6 minute read
DESIGN INSIDER A Complex Tapestry
Jack Lenor Larsen,
who died in December at age 93, was invariably referred to as a weaver—a descriptor that’s totally apropos, yet only hints at his sweeping cultural influence and 360-degee creative purview. Yes, the interplay of warp and weft was Larsen’s operating system, his framework for making sense of the world. He held an MFA in fiber arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, his designs sprang from the loom, and he birthed the American modernist textile movement, developing innovative, high-performance constructions that celebrated age-old techniques. “Jack always said textiles were the perfect blending of architecture, poetry, and painting,” says Lori Weitzner, his design director from 1993 to 1998. “He was a craftsman, an engineer who started with structure and built up from there to create something beautiful.”
But over the course of his seven-decade career, Larsen’s professional contributions encompassed myriad
Jack Lenor Larsen, 1927–2020.
a complex tapestry
At once progressive and timeless, textile legend Jack Lenor Larsen’s design vision is enduring
pursuits, among them interior and fashion design, gardening, collecting, curating, writing (10books!), lecturing, teaching (future client Louis Kahn was a student), philanthropy, and even boatbuilding (a side hustle during his Seattle childhood). Along with helming his eponymous brand, founded in 1952 and merged with Cowtan & Tout in ’97, the multitasker also served as president of the American chair of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, established the Reserve, and organized numerous museum including a 1981 retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and is represented in the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York and the V&A in London, among others.) “In Jack we had a true Renaissance man, a master of weaving, design, gardening,” choreographer Bill T. Jones, a close friend, says.
Larsen liked to describe himself as a slow learner, but he certainly Design Hall of Fame inductee launched his own industrially produced synthetics, whereas Larsen favored handspun natural yarns, variegation, and utterly original structures. “To have anything special for their interiors, architects had to hire a weaver,” he told me in a 2007 interview. “Designers liked what I was doing and said, ‘If you make it, we’ll buy it.’ So I started making, which you could do without much capital; the client would give you an
But solo success proved immediate, and ativity: His breakthrough cord and gold metal—for advance for the yarns. I the lobby of SOM’s 1952 Lever House. Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, and Marcel Breuer soon came calling; Larsen’s creations from that era can still be viewed at Fallingwater, Taliesen, and the J. Irwin Miller House.
Success also opened the doors to international travel. In the mid’50’s, Larsen served as a conduit between the West and the East, dispatched by the U.S. State handweavers. In his lifetime, Larsen visited more Haiti and Morocco to India—to study regional textile methods and collaborate with artisans, producing collections in some 30 countries and operating European satellites. “That he found ways to employ and sustain these artisans and to produce and preserve their designs for all the world to enjoy was a miracle,” Weitzner says.
It is fitting, though, that the global citizen’s last days were spent at LongHouse Reserve, the property that was both his private sanctum and
Craft Council in the ’80’s, was the VP and later arts center LongHouse shows. (He was the subject of many himself, proved a quick study in the entrepreneurial arena. The 1999Interior label just a few months after a post-grad relocation to New York City. The market then was for thought I’d just do that until someone hired me!”
more conducive to creproject was a commission to design curtains— a lacey weave of linen Department to help Vietnam and Taiwan achieve exports and jobs for local than 90 nations—from East Hampton, New York, an open-to-the-public museum and sculpture garden. The house itself, modeled on a seventhcentury Shinto shrine, was built in 1992 by architect Charles Forberg, a longtime collaborator who designed many Larsen showrooms.
Clockwise from left top: Chinese Contemporary Warriors, a 2005 work by Yue Minjun, in the sculpture garden at LongHouse Reserve, Larsen’s residence/museum in East Hampton, New York. Completed in 1992, the house was Larsen’s 30th collaboration with architect Charles Forberg; in the stairwell hangs Dawn MacNutt’s Kindred Spirits, in sea grass and copper wire. The exterior is modeled on the seventh-century Grand Shrine at Ise, Japan. A close-up for Interior Design’s 75th-anniversary issue in 2007. Happiness, a 1967 screen-printed rayoncotton-mohair blend. Swan Song, a 1994 handwoven silk-linen. Onward, circa 2000, in Thai silk handwoven on a linen warp. Larsen Performance Collection in Sunbrella, 2019.
designinsider
Visitors to the not-forprofit institution can view ethnographic textiles, embroideries, and crewelwork that Larsen collected alongside works by Anni Albers, Dame Lucie Rie, Wharton Esherick, Dale Chihuly, Willem de Kooning, Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Toshiko Takaezu, and R. Buckminster Fuller. The 16-acre landscape was entirely of Larsen’s changing tapestry was who worked beside him there. “During the course imagining and fueled his of over 24 years of working with Jack, I learned the importance of dreaming, planning, and being open to all possibilities,” LongHouse Reserve executive director Matko Tomicic discloses.
Designing until the end—his most recent collection was a 2019 Sunan uncanny ability to stay relevant. “He was one of those curious personalities who exuded an
textile designs; his approach to this everinspirational to those brella series—Larsen had awareness of high modernism and yet insisted on living squarely in this era,” Jones says. He was omnivorous, a lifelong learner and scholar propelled by insatiable curiosity. “Jack was always educating himself,” Interior Design editor in chief Cindy Allen recalls. “He was a true heavyweight of knowledge.”
In a culture that too often prizes the new and youthful at the expense of experience, longevity, and perspective, Larsen’s greatest gift, perhaps, was showing us how to view history as a living, continuous thing, and a connection to the human spirit. He embodied that vision himself.
—Jen Renzi
Clockwise from top left: A Marc Leuthold ceramic sculpture and Olga de Amaral woven horsehair wall hanging, Tierra y Oro #5, in the living room. Larsen on his bed, by a Cedric Hartman lamp. A nylon-mohair curtain, woven in Swaziland, for the Wolf Trap Theater, 1972. A Wharton Esherick painted-pine bench and Gregory Roberts’s carved ceramic KalaPani (Blackwater) near the dining area’s Japanese paper-covered screen. Borealis, a 1987 worsted. Fly’s Eye Dome by R. Buckminster Fuller on LongHouse Reserve’s 16-acre grounds.
