Colour As I See It

^Figure 1. Dorothy Liebes

Colour as I see It Alexa Griffith Winton “As a designer in colour, how can the colour limitations of a mass market be circumvented to produce fabrics that are popular, yet of fine design? Colour is the elixir of the designer's life. But there are no limitations, really. Colour cycles, whether induced by man-made obsolescence motives or a natural urge for change, are not limiting, but stimulating. Colour is heady stuff, and the more one lives with it (as the 20th Century man does), the more one can take and digest.

After all, it isn't the colour, but the combination of colours and values. Skill and taste regulate the inspired colour performance.”

Dorothy Liebes in American Fabrics, Fall 1952

In 1945, House Beautiful called Dorothy Liebes (1899 – 1972) the “greatest weaver alive today,” a sentiment that Edward Durrell Stone echoed nearly thirty years later at a ceremony honoring Liebes’ long and distinguished career, stating, “She is brilliant, and she is certainly the most talented weaver of the twentieth century.” In her obituary, Interiors confirmed Liebes’ influence on modern design, calling her the “the greatest modern weaver, and the mother of the twentieth-century palette.”

Her textiles – the style of which grew so prevalent it became known as the “Liebes Look” – played a key role in the development of American Modernist architecture.

By using her richly coloured and highly textured drapes, screens, blinds and upholstery, architects solved the problem of creating livable yet modern interiors in often rigorously severe spaces, often devoid of all ornament. In other words, this new modernist spatial idiom required a completely reinvented—and ultimately modern – textile paradigm. Not only did Liebes succeed in creating a vocabulary for textiles adapted to modern design, she also played an instrumental role in defining the characteristics of American modernism for nearly fifty years.

Liebes wrote prolifically about colour and its role in the interior. Most of her articles were published in either mainstream home design magazines such as House and Garden, or industry publications like American Fabrics.

Dorothy Liebes, Architecture, and Interior Design

“One does not need to borrow from the past; the day-by-day life pattern is exciting and vast. In the field of textiles for shelter, the chief inspiration is Architecture, the Mother Art of all. What is more inspiring to a textile designer than to gaze on a new set of blueprints and drawings of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, a Lever house, a Mies van der Rohe apartment, or a Gropius, Wurster or Belluschi housing project? A well integrated knowledge is the mainspring to feed a lively creative imagination. One knows all the past art forms, but one strives to tell the creative story of today in terms of today and the future.”

Dorothy Liebes, American Fabrics, Fall 1952

From the beginning, Liebes worked with architects on custom commissions for interior use. As she wrote in her unpublished memoires, “Working with [architects], two points quickly became apparent. First, I had chosen an un-crowded field.

Relatively few persons were producing hand-woven fabrics for commercial or other uses in the United States at that time. Second, the one-of-its kind article that I could produce had a special value to architects and interior decorators.” In these early projects, Liebes encountered architectural blueprints for the first time, and she quickly realized she needed a methodology for translating her intuitive and highly personal approach for the more formalized and hierarchical process of realizing architectural commissions. She learned to read blueprints, a crucial step in working with architects and helping them to understand her work and its context. Her ability to communicate effectively with architects was accompanied by a highly personal approach to working directly with clients. Her methods included highly detailed and confidential personality profiles of a client and his or her spouse, in the belief that every individual’s persona or aura must be acknowledged in the process of designing their interiors:

When [architects] designed a private residence, I asked them to include, as well, written personality sketches of the owner and especially of his wife. . . . They were not always flattering, but to me they were an essential part of the process of creating exactly the right fabric in the right colors and design for the particular person who would be living with them. Color and personality are closely related, as I see it. I find myself subconsciously thinking of one person as “blue,” another “green,” etc. In fact, all shades of the spectrum are represented in the human aura.

For the sake of confidentiality, Liebes destroyed these profiles after each job was completed.

In part due to her ability to communicate with both architects and with clients, by the late thirties Liebes was working with a number of prominent architects designing buildings in the Bay Area, and she often collaborated on both commercial and private projects with decorator Timothy Pflueger, and the architects William Wurster, and Gardner Dailey in San Francisco. She also began to gain valuable national exposure from her work with architects in the Midwest and East Coast. Her friendship with the highly influential editor of Architectural Forum, Howard Meyer—he coined the expression “busy as a Liebes loom” in response to the constant hum of activity that followed her day and night—also helped raise her profile nationally.

^Fig. 2 . Image by C. Elwood Hoover from “Weaver Extraordinary,” California Monthly, March 1938

Liebes was often called upon to clarify issues of modern interior design for the general public. Her rolled window blinds, often woven from a combination of natural materials such as reeds and bamboo and materials made via new technologies, such as Lurex. She considered these flat, typically coloured and textured window coverings to be ideal for providing both privacy land visual interest in interiors where large expanses of glass windows challenged traditional notions of domestic privacy. She wrote an article for the New York Times in October, 1948, in which she specifically addressed these issues.

In the contemporary home, tremendous stress is placed on “fenestration” the number, size and shape of the windows in a given room… Sometimes full panels of contrasting colours give height and variety and interest. Try pink and coral together. Place green and turquoise, beige and pale rust or orange side by side and note the effect.”

Dorothy Liebes, “Enhancing the View: Windows can be something to look out of as well as to look through, New York Times, October 3, 1948

^Fig. 3. Dorothy Liebes Studio, window blind sample, painted bamboo with chenille and Lurex yarns, c. 1949. Philadelphia College of Art

Design for mass-production From the inception of the Dorothy Liebes studio in 1937 Liebes fabrics were prohibitively, and famously, expensive, ranging from between 30 to over 100 dollars per yard, depending on the design and materials used; in today’s currency these fabrics would cost between 450 and 1500 dollars per yard. The inaccessibility of her work bothered Liebes, and she worked hard for and advocated on behalf of well-designed, industrially produced textiles.

Her efforts to create affordable, mass-produced goods, despite her reputation as a designer to the rich, demonstrate her commitment to the Good Design movement, and her conviction that quality design belonged to everyone, regardless of budget. Her successful resolution of the sometimes-contentious relationship between handcraft and mass-production allowed many middle-class Americans to participate in the modern design movement, which was by this time associated with notions of American progress and an increasing sense of national and cultural pride. Of this standoff between hand- and machine-made, which Liebes manipulated so skillfully to the benefit of both designers and consumers, she wrote, “The hand woven design business feeds the power-woven design story in many ways. Fortunately, there are always some who desire handmade things of beauty and originality – the custom made. This support of the designer-artisan makes possible, in turn, new ideas and designs for industry in a proven, pacesetter way.”

Liebes worked with a number of industrial textile manufacturers, including Goodall Sanford Mills in Maine, with whom she developed power-loomed fabrics that effectively mimicked her hand woven textiles. In 1947 she became the official spokesperson and stylist for Doebeckmun’s new and wildly popular laminated

metallic yarn, called Lurex—Liebes came to the conclusion that industrial design was a more relevant use of her talents. By 1958, she ceased all hand weaving projects, focusing instead on her industrial projects. She worked continuously until her death in 1972.

There is, increasingly, exciting new scholarship exploring the complex roll of colour within modern architecture and interior design. The career of Dorothy Liebes, spanning four decades, confirms that colour - along with handcraft - played a key role in defining the prominent presence of colour within American modernist design, in particular in interiors. Further research into the work of designers like Liebes, figures who wielded great influence during their careers but were then dropped from the historical narrative - will continue to expand and enrich our understanding of colour and design across the volatile and highly creative postwar era.

^Fig. 4 Dorothy Liebes in her studio, c. 1967

Extracts from Liebes Writings On Colour Liebes wrote often for both popular and design-specific publications throughout her career. Because her work was so associated with colour, how to use it, understand it, and its overall role in the home were consistent themes. The following are just a few examples of Liebes’ writings focusing specifically on colour.

Colour as I see it “There are fashions in colours and, like fashions in clothes, they move in cycles. Inevitably they bear a living relationship to the conditions of life. Muted colours were admirable adapted to the sentimental manners and art of Victoria's age. The bright colours which we had during the war served to counteract the headlines. (There is a second, practical reason why we had vivid colours; blacks and dark shades are least successful on dark, cheap materials - they need quality).

My own house will be yellow and turquoise blue with some pink and perhaps a strong chartreuse.”

Dorothy Liebes, House and Garden, May 1942

^Figure 5. Dorothy Liebes Studio, swatch of hand woven fabric c. 1951, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Metal is a colour. Indians knew this centuries ago as they wove gold thread - a yellow accent - into saris. Romanians counted silver as an exciting form of gray to alter clothes. Metal, more than any other ordinary colour, heightens the shades around it. I use it over and over again for my fabrics, and I like to weave the same fabric with and without metal threads, then juxtapose the two in the same room....

Today, as never before, science has given people on all economic levels an endless palette from which to choose. The necessity for mankind to make do with dull and mediocre colour is past. The age of good colour is here.�

Dorothy Liebes, House and Garden, May 1942

^Figure 6. Dorothy Liebes Studio, hand woven pillow in shades of blue and green. Collection of the author.

^Fig. 7 Dorothy Liebes Studio, swatch of hand woven fabric in white cotton and gold Lurex.

American Craft Council.

^Figure 8. Dorothy Liebes Studio, swatch of hand woven fabric c. 1949, Metropolitan Museum of Art

^Figure 9. Dorothy Liebes Studio, swatch of hand woven leather and cotton c. 1950, Philadelphia College of Art

Strange and special shades Part of Liebes’ success rested on her ability to precisely key her palette to that of her clients’ interiors and their personality. She often worked with a dyer in San Francisco named Mr. Zaphos - whom she called a “medieval alchemist” who was able to conjure the subtle or saturated range of colours Liebes required for each job.

“The dyer to whom I went for “strange and special shades” was Mr. Zaphos, a master dyer. He had a small shop in an alley in San Francisco. He was a valuable adjunct to the work of the studio because he could get the value of the colours we wanted exactly, working like a medieval alchemist until he hit upon the right colour brew. He loved our colours, even though they meant extra hard work for him to achieve them.”

Dorothy Liebes, unpublished memoires, Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art

^Fig. 10 Mr. Zaphos, undated photograph from Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art

^Fig. 11. Dorothy Liebes Studio weaver Marian Phal with hand woven, multicoloured and Lurex panel, c. 1947

^Figure 12. “Liebes weaves by hand, designs for machine looms, crusades for young talent,� Life, November 1947

FURTHER READING Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ed.,Journal of Design History Special Issue: Colour and Design, 27:3.

Winton, A. G., “None of Us is Sentimental about the Hand: Dorothy Liebes, Handweaving and Industry,” in Journal of Modern Craft (4:3) 2011. _____“Colour and Personality: Dorothy Liebes and Midcentury American Design,” Archives of American Art Journal, (48:1-2) 2010.