Dorothy who? That’s the query design insiders, together with museum-goers, might ask themselves when New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum opens the primary monographic present in over 50 years on Dorothy Liebes (1897-1972), the influential textile designer and weaver. Liebes performed a key function in mid-century Fashionable American interiors, however now even many specialists within the subject may need hassle putting her.
Liebes’s collaborators, corresponding to Frank Lloyd Wright and Raymond Loewy, want no introduction. And Liebes herself was amply celebrated in her personal lifetime. However the full scope of her three a long time of A-list commissions—which stretched from New York’s United Nations constructing to the set of the 1949 Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy comedy Adam’s Rib—disappeared into archives and museum collections following her demise in 1972, when her studio closed down. A Darkish, A Mild, A Brilliant: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes makes use of practically 200 objects, from code-like pattern playing cards to extant items of glamorous furnishings, to reinstall Liebes as one of many interval’s inventive geniuses.
Liebes’s Mexican Plaid textile, round 1938, mixed pure fabics, corresponding to wool and cotton, with artificial ones, together with cellophane. Picture: Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Establishment
The curious title refers to Liebes’s motto for the right way to devise color schemes, and the present manages to carry the black-and-white inside images of mid-century interiors again to life with preserved examples of Liebes’s palette.
Liebes had initially deliberate to be an artist, explains the exhibition’s co-curator Alexa Griffith Winton, and “her understanding of color emerged from that”. The California native collaborated with trend designers, in addition to architects, and whereas a 1958 woven-leather pattern card—in numerous shades of yellow—is a research for a leather-based sample appropriate for footwear and purses, its putting grid reveals an artist’s eye at work.
Liebes’s pattern card for the Eagle Ottawa Leather-based Corp (1958) Picture: Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Establishment
A problem for mid-century Fashionable architects was what to do with all these glass home windows. “You couldn’t have Victorian ruffles,” says Winton, and so Leibes leaped into the fray by serving to to trend “a brand new paradigm for window remedies”. The present will likely be wealthy in examples of Liebes’s textiles for shades and drapes. In 1950, simply after Liebes relocated her studio from San Francisco to New York, she collaborated on Henry Dreyfuss’s now legendary redesign of the Persian Room, a nightclub in Manhattan’s Plaza Resort. The present will embody an expanse of luminous inexperienced cloth Liebes later devised for the area, which used artificial Lurex yarn to recommend lights within the drapes.
Liebes was an early and persuasive advocate of incorporating artificial supplies into tremendous textiles, and the Cooper Hewitt is ready to attract on its assortment for a 10ft-long pattern of a fabulously colored materials referred to as Mexican Plaid. The 1938 twill might embody conventional cotton, silk and wool—however will get a dose of Twentieth-century sparkle from cellophane.
• A Darkish, A Mild, A Brilliant: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 7 July-4 February 2024
