To celebrate the opening of The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s, this Object of the Day is dedicated to design now on view in the exhibition.
Artist Raoul Dufy was one of the most successful and prolific textile designers of the period. The aesthetic sensibility of his woodcut prints was well suited to textile patterning. He developed a distinctively joyful style, producing literally thousands of designs while under contract with Lyons based luxury silk producer Bianchini-Férier between 1912 and 1928. The foliate motifs of this particular fabric are highly abstracted – proclaiming the modernity of the pattern. At the same time, they convey a sense of lush, dense vegetation, reflecting a fascination with the exotic that was evident in many of Dufy’s textiles.
This textile is currently on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s through August 20, 2017.
