Textile designs by artists

Influential 20th-century fine artists and sculptors, from Picasso to Barbara Hepworth, gained additional status as textile designers until decline set in during the 1970s

- Celia Rufey

During the first decades of the 20th century, fine art moved beyond Impressionism to embrace graphic colour and abstraction. Modernism beckoned, while class distinction separating the work of painters and sculptors from pattern and product design began to fall away.

French painter Raoul Dufy, who exhibited with the Fauve movement in Paris, set the ball rolling through this invisible divide in 1910. Needing a further source of income, he took commissions for textile designs from the couturier Paul Poiret. He used his own carved woodblocks for printing, and his designs for fashion were so successful that Dufy went on to accept a contract to supply designs to Lyon textile manufacturer Bianchini-Férier. Not only did Dufy's skill as a painter gain status from this success but, during the next 16 years, he created thousands of textile designs, many illustrating an interplay between Fauve and Cubist ideas.

A handful of these designs are available now, printed by Christopher Farr Cloth. It was Dufy who inspired English landscape painter Alec Walker to design textiles based on his own paintings, and launch Cryséde in Cornwall to market his fabrics (see H&A, August). Dufy's success was also noted across Britain's artists' community, where the Omega Workshops - set up by Roger Fry in 1913 - were similarly keen to dissolve the relative values ascribed to fine and applied art.