VANESSA BELL MAUD

MAUD
Rare original piece of Omega Workshops fabric
Designed by Vanessa Bell in 1913
Block printed on linen
This piece was once part of a set of curtains made for Florence Hodgkin and has faded with use with one small hole
Omega Workshops stamp on top RH
Maud is one of six fabric designs by the Omega Workshops, named after the prominent collector Lady Maud Cunard. Designed by Vanessa Bell,
Size 80cmx40cm
This has been stitched onto vintage linen and mounted on card, making it easy to frame.
Provenance
Florence Hodgkin cousin (by marriage) of Roger Fry and Grandmother to Sir John Eliot Gardiner (Conductor) and Howard Hodgkin (Painter) and thence by descent to the previous owner.
The non-figurative textiles produced by artists at the Omega Workshops in 1913 are perhaps the Omega's most radical contribution to modernist design. In an article in 1941 Nikolaus Pevsner recognised the quality of their innovation, remarking that it was not until the 1920s that such abstract applied design became widespread among French, German and Russian artists. Two stencil-printed linen textiles by Vanessa Bell were produced in time to be sold at the opening of the Omega in July 1913; they were available in different colour combinations and sold well, alongside other linens designed by Frederick Etchells, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Bell's were named Maud and White; a third textile by Bell, completely abstract and brilliantly coloured, was not however printed and the gouache design is in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Bell designed no more printed textiles until the early 1930s but none is as startling as Maud's pared-down geometrical repeat, outstanding in European textiles before the First World War. Examples of the textile as printed are in the Victoria & Albert Museum.