Lucienne Day

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Lucienne Day, 1952

Lucienne Day (born January 1, 1917 in Surrey , † January 30, 2010 ), born Désirée Lucienne Conradi , was an English textile designer . With her work she was style-defining for Great Britain and beyond in the 1950s and 1960s.

life and work

The beginnings

Désirée Lucienne Conradi was the daughter of a wealthy Belgian insurance broker and an English mother. She spent her childhood in Croydon . She attended Worthing Convent School and enrolled at the Croydon School of Art at the age of 17 . It was there that she developed her love for textiles. In 1937 she enrolled at the Royal College of Art .

There she met the designer Robin Day at a dance event . The two, connected by their enthusiasm for modern design, married in 1940. It was the beginning of a lifelong, much-vaunted partnership in the workplace. Both work in the same studio - each in their own field and on their own work, but discussing and advising one another. Their drawing boards were back to back. In 1954, Lucienne gave birth to their daughter Paula.

Lucienne's work was initially based on the English tradition of creating patterns from plant shapes, flowers, grasses and stalks, which went back to William Morris . She was also heavily influenced by European abstract painting, especially Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky . Their fabrics were produced in large quantities and eventually adorned the majority of modern English houses and apartments. In doing so, she created a bridge between art and mass production and realized William Morris' vision of making art affordable for everyone. Part of their success was also the implied message of growth and rebuilding in post-war Britain.

She spent the war years as a lecturer. The years immediately after were tough. Jobs were rare, because the companies that had produced room textiles had to manufacture parachutes and blackout fabrics during the war. In the fashion industry, on the other hand, there was fierce competition and British designers were disregarded. Lucienne Day worked under her maiden name and was invited to some interviews because the job advertisers thought she was French.

At the beginning of Lucienne Day's career, design was just beginning to develop into a profession. Working as a freelancer, she created her first designs for the clothing factories. As soon as the opportunity arose, however, she turned to interior and furniture textiles and expanded her field of activity to carpets, wallpaper and tablecloths. Her success was fueled by the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition and the Homes for the People and Council of Industrial Design associations . Conversely, her work made a major contribution to their success.

Success as an industrial designer

Her breakthrough to fame came in 1951 with her design Calyx . Large sheets of this fabric adorned the dining room of the Homes and Gardens pavilion designed by her husband Robin at the Festival of Britain . The pattern shows floating, mushroom or shell-like shapes, connected by stalk structures, in high-contrast yellow, black and white against an olive background. Calyx was produced by the traditional company Heal’s . Their management had so little confidence in the completely new design that they paid Lucienne Day just £  10 instead of the £ 20 she asked for the design. When he later in the same year won the gold medal at the Triennale of Milan and in the following year the prestigious International Design Award of the American Institute of Decorators and became a great sales success, the company at least paid the rest of the fee.

On Calyx followed the pattern Flotilla , a composition abstracted marine motifs. It was printed on rayon and was intended for customers “who like Calyx but have smaller windows and wallets,” according to Lucienne Day at the time. It was selected for the People's House at the 1952 Ideal Home Exhibition .

This proved that modern, high-quality design was in demand on the market. Lucienne Day was now in demand everywhere. She designed for fabrics for Edinburgh Weavers and Liberty , wallpapers for Crown Wallpaper and the wallpaper factory Gebrüder Rasch , ceramics for Rosenthal , tablecloths for Thomas Somerset and carpets for Tomkinsons and Wilton Carpet . The company Heal’s remained most closely connected to her, although she worked as a freelancer all her life . For these she created designs for two decades. As motives they used plants and trees, but also Persian calligraphy and the mobiles of Alexander Calder . She underscored her skills as a color designer with the various color combinations in which many of her designs were available.

During the 1950s, her designs gradually became more geometric, echoing the paintings by Ben Nicholson and the porcelain pieces by Swedish designer Stig Lindberg . In a playful look she used new typography , for example in Graphics , another award-winning design. In her eerie design, Spectators , she staged small stick figures. In the 1960s she switched to block shapes, zigzag lines and stripes of pure light color, based on Patrick Heron's paintings of the time. She mostly drew her designs in gouache on paper. For their part, they were received as works of art. The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester has an extensive exhibition of these works.

From 1963 to 1987, Lucienne and Robin Day worked together as design consultants for the John Lewis department store chain and played a key role in the redesign of its corporate design . They also worked together on the interior of the Vickers VC10 fleet for the airline BOAC . Robin designed the seats and Lucienne the fabrics. Another joint project was the interior design of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge .

Silk mosaics

In the 1970s, backward-looking styles that did not correspond to Lucienne Day's sense of style increasingly prevailed on the market. She decided to switch from industrial design to an individual artistic work. An architect friend saw a draft of a fire safety door for John Lewis on her drawing board. He mistakenly assumed it was a design for embroidery. Lucienne Day took up the idea and created silk mosaics , silk mosaics, shimmering patchwork pieces from a myriad of small silk squares, which were often no larger than a square centimeter. At first she struggled to gain a foothold, advertised her works to gallery owners and art dealers, gave works on commission , but ultimately found buyers. She worked with two assistants on the drafts and production of her pieces. The large, colorful silk mosaic The Window , created in 1986, is particularly spectacular . It adorns the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center in London.

The late years

From 1987–1989, Lucienne Day was the first woman to be appointed as a Master at the elite Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry . In the 1990s, the importance and influence of her work in the professional world and the subsequent generation of designers was widely recognized. Museums around the world keep their original works. In 1993 there was a major retrospective in Manchester , which was followed by others in other locations. In 2001, a large group exhibition of the work of Lucienne and Robin Day took place at the Barbican Center in London.

At that time, the Days had stopped working as a designer and artist. In 2000 the couple moved from Chelsea to Chichester , closer to their garden shed in Sussex . Lucienne Day devoted herself extensively to her garden there.

literature

  • Charlotte Fiell; Peter Fiell (Ed.): Design of the 20th Century , Taschen, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-8365-4107-7 , p. 191

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