LuciENNE day
Contents Abstract About Childhood and early life Early career Style Work samples
- Prints
- Ceramics - Home decor
The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation Awards
Abstract Textile design is essentially the process of creating designs for woven, knitted or printed fabrics or surface ornamented fabrics. Textile designers are involved with the production of these designs, which are used, sometimes repetitively, in clothing and interior decor items. The field encompasses the actual pattern making while supervising the production process. In other words, textile design is a process from the raw material into finished product. Fiber, yarn and finishes are the key elements to be considered during the textile design procedure.
About Lucienne was a British textile designer who discovered her love of fabric at the age of 17, when she attended Croydon School of Art. She studied textiles at the Royal College of Art, where she met her husband, Robin Day. He was also interested in modernist design as a furniture designer, and the two were married in 1942. Their first home, a flat in London, displayed their early collaborations—his handmade furniture, and her handprinted fabrics. Best-known for her textiles, Lucienne Day (1917 – 2010) is recognised as a virtuoso pattern designer and colourist. Lucienne Day was an enthusiastic gardener and plant forms inspired many of her textile designs.
Childhood and early life Born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England, and raised in nearby Croydon, Lucienne Day was half-Belgian, the daughter of an English mother (Dulcie Conradi) and a Belgian father (Felix Conradi), who worked as a re-insurance broker. Initially educated at home, she attended Woodford School in Croydon from 1926-9 and a boarding school at the Convent of Notre Dame de Sion in Worthing, Sussex, from 1929-34. She later joined the Royal College of Art in 1937, by which time the failings of the college with regard to industrial design - lamented by her future husband Robin Day - had to some extent been removed. She graduated in 1940 (her graduation show providing opportunity for the first cooperation with Robin), and began to design fabrics for Sekers. However the discovery that she could not expect to be credited for her work at the company caused her to leave. She and Robin married in 1942.
Career Lucienne Day’s career graph is in the shape of a upward wave. Lucienne set up in private practice in 1946 and began selling designs to textile manufacturers, initially in the field of dress fabrics. She started Heal’s. Lucienne Day’s career in design spans 60 years and the freshness and originality of her work ensures that it is still relevant to contemporary interiors. A versatile and influential designer, Lucienne was commissioned by a wide range of companies and extended her very particular vision to carpets, wallpapers, tea towels and ceramics as well as textiles. With her husband Robin she pioneered the post-war revival of design and manufacture and extended the boundaries of modern design, enjoying international recognition. Her best known textile design ‘Calyx’ was launched at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and subsequently received the coveted International Design Award of the American Institute of Decorators. She colaborated with many texitle companies like, Liberty, Edinburgh Weavers, Cavendish Textiles (John Lewis) and British Celanese. Her six designs for British Celanese, printed on low-cost acetate rayon taffeta, were particularly joyful, winning paeans of praise. She also had fun designing tea towels for the Irish linen firm Thomas Somerset between 1959-69. By the mid 1970s, however, the design climate in Britain was changing and there was less enthusiasm for the Days’ fearless contemporary approach. Robin struggled on through the dark years of the recession, but in 1975, at 58, Lucienne withdrew from industrial design. Still in need of an avenue for her creativity, she developed the new medium of silk mosaic hangings.
Style “In the very few years since the end of the war, a new style of furnishing fabrics has emerged…. I suppose the most noticeable thing about it has been the reduction in popularity of patterns based on floral motifs and the replacement of these by nonrepresentational patterns – generally executed in clear bright colours, and inspired by the modern abstract school of painting.” Lucienne’s style was very modern for her times. She created designs using abstract botanical motifs.She drew in inspiration from various natural elements. She was also inpired by paintings of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. However, although abstraction was the dominant idiom in her work, Lucienne also perpetuated the English tradition of patterns based on plant forms, often incorporating stylised motifs derived from nature, such as leaves, flowers, twigs and seedpods. After dabbling in painterly, textural abstraction during the early 1960s, she experimented with hard-edged, multi-layered geometric designs composed of squares, circles, diamonds and stripes during the mid to late 1960s. Stylised florals and arboreal designs remained recurrent motifs until the mid 1970s. Lucienne Day believed that good design should be affordable and in 2003, she told The Scotsman newspaper that she had been “very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and to be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture.
Lucienne herself has selected the 12 designs which she feels are the strongest most appropriate for revival.
work samples -Prints -Ceramics -Home decor Day designed an array of other furnishings and domestic accessories, including wallpapers, table linen, carpets and ceramics. The three ground-breaking “Contemporary� wallpapers she designed for the Festival of Britain were hand-printed by John Line and Cole & Son. Keen to reach a wider audience, Day subsequently created small machine-printed abstracts for the Wall Paper Manufacturers Ltd (better known as Crown), and the German company Rasch.
Awards Throughout her career, Lucienne Day won many awards, including a Gold Medal for Calyx at the Milan Triennale in 1951 and a Citation of Merit from the American Institute of Decorators in 1952. In 1954, four of her Heal’s fabrics (Ticker Tape, Linear, Spectators and Graphica) won a Gran Premio at the Milan Triennale. In 1957 she won a Design Centre Award from the Council of Industrial Design for her Tesserae carpet for Tomkinsons, the first of three awards. Her second was for three tea towels for Thomas Somerset – Black Leaf, Bouquet Garni and Too Many Cooks – in 1960. Her third came in 1968 for her Chrevron furnishing fabric for Heal Fabrics. In 1962, Lucienne Day was made a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an appointment which, according to the Royal Society of Arts, honours designers who have achieved “sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry.” At that date she was only the fifth woman to be made an RDI, and she later served as the first female Master of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry from 1987-9. In 2004, she was awarded an OBE.
Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation The Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation was set up in February 2012 and was registered as an Arts and Education Charity (no. 1147979) in July of that year. The design contents of Robin and Lucienne Day’s home were donated to public collections including the V&A Museum and the Geffrye Museum, London. Fiona MacCarthy OBE and Professor Sir Christopher Frayling became Patrons. Objectives 1. To promote knowledge, appreciation and understanding of the nation’s design heritage in general, and the work of Robin and Lucienne Day in particular. 2. To encourage provision of public access to the design legacies of Robin and Lucienne Day. 3. To provide opportunities, in a form true to the democratic spirits of Robin and Lucienne Day, which will enable the general public or students of educational establishments to further their study of design in general, and furniture or textile design in particular. The Foundation is an independent organisation chaired by Paula Day and run by a Board of Trustees, all of whom donate their time and expertise to further the charity’s objectives.
“I am very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and to be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture.” -Lucienne Day