LONDON.- This major exhibition of works on fabric by leading 20th-Century artists begins in the 1910s with designs by the Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis and the artists of Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshops – Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry – who wanted to change ‘the erroneous distinction between fine and applied art’. The Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy was the first 20th-century artist to become seriously and successfully involved in producing textile designs. His work influenced and encouraged many other artists and textile companies in Britain, on the Continent and in America.

After the war the movement to create ‘a masterpiece in every home’ flowered with the involvement of leading contemporary artists: John Piper, Salvador Dalí, Ben Nicholson and Steinberg. Eventually, these art textiles were turned into commercial clothing: a Joan Miró dress, a Salvador Dalí tie. By the 1960s, Picasso was allowing his pictures to be printed on almost any fabric, save upholstery. The sofa was a line he wouldn’t cross, as the curators note: ‘Picassos may be leaned against, not sat on.’

This exhibition is an important and comprehensive survey of this art form in Britain and America. There are approximately 200 textile designs, many of which have never been on public display before.

Head of the Fashion and Textile Museum, Celia Joicey says ‘This exhibition of rare fashion and furnishing fabrics by artists highlights the quality of textiles as a medium for combining art and mass production. With recently discovered works by Dufy, Dali, Miró and Picasso, we hope to shed new light on artistic practice in the mid-twentieth century.

The Curators of the exhibition, Geoff Rayner and Richard Chamberlain, say ‘This exhibition allows a remarkable glimpse of how ordinary people were once able to directly engage in a personal and intimate way with high modern art through their everyday clothing and the furnishings of their homes’.