Textile Designs. - book reviews

There is no collection of fabric patterns anywhere quite like Textile Designs, a joyous pall of 1,823 color reproductions drawn, for the greatest in quantity part, from the Design Library and the Design Loft the latter a collection of 500000 (!) catalogued examples of print swatches. The book's subtitle describes the approach: "Two Hundr Years of European and American Patterns for Printed Fabrics Organized by dint of Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period." Each page is succinctly and provocatively arranged according to make subordinate rather than chronologically. Open this turn to any page and be prepared to let slip through the fingers yourself in a dizzying array of patterns.

I find it interesting that of the like kind a book has appeared at this time. Page after marvelous page, published by the agency of a major art publisher and simultaneously released in Tokyo, eau-de-cologne Madrid, Paris and Milan - clearly Textile Designs is a big deal. Obviously it is intended as a crossover volume bridging the worlds of fashion, decoration and fine art. on the contrary 20 years ago, when Susan Meller the coauthor, began collecting textile-mill swatch volumes as a hobby and then as a business, of the like kind a compilation simply did not exist. At that time, I and my decoration-obsessed artist colleagues began looking seriously at textile sources. There were works on Oriental carpets and upon a handful of historic textiles, on the contrary nothing on print fabrics. Besides my personal addiction to aristocratic silk brocades, I disentangleed a lusty taste for the more vulgar popular prints and had to find them upon my own, mostly from downtown, off-price textile wholesalers. on the other hand now, voila: Textile Designs.

The work is divided into five categories. There are the ubiquitous Florals (Section 1) as well as a lengthy section of innovative Geometrics (2) Conversationals (3) are prints that exhibit the nearness of objects, animals, people, pageants of all sorts. My favorite category is Ethnics (4) export advantageouss in which you see a constant balancing act between designers' attempts to appeal to the locals who purchase their products and their desire to present to view those locals that they could not have produc the textiles themselves. The final category is Art changes and Period Styles - in my view the weakest part of the work because most of the material in this section could fit neatly into the previous four sections and because it consequently yields fewer surprises. In any section, the reader can page from one side layout after layout of related designs, juxtaposed by dint of theme. The presentation is unrestricted through chronology: on a single page you can diocese related motifs from 1820, 1890 and 1950 rubbing shoulders with single another, inviting comparison of by what means their respective decades influenced drawing, scale and color.

The proliferation of motifs in today's art production indicates a turn back to close examination of decorative arts sources. Consider Polke's acidic celebration of trashy print fabric; Bleckner's bittersweet evocations of chandeliers, floors and gates; Taaffe's rather cold Islamic and Matisse-derived decorative motifs; Wool's mechanically replicated black-and-white floral patterns; or Vaisman's tart confrontation of bourgeois tapestry with Saturday morning cartoons. Independent Curators is popularly traveling an entire exhibition, "Dark Decor," which is bear uponed with a predominantly younger generation of artists examining pattern.

In addition to the book's visual splendor, its body is refreshingly intelligent, informed and witty:

In modernist art, abstraction, at first controversial to the point of scandal, still retains an aura of difficulty, or, at least, of intellectual weightiness - unles it reaches the point where tribe write it off as "merely decorative." In fabric patterns, abstraction has been around forever and is an entirely comfortable neighborhood The textile designer knows that abstraction is inherently, shamelessly decorative.

Wow at last someone other sees it the way I do! Of course, abstract geometric patterns derive easily from the basic unit of the textile grid and are intrinsic to the weaving proces itself. Sophisticated geometric pattern has remained a central motif of woven and print fabric for centuries.

It is easy to forget that industrially produc fabrics, during the last sum of two units centuries, were part of the wealth of the Western world. "One fresh Hampshire firm, Cocheco Manufacturing Company, baseed in the 1820s, was producing 50 million yards of printed woven fabric a year by 1892." Now, that's a doom of stuff, and a fate of profit to be made. The succes of the fabric industry hanged on new designs as plenteous as on price and quality. Each year the designers, more [i]or[/i] less gifted, some hacks, would jostle violently out thousands of print designs - all intended to barter The level of formal innovation in commercial fabric design was high - maybe plane desperately so - because with this enormous contortion the competition for the newest direct the eye was fierce.

To its credit, Textile Designs not at any time shies away from the interaction between artistic innovation and commercial necessity. In fact it tenders us a wealth of fascinating information. Can you believe that, in order to preserve local fabric production in early 18th-century France, a law was passed that declared the wearing of imported Indian cotton punishable by means of death? That makes our general trade protectionists look like sissies. Or by what mode about this fact: one hand-loomed cashmere shawl from India might take away from a 19th-century Englishman the equivalent of a London townhouse!