Art reviews: Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol | Soft Impressions

In the 1940s and 1950s artist textiles went mainstream with some spectacular results, writes Susan Mansfield

Installation view of Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol | Aberdeen Art Gallery

Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol, Aberdeen Art Gallery ★★★★

Soft Impressions: Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard, Camara Taylor, Dundee Contemporary Arts ★★★★

Modernism can sometimes appear to be an aloof, elite phenomenon, something one might view in a museum and struggle to understand. However, Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol - a fascinating exhibition organised by the Fashion and Textile Museum in London and drawn from the private collections of guest curators Geoff Rayner and Richard Chamberlain - tells a different story: that the giants of modern art also adapted their work into fabrics for fashion and home furnishings.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops sought to challenge “the erroneous distinction between fine and applied art”, and artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry worked on textile designs. There’s a sense in which they followed in the footsteps of William Morris, who was determined to bring craft and design of the highest standard into the domestic sphere, at least for those who could afford it.

However, it was in the 1940s and 1950s that artist textiles really went mainstream. Textile manufacture was seen as an important part of British post-war economic recovery, and leading European artists were persuaded to lend a hand, from Matisse to Henry Moore and Patrick Heron. The key product was often the headscarf - the must-have accessory of the time, and a good blank canvas for an artist. In the US, textile designer Wesley Simpson brought Salvador Dali and others into the fray.

Around the same time, Lancashire-based Horrockses, Crewdson & Co helped to pioneer the printed tea dress, with fabric designs by artists like Alastair Morton, Graham Sutherland and Eduardo Paolozzi. Their work included a collection of dresses for the new Queen’s Coronation Tour of the Empire and Commonwealth in 1953-54.

Installation view of Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol | Aberdeen Art Gallery

The importance of the trend for artist-inspired textiles was signalled in an exhibition, Painting in Textiles, at the ICA in 1953 featuring work by Moore, William Scott, John Piper and others. Barbara Hepworth contributed designs to St Ives-based Porthia Prints, and Paolozzi, with the photographer Nigel Henderson and their wives, set up an artist cooperative making experimental patterns which collaged photographs, children’s drawings and newspaper headlines.

One of the most high profile initiatives came from New York-based Fuller Fabrics in their Modern Masters project, which included collaborations with Picasso, Leger, Chagall and Miro (Chagall’s Belle Fleurs headscarf was a particular treat in the show, as were Dali’s dancing telephones). Typically, Picasso went further than others, designing (or allowing elements from his sketchbooks to be turned into designs for) American ski wear manufacturer White Stag. Seeing his iconic motifs embazoned on cocktail culottes and a colourful rain mac is quite the showstopper.

Andy Warhol’s fabric designs, by contrast, feel cheerful and colourful, belonging to the graphic designer phase of his career and lacking the edginess of his later work. Zandra Rhodes has a different perspective again, being a designer of textiles and of clothes.

A handful of more recent objects are grouped together at the end, including the Skull Scarf, a collaboration between Damien Hirst and Alexander McQueen, but there’s no clarity here about the direction in which artist textiles have gone post-Warhol.

The 1940s and 1950s are where it’s at, when modernism was embraced by popular culture in more ways than we know. Take, for example, the animated film Destino - shown here for no reason I can fathom - which began in 1945 as a collaboration (unlikely as it seems) between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. Seeing Dali’s visual world animated in a surreal-Disney-princess-style adventure was worth the ticket price alone.

Detail from Camara Taylor, Untitled (familiar document), Digital Print, 2014 | DCA

The role of printmaking in the practices of Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor is the starting point for Soft Impressions at DCA, where both Cammock and Pollard have taken part in recent printmaking residencies. However, this show, curated by DCA’s Tiffany Boyle, is a thoughtful intertwining of the three artists’ work which goes far beyond printmaking.

The first, smaller gallery presents key works from all three artists to lay out the themes: Pollard’s film, Belonging in Britain, which uses family photographs and letters to explore the transition from Guyana to the UK; a selection of her series of blind embossings, Seventeen of Sixty Eight, showing racist insignia from British pubs; Taylor’s grandmother’s photograph, printed with the black ink removed, and Cammock’s screenprint which uses the words “We shared the colour of thought”.

The work approaches questions of race and identity from a variety of angles but, as the title suggests, it does it softly, in nuanced ways, sometimes inviting surprise. Taylor’s 12-minute film nobody’s word explores the artist’s own family history, and includes a matter-of-fact discussion between two family members about the likelihood that they are descended from the mixed race children of two 17th-century Scottish plantation owners.

Cammock’s new work for the show includes a print montage of photographs of the abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass - in his time, the most photographed man in America - who visited Dundee in the 1840s to address the Free Church which had accepted a large monetary gift from slave owners. Taylor has explored the work of 19th-century African-American artist Robert S Duncanson, who travelled to Scotland twice to paint: reproductions of his landscape paintings are slowly disintegrating in solutions of rum, whisky and water.

Pollard’s work as a printmaker is explored in some depth, and there are new prints made at DCA which play with typography, a nod to the fact that her father worked as a printer. Cammock’s film The Lay Shaft Drive is Down, made in a former gin mill in London, opens up questions which are not only about race but about labour, the economy, the way alcohol has been used to mollify the working classes. In 12 minutes, she gets from mill workers’ songs to the ideas of Adam Smith.

Some of the most striking work here is inspired by her discovery of an unpublished collection of poems by Dundee jute worker and political activist Mary Brooksbank. A new mural combines Brooksbank’s lines about solitude with what might be a very contemporary abstracted cityscape. Elsewhere, Cammock’s words, printed on a length of jute, seem to reach back to Brooksbank across time: “If I run my palm along the twine/ I might feel the burn of your tired fingers”.

Across two generations, the three artists follow their own tracks, but these meet, cross and intertwine in this show. The generation gap is tangible: Pollard and Cammock seek to illuminate, even though the approach at times feels oblique, like Pollard’s white-on-white embossings; Taylor prefers to complicate, deconstruct. However, this thoughtful exhibition is less about comparing and contrasting, more about presenting, observing and letting the viewer arrive at their own conclusions.

Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol until 13 April; Soft Impressions until 23 March