Twentieth Century Pattern Design
By Lesley Jackson, 2011
Princeton Architectural Press, 2011
224 pages
20th Century Pattern Design: Textile & Wallpaper Pioneers, by Lesley Jackson, was originally published in 2002, and an updated edition was issued this year. There seems to be only minimal revision of the previous edition, with no new examples from the past decade, though the comprehensive bibliography has been updated.
The book's chronological survey begins with Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau, though cultural appreciation of wallpaper and domestic decoration flourished a decade earlier during the Aestheticism movement. ("Modern wallpaper is so bad", the aesthete Oscar Wilde famously observed, "that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime".)
Jackson's coverage is almost exclusively British, European, and American, and she profiles the key designers and studios of each decade. Her approach is largely ismatic, and she identifies trends such as Functionalism, Ruralism, Revivalism, and (more contentiously) Giganticism. She also links pattern design to the major cultural paradigms of the 20th century: Proto-Modernisn, Modernism, and Post-Modernism.
The first book to examine pattern as an essential part of twentieth-century design history is now available in paperback. Organized by decade, Twentieth-Century Pattern Design details the technical innovations that affected the development of modern textiles and wallpapers. With stunning color plates and lively text, Lesley Jackson takes readers on a tour of the development of twentieth-century patterns from around the world. Focusing on surface pattern in the home, Jackson draws frequent parallels to the worlds of fashion, packaging, and graphics and explores the interrelationship between painting and pattern design. The result is a book that is as inspiring as it is informative.Twentieth-Century Pattern Design is an invaluable resource for modern design enthusiasts and historians, collectors, and interior and graphic designers.
