Lucienne Day in 1952. Image courtesy the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Manchester.
The Textile Museum was saddened to learn that designer Lucienne Day, whose work will be featured in The Textile Museum’s 2010 spring/summer exhibition, Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain, passed away on January 30, 2010 at the age of 93. Britain’s best known textile designer in the post-World War II period, Day created award-winning designs for wallpapers, tea towels, carpets and ceramics. She was especially renowned for her lively, colorful furnishing fabric patterns.
“Lucienne Day’s career was unparalleled,” said Lee Talbot, The Textile Museum’s Associate Curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections and Coordinating Curator of Art by the Yard. “Her remarkable body of textile art remains a fresh source of artistic inspiration and visual delight, even into the 21st century. I am pleased that we will be able to celebrate her creative designs with our Art by the Yard exhibition.”
A graduate of the Croydon School of Art (1934-7) and the Royal College of Art (1937-1940), Day’s commercial success began with her groundbreaking fabric Calyx, printed in 1951 by Heal Fabrics. Although the manufacturer was initially skeptical about Calyx’s avant-garde design, they decided to take a chance with the young designer’s refreshing and innovative ideas. This proved to be a brilliant choice for Heal, as Day soon became the star in the new era of British design. Her strengths as a textile designer stemmed from her sophisticated color choices, stylized references to nature, abstract forms and intriguing patterns inspired by Modernist painters such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Color was critical to the perfectionist and accomplished Day, so she worked closely with Heal Fabrics to ensure that her vision was properly executed in each “colourway” version of the final product. Although she worked for other furnishing fabric firms, it was Heal Fabrics for whom she produced over 70 textile designs.
Helix, 1970, Lucienne Day. Collection of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown, III.
Lucienne Day and her husband, furniture designer Robin Day (b. 1915), were key arbiters of taste as Britain’s most celebrated designer couple and together they popularized a sleek new aesthetic in British interiors. The couple was featured in a 1954 advertisement for a Hillman family car and a 1955 ad campaign for Smirnoff vodka. Magazine articles, such as one in the January 1954 issue of House and Garden spotlighting the Day’s London townhouse, allowed eager fans and consumers to peruse their choices in home décor. Lucienne and Robin Day came to personify the modern style in mid-century Britain, and consumers strove to emulate the lifestyle of this talented, successful, and attractive couple. Like many designers in the optimistic post-WWII period, they both believed in modern design’s transformative power to shape a better world, and sought to create beautiful, useful objects accessible to people of all income levels.
Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain, on view at The Textile Museum May 15, 2010 through September 12, 2010, illustrates the evolution of Day’s design style over the decades, from the playful linearity of her patterns in the early 1950s, to her experimentation with bold visual effects using black silk-screen patterns over fields of color in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and finally her dynamic Pop style of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Art by the Yard also includes textiles designed by two of Lucienne Day’s most accomplished contemporaries: Jacqueline Groag (1903-1985) and Marian Mahler (1911-1983).
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