...... With her own independent textile printing workshop from 1927 to 1939 Marx cut designs on wood and lino, and printed lengths to order....
Marx knew many of the leading figures of the 1920s crafts revival but was also interested in designing for industry under appropriate conditions of artistic independence. In 1935 she was commissioned by Christian Barman of London Underground to design new seating moquettes. ‘It couldn't be a dazzling design, or something too directional, in case people travelling began to feel seasick’, she recalled ....
The war brought an end to handblock printing, but Marx found new occupations in illustrating children's books and painting for the Recording Britain scheme. ... In 1944 she was created a royal designer for industry by the Royal Society of Arts. After .... the war [she is found] teaching in art colleges at Gravesend and Croydon, where she was head of three departments at once. She increased her production of book illustrations (usually wood engravings but sometimes lithographs) and in the course of a long and productive relationship with the publishers Chatto and Windus designed a standard pink and sky-blue jacket for the translations of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. For the new reign in 1952 she designed borders for the queen's head for the low-value definitive stamps, an area of design to which she returned with the Christmas stamps of 1976.
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With Margaret Lambert, Marx collaborated on ...book[s:], .... English Popular and Traditional Art (1946), in Collins's Britain in Pictures series, and English Popular Art, published by Batsford in 1951. Other artist contemporaries shared their excitement about the stimulus that the folk art of the industrial revolution offered to the modern eye.
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Like many of the anonymous producers of popular art Enid Marx liked to use animals as motifs... a Noah's ark [she designed] was used by London Underground to advertise the zoo ....At home she kept Siamese cats, whose misdeeds formed a frequent topic of conversation with the many visitors whom she entertained right up to the end of her life.
Enid Marx did not marry.
She was a very distant cousin of Karl Marx.
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