1-7 of 7 Results  for:

  • Art History and Theory x
  • Textiles and Embroidery x
Clear all

Article

Debschitz, Wilhelm von  

A. Ziffer

(b Görlitz, Feb 21, 1871; d Lüneburg, March 10, 1948).

German designer, painter, teacher and theorist. A self-taught artist, he made several study trips to Italy and the Tyrol. In painting he found inspiration in late German Romanticism, before turning to the English Arts and Crafts Movement. His designs were exhibited in 1899 at the exhibition of the Bayerische Kunstgewerbeverein (Munich, Glaspal.) and in 1901 at the first Ausstellung für Kunst im Handwerk in Munich. In 1902 he founded the Lehr- und Versuch-Atelier für Angewandte und Freie Kunst with the Swiss artist Hermann Obrist, developing a modern co-educational teaching system based on reformist pedagogy and popular psychology. In preliminary courses, classes and workshops, a broad practical training was offered primarily in arts and crafts. This precursor of the Bauhaus encouraged contact with dealers and collectors and was widely accoladed. When Obrist resigned from the school in 1904, Debschitz founded the Ateliers und Werkstätten für Angewandte Kunst and the Keramischen Werkstätten production centres attached to the school. In ...

Article

Dresser, Christopher  

Rosamond Allwood

(b Glasgow, July 4, 1834; d Mulhouse, Alsace, Nov 24, 1904).

Scottish designer, Botanist and writer. He trained at the Government School of Design, Somerset House, London, between 1847 and 1854, during which time he was strongly influenced by the design reform efforts of Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and Owen Jones. In 1854 he began to lecture at the school on botany and in 1856 supplied a plate illustrating the ‘geometrical arrangement of flowers’ for Jones’s Grammar of Ornament. In 1857 he presented a series of lectures at the Royal Institution entitled ‘On the Relationship of Science to Ornamental Art’, which he followed up in a series of 11 articles in the Art Journal (1857–8) on the similar subject of ‘Botany as Adapted to the Arts and Art-Manufacture’. His first three books were on botanical subjects, and in 1860 he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Jena for his research in this area.

Following the International Exhibition of ...

Article

Girona Creation Tapestry  

Pamela A. Patton

Embroidered textile (Girona, Cathedral; see Girona Cathedral) produced in Catalonia c. 1100. Although popularly labelled a tapestry, it is in fact a monumental embroidery in wool and linen on fine wool twill. It might have been produced for the cathedral following its consecration in 1038, since the cathedral is known to have possessed a number of textiles as early as 1053. Although a 16th-century reference to a hanging depicting the Emperor Constantine is sometimes taken to allude to this work, it is not otherwise documented before the end of the 19th century.

While the lack of comparable textiles leaves the date of the work uncertain, both pictorial style and the forms used in the inscriptions support a date in the late 11th or very early 12th century. In its present state, it takes the form of a substantial fragment, approximately 3.65m×4.70m, of an original perhaps 5 m sq. Today, it lacks a narrow strip along its right edge and over a metre of its lower section. The wool used predominantly in its embroidery was dyed a wide range of colours, including greens, blues, red, beige, black and various earth tones; bleached linen or hemp is also evident. Self-couching and stem stitch combine to cover the base material completely and create a tapestry-like appearance....

Article

Itten, Johannes  

Anna Rowland

(b Südern-Linden, Nov 11, 1888; d Zurich, May 25, 1967).

Swiss painter, textile designer, teacher, writer and theorist. He trained first as a primary school teacher in Berne (1904–6), where he became familiar with progressive educational and psychoanalytical ideas. He was, however, interested in art and music, and in 1909 he decided to become a painter. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but was so disappointed that he returned to teacher training in Berne. He read widely and developed an interest in religion and mystic philosophy. After qualifying he returned to Geneva and greatly enjoyed the course on the geometric elements of art run by the Swiss painter Eugène Gilliard (1861–1921). After travelling in Europe, in 1913 Itten went to Stuttgart to study at the academy of Adolf Hölzel, a pioneer of abstraction who was also convinced of the importance of automatism in art. Greatly impressed, Itten absorbed his teaching on colour and contrast and his analyses of Old Masters paintings. Encouraged by Hölzel, he made abstract collages incorporating torn paper and cloth....

Article

Maclagan, Sir Eric  

(Robert Dalrymple)

(b London, Dec 4, 1879; d Spain, Sept 14, 1951).

English museum curator. In 1905 he joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as an Assistant in the Department of Textiles; subsequently he moved to the Department of Architecture and Sculpture. His lifelong career at the Museum was interrupted during World War I, by a period of service (1916–19) in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information. In 1921 he became Keeper of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture. He concentrated on the study of Italian sculpture and he compiled, in collaboration with Margaret Longhurst, the Museum’s Catalogue of Italian Sculpture (1932). Though superseded in 1964 by John Pope-Hennessy’s Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Maclagan’s work remains a monument of careful scholarship, which took full account of the advances made by Wilhelm von Bode in the study of sculpture.

As a museum curator he initiated some notable purchases, including a ...

Article

Resist  

Material such as wax or varnish used to cover those parts of a surface (e.g. cloth, pottery or a metal printmaking plate) that are not meant to be exposed to dye, lustre or acid (see Textile, §III, 1, (ii), (b)). In printmaking, the term refers to both the ground and the stopping-out varnish; in watercolour it is often called ‘masking medium’....

Article

Shepherd, Dorothy  

Yuka Kadoi

(b Welland, Ont., Aug 15, 1916; d Ashville, NY, Aug 13, 1992).

American art historian , specializing in medieval Islamic textiles. Having studied at the University of Michigan under Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu and R. Ettinghausen (BA 1939; MA 1940), Shepherd enrolled at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University to conduct further research on Hispano-Islamic textiles. In 1942 she joined the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration where she was in charge of its textile collection. After an interruption of her scholarly career during World War II when she served for the Office of War Information in London and Luxembourg and the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Division of the United States Military Government in Frankfurt and Berlin, she joined the Cleveland Museum of Art as Associate Curator of Textiles in 1947 and became Curator of Textiles in 1952. In 1955 she was appointed as Curator of Near Eastern Art and Adjunct Professor of Near Eastern Art at Case Western Reserve University, also in Cleveland. She became Chief Curator of Textiles and Islamic Art in ...