Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol

A comprehensive survey of over-200 works on fabric by leading 20th-Century artists including Pablo Picasso Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Andy Warhol and Barbra Hepworth. In the 1910s, led by painter Wyndham Lewis and the artists of Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshops, artists begun to reconsider the distinction between fine and applied art. Raoul Dufy was the first 20th-century artist to become successfully involved in producing textile designs. After the war the movement to create ‘a masterpiece in every home’ flowered with the involvement of leading contemporary artists: John Piper, Salvador Dalí, Ben Nicholson and Steinberg. Eventually, these art textiles were turned into commercial clothing: a Joan Miró dress, a Salvador Dalí tie. By the 1960s, Picasso was allowing his pictures to be printed on almost any fabric, save upholstery. The sofa was a line he wouldn’t cross, as the curators note: ‘Picassos may be leaned against, not sat on.’