Enid Marx (October 20, 1902 to May 18, 1998) was an English artist. An obituary summarizes certain aspects of her world:
THE designer and artist Enid Marx had a passion for patterns. It was an enduring love affair which led her to amass, from early childhood, an important collection of decorative objects from fabrics, cigarette cards and inn signs to ceramics, corn dollies and even gingerbread moulds.
But it was the creation of new patterns for which Marx was celebrated. During her long career - spanning over 70 years - this distinguished designer produced a kaleidoscope of work including stamps, seating fabric and posters for London Transport, books and book-jackets, wrapping paper, logos, laminates for the wartime Utility Furniture Panel (she was awarded the coveted title Royal Designer for Industry in 1944), packaging labels, rugs and menu cards. "Pattern- making comes as second nature," she once said.
Marx, second cousin thrice removed of Karl, was petite and charming, industrious and a perfectionist, outspoken and campaigning. Indeed outspokenness and wilfulness occasionally landed her in trouble; a secret government job during the Second World War was short-lived - she was requested to leave after asking for extra paper to doodle on.
Her refusal to toe the line also meant she failed to achieve her diploma from the Royal College of Art, where she studied in the 1920s. The thought of producing the required "washed-out William Morris stuff" was untenable - she had just discovered the excitement of Picasso and Braque.
Sir Frank Short refused to allow her into his wood-engraving class; he said she drew so badly she wasn't worth teaching. But her fellow-student Eric Ravilious sneaked her in after hours and taught her what he had learned that day. Marx failed to get a diploma because she insisted on drawing in an abstract manner. It was at this time that she first thought of becoming a textile designer.
However, the seeds of her interest in textiles had been sown in childhood when an employee in the local draper's gave her a collection of ribbon samples:
I was aged about four, and to my mother's consternation, invited the whole department to tea, telling them to bring their own cups! I remember the ribbons well; they were pasted on cards with loose ends for feeling. I was especially pleased when he gave me wide samples of fancy ribbons, with plaids or flowers and deckle edges. The narrow baby ribbons were of no interest to me, but I took them out of fear I'd not get the wider ones. I never did anything with them except hoard them.
She also collected French poetry books covered in pattern papers, children's books and toy theatre sheets - she and Eric Ravilious used to visit Pollock's shop in Hoxton where they watched women employees hand-colour the pattern sheets.
.......
[In 1926] she started her own workshop - in a cowshed on Hampstead Hill - designing and making hand-blockprinted textiles. The work was sold through the Little Gallery, off Sloane Street, and later at Dunbar Hay, a gallery in Albemarle Street opened in 1936 to show the work of young designers.
Marx's designs, usually abstract and geometric, soon became extremely fashionable and sought-after - customers included Gerald du Maurier and Gertrude Lawrence. Publishers recognised that the designs would work well on book jackets. The first, in 1929, was a book on the work of the engraver Albrecht Durer. Then came jackets for Chatto and Windus where a commission for two designs prompted Marx to produce 15, of which the publisher bought 12. And, for Curwen Press, Marx completed her first range of patterned papers.
In the late 1930s Marx and her long-time friend Margaret Lambert teamed up for their first folk art project and began collecting print ephemera, scrapbooks, valentines, paper peepshows, children's books and toys for a book entitled When Victoria began to Reign, published by Faber & Faber in 1937.
.......
Marx always embraced the challenge offered up by tackling many different types of work and during the war years began writing and illustrating her own children's books - one, Bulgy the Barrage Balloon, could only be completed after the Ministry of Defence gave Marx permission to depict a barrage balloon. They were very small format books printed on off-cuts.
Marx's skills as a watercolourist were also drawn upon when the Pilgrim Trust commissioned 14 watercolours to record notable British buildings under threat from German bombing.
Towards the end of the war, in 1943, the furniture designer Gordon Russell invited Enid Marx to be a member of the Board of Trade Utility Furniture team. The furniture was turned out cheaply and in large quantities for people who had suffered bomb damage. Marx was responsible for textiles. Her task was to create as great a variety as possible from a very limited supply of yarns and range of colours.
After the war she began working again for publishers and formed a strong bond with Penguin. There was a prestigious commission from Morton Sundour for a collection of printed furnishing fabrics, and in 1947, with Margaret Lambert, Marx published the scholarly English Popular and Traditional Art. Her seminal book English Popular Art (1951), again written with Lambert, was republished in 1989 by Merlin Press.
The Queen's Coronation in 1953 gave Marx the chance to explore yet another design medium - postage stamps. It was a commission she relished....
One of my greatest pleasures has been to work on stamps. The design is a sort of puzzle. Into this tiny national visiting card has to be fitted the Sovereign's head, the value and the given subject, commemorative or otherwise. For the Coronation definitives the four flower emblems of the kingdom had to be exactly the same size, in order that there shouldn't be any "feeling".
More than 20 years later, in 1976, she designed a set of beautiful Christmas stamps based on the Opus Anglicanum embroideries.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, commissions continued to flood in for woodcuts, engravings and linocuts, packaging, calendars for Shell Oil, London Transport posters, greetings cards, bookjackets and laminates. Then, at the age of 63, when most people are considering retirement, Enid Marx became Head of Department of Dress, Textiles and Ceramics at Croydon College of Art in 1965. She stayed for five years, and then left to pursue her own work which she continued until her death.
......
Marx, affectionately known as Marco, never shirked from fighting the good fight and tackled with equal enthusiasm the right of her local grocer, when facing eviction, to find new premises before leaving the old, and her own right to insist on having as much control as possible over the printing processes used to reproduce her work.
Enid Marx battled in the late Seventies to save from demolition the Agricultural Hall, now the Business Design Centre, close to her home and studio in Islington in London, acted as a catalyst and contributed to animated debate about the role of RDIs. She also fought unsuccessfully for many years for a national museum for English folk art. ....
Let's setup this last example of Enid Marx's work with a paragraph from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, article.
THE designer and artist Enid Marx had a passion for patterns. It was an enduring love affair which led her to amass, from early childhood, an important collection of decorative objects from fabrics, cigarette cards and inn signs to ceramics, corn dollies and even gingerbread moulds.
But it was the creation of new patterns for which Marx was celebrated. During her long career - spanning over 70 years - this distinguished designer produced a kaleidoscope of work including stamps, seating fabric and posters for London Transport, books and book-jackets, wrapping paper, logos, laminates for the wartime Utility Furniture Panel (she was awarded the coveted title Royal Designer for Industry in 1944), packaging labels, rugs and menu cards. "Pattern- making comes as second nature," she once said.
Marx, second cousin thrice removed of Karl, was petite and charming, industrious and a perfectionist, outspoken and campaigning. Indeed outspokenness and wilfulness occasionally landed her in trouble; a secret government job during the Second World War was short-lived - she was requested to leave after asking for extra paper to doodle on.
Her refusal to toe the line also meant she failed to achieve her diploma from the Royal College of Art, where she studied in the 1920s. The thought of producing the required "washed-out William Morris stuff" was untenable - she had just discovered the excitement of Picasso and Braque.
Sir Frank Short refused to allow her into his wood-engraving class; he said she drew so badly she wasn't worth teaching. But her fellow-student Eric Ravilious sneaked her in after hours and taught her what he had learned that day. Marx failed to get a diploma because she insisted on drawing in an abstract manner. It was at this time that she first thought of becoming a textile designer.
However, the seeds of her interest in textiles had been sown in childhood when an employee in the local draper's gave her a collection of ribbon samples:
I was aged about four, and to my mother's consternation, invited the whole department to tea, telling them to bring their own cups! I remember the ribbons well; they were pasted on cards with loose ends for feeling. I was especially pleased when he gave me wide samples of fancy ribbons, with plaids or flowers and deckle edges. The narrow baby ribbons were of no interest to me, but I took them out of fear I'd not get the wider ones. I never did anything with them except hoard them.
She also collected French poetry books covered in pattern papers, children's books and toy theatre sheets - she and Eric Ravilious used to visit Pollock's shop in Hoxton where they watched women employees hand-colour the pattern sheets.
.......
[In 1926] she started her own workshop - in a cowshed on Hampstead Hill - designing and making hand-blockprinted textiles. The work was sold through the Little Gallery, off Sloane Street, and later at Dunbar Hay, a gallery in Albemarle Street opened in 1936 to show the work of young designers.
Marx's designs, usually abstract and geometric, soon became extremely fashionable and sought-after - customers included Gerald du Maurier and Gertrude Lawrence. Publishers recognised that the designs would work well on book jackets. The first, in 1929, was a book on the work of the engraver Albrecht Durer. Then came jackets for Chatto and Windus where a commission for two designs prompted Marx to produce 15, of which the publisher bought 12. And, for Curwen Press, Marx completed her first range of patterned papers.
In the late 1930s Marx and her long-time friend Margaret Lambert teamed up for their first folk art project and began collecting print ephemera, scrapbooks, valentines, paper peepshows, children's books and toys for a book entitled When Victoria began to Reign, published by Faber & Faber in 1937.
.......
Marx always embraced the challenge offered up by tackling many different types of work and during the war years began writing and illustrating her own children's books - one, Bulgy the Barrage Balloon, could only be completed after the Ministry of Defence gave Marx permission to depict a barrage balloon. They were very small format books printed on off-cuts.
Marx's skills as a watercolourist were also drawn upon when the Pilgrim Trust commissioned 14 watercolours to record notable British buildings under threat from German bombing.
Towards the end of the war, in 1943, the furniture designer Gordon Russell invited Enid Marx to be a member of the Board of Trade Utility Furniture team. The furniture was turned out cheaply and in large quantities for people who had suffered bomb damage. Marx was responsible for textiles. Her task was to create as great a variety as possible from a very limited supply of yarns and range of colours.
After the war she began working again for publishers and formed a strong bond with Penguin. There was a prestigious commission from Morton Sundour for a collection of printed furnishing fabrics, and in 1947, with Margaret Lambert, Marx published the scholarly English Popular and Traditional Art. Her seminal book English Popular Art (1951), again written with Lambert, was republished in 1989 by Merlin Press.
The Queen's Coronation in 1953 gave Marx the chance to explore yet another design medium - postage stamps. It was a commission she relished....
One of my greatest pleasures has been to work on stamps. The design is a sort of puzzle. Into this tiny national visiting card has to be fitted the Sovereign's head, the value and the given subject, commemorative or otherwise. For the Coronation definitives the four flower emblems of the kingdom had to be exactly the same size, in order that there shouldn't be any "feeling".
More than 20 years later, in 1976, she designed a set of beautiful Christmas stamps based on the Opus Anglicanum embroideries.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, commissions continued to flood in for woodcuts, engravings and linocuts, packaging, calendars for Shell Oil, London Transport posters, greetings cards, bookjackets and laminates. Then, at the age of 63, when most people are considering retirement, Enid Marx became Head of Department of Dress, Textiles and Ceramics at Croydon College of Art in 1965. She stayed for five years, and then left to pursue her own work which she continued until her death.
......
Marx, affectionately known as Marco, never shirked from fighting the good fight and tackled with equal enthusiasm the right of her local grocer, when facing eviction, to find new premises before leaving the old, and her own right to insist on having as much control as possible over the printing processes used to reproduce her work.
Enid Marx battled in the late Seventies to save from demolition the Agricultural Hall, now the Business Design Centre, close to her home and studio in Islington in London, acted as a catalyst and contributed to animated debate about the role of RDIs. She also fought unsuccessfully for many years for a national museum for English folk art. ....
Let's setup this last example of Enid Marx's work with a paragraph from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, article.
Like many of the anonymous producers of popular art Enid Marx liked to use animals as motifs, making up illustrated alphabets and simple tales about them or incorporating them in illustrations and large linocuts; a Noah's ark was used by London Underground to advertise the zoo under the slogan ‘Carried in comfort’. .....
"J" for just right.
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