Art Deco Thirty Years Ago

 Françoise Barnes, Art Deco, 1980

Collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum

Barnes's quilt reflects the enthusiasm of young artists introduced to Art Deco by Bevis Hiller's retrospective look at modern design in the late 1960s.

Art Deco seemed a natural for quilt design.

The first quilt I ever designed for Quilters Newsletter in the late '70s had blocks combining traditional patchwork and images from the art deco restaurant dishes I was collecting at the time.
Editor Bonnie Leman rejected the design (similar to the one above) and wrote me she would prefer articles with more traditional ideas.

Other artists saw the same links and the same divide between traditional quilts and art quilts. Francoise Barnes, Nancy Crow, Virginia Randles and friends who lived in Athens, Ohio got tired of  rejection slips and created a venue to show quilts taking off in new directions. The first Quilt National was held in 1979 at the Dairy Barn in Athens.

Nancy Crow

February Study

Many quilts in that innovative first exhibit surprised us with their geometries.

Michael James

Dawn Nebula

Maria McCormick Snyder

Log Cabin Variation

The three quilts above were in that first Quilt National. The show continued to attract work

based on the affinity between patchwork and historical modernism.

 Françoise Barnes

Zaire Songe Mask II, 1989

Many of the artists involved in the first Quilt National continued to explore the arcs and lines of Art Deco. 

Nancy Crow 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1985

See more of Crow's work here:

http://www.nancycrow.com/

Michael James, Unnamed, 1986

See more of Michael James's quilts here

http://cehs.unl.edu/mjames_quilts/

Jane Sassaman, Waves, 1981-1986

See more of Sassaman's work here:

http://www.janesassaman.com/gallery.php?cat=1&s=0

Pauline Burbidge, Spiral 1, 1985

See more of Burbidge's work here:

http://www.paulineburbidge-quilts.com/index.php

And see more about Quilt National 1979

http://www.dairybarn.org/quilt/index.php?section=226&page=293

Jane Sassaman, Heaven and Earth, 1993

Modern Print Monday: London

The original print for London in the Modernism line was a small swatch of cotton that

combined an abstracted floral with some minimal geometrics.

The layering of the pattern and those triangles

reminded me of this Josef Hoffmann print

from early 20th century Vienna.

Same color palette too---it's amazing how influential the Wiener Werkstatte

was on American prints (and how little we have understood about the design sources.)

The florals echo the geometric Glasgow Rose as in this Roseville pot,

in the Mostique pattern.

We changed the palette a bit, toning down the contrasting shades.

Vintage Art Deco Quilts

Century of Progress

Aurora See Dyer

When outlining posts on Art Deco I initially despaired of being

able to include any vintage Art Deco quilts.

But then I remembered I have notebooks full of them

--- all inspired by the 1933-4 Chicago Worlds Fair.

I got interested in the quilt contest at the fair because I had quite a collection of souvenirs from that event. Above the fair logo, a comet representing the Star Arcturus.

A tiny coin purse

A belt buckle

The two-season fair was the source of

uncountable inexpensive knick-knacks,

which used to cost a quarter at thrift shops

Inspiring Merikay Waldvogel and I

 to write a book on the quilt

contest sponsored by Sears.

The Spectrum

Edith Morrow Matthews

The huge cash prizes attracted thousands of entries,

many of them quite moderne.

Detail of quilt by Emma Mae Leonhard

showing a Century of Progress in fashion

Collection of the International Quilt Study Center

and Museum

Sears issued a call for a special category of

quilts commemorating A Century of Progress,

the fair's theme. Quilts expressing the theme were

eligible for a bonus prize.

This was the heart of the Great Depression

and the cash prizes were huge.

Progress

Linda and Clarence Rebenstorff

Many of the quiltmakers looked to

the fair's advertising for inspiration.

Progress meant up-to-date modernism.

The posters are

classic Art Deco

as was the architecture.

 The Ford Building 

A General Motors LaSalle in the most modern of showrooms.

An enormous Studebaker.

Century of Progress

Anna Hansen

The architecture inspired several quiltmakers

to include the moderne Sears display building.

Quilting showing the first European settlement in Chicago

and the 1933 skyline

in a silk quilt in the collection of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum

Unfortunately, all that Art Deco creativity in the quilts was misdirected.

Sears issued the call for modern quilts

but did not choose judges who appreciated modernity.

Judges at the National Contest

They chose as prize-winner a reproduction of a mid-19th-century quilt

in up-to-date colors of Nile green.

Merikay and I wondered what might have

happened if an Art Deco quilt had

won that influential contest.

Would quilt design have taken a different direction

in the 1930s?

See my post on the contest winner:
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2013/02/online-shopping-drama.html

Garden Kaleidoscope

Mayme Helman Barnfield

Merikay has written about the contest extensively for the Quilt Index Gallery pages.

Click on the links for lots more:

http://www.quiltindex.org/essay.php?kid=3-98-3B

http://www.quiltindex.org/galleryFullRecord.php?kid=3-98-72

Here are the prizewinners:

http://www.quiltindex.org/galleryFullRecord.php?kid=3-98-73 

On the gallery page scroll down to Sears contest to see various gallery photos with comments by Merikay.

http://www.quiltindex.org/galleries.php 

Modern Print Monday: Vienna

Vienna print from my Modernism reproduction

collection for Moda

The document print was probably once

a quilt backing. You can see the wrinkles

where the lines of quilting were.

The original was faded---the large-scale cretonne prints of the early 20th century were not as colorfast as our prints today. In the wrinkles we got a better idea of the original color, which we called Baltic Blue.

Here's the reproduction of that print in Baltic Blue.

The line has four colorways.

What caught my eye in the original was THAT ROSE.

Maria Likarz fashion plate

 in the form of a postcard

Big, splashy, painterly roses were a fashion necessity in the teens and twenties from Vienna...

Paul Poiret coat, fashion plate by Paul Iribe.

to Paris....

Design by Edouard Benedictus

Large abstracted florals

defined flapper glamour.

Vienna in Klimt Olive

Vienna in Cafe Brown

Flapper humor?