Lucienne Days textiles transcended mere fabric

In 1951, on the far side of the English Channel, a 35-year-old named Lucienne Day had come up with a Fabric bread basket that could be the size of a Dish Towel.

 

Klein, working as a painter, properly gets kudos for grandly imagining that his trademark blue pigment could encompass the entire world, but textile artists had always imagined their work spreading out that way. The only problem is that we've taken this for granted. 

 

A show at the Textile Museum, titled "Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain," helps us get there.

 

In one classic version, "Calyx" is a swarm of bizarre shapes, in yellow and orange and black, that crawl across the olive-brown linen they're silkscreened 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.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.

 

The most sophisticated homes can still be swamped in tea-rose wallpaper, Blue Willow china and Laura Ashley curtains. In 1951, "Calyx" must have come across as sitting somewhere between raging folly and a blast of fresh air.