CHARGE BY PHONE: (202) 467-4600
VISIT: Kennedy Center Box Office TTY: (202) 416-8524
Theater at the Kennedy Center is presented with the generous support of Stephen and Christine Schwarzman. Mary Poppins is made possible through the generosity of The Adrienne Arsht Musical Theater Fund.
©Disney/CML
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156