Sometimes, the most powerful expressive act is to take something away.
 
This is a familiar idea to historians of twentieth century art, because of Robert Rauschenberg's famous Erased DeKooning of 1953. A young artist's gesture of insurrection against the previous generation, Rauschenberg's work also draws on a long tradition of iconoclasm. The V&A's British Galleries includes a fascinating display of objects defaced by early Protestants, who were taught to abhor 'graven images.' I'm a curator, so I guess I'm supposed to prize original condition. But I bet I'm not the only one who finds medieval stained glass or paintings like the ones below, in which the faces have been scratched out by fervent believers, to be more haunting and beautiful than intact examples ever could be.
 
             
 
Erasing can also be an important design process in its own right. Anyone who's ever done a layout sketch in pencil, traced it in ink, and then erased the pencil underdrawing knows how this process can 'snap' an image into focus.
 
When faced with a graphic design, we're usually not privy to these early stages of development. Fortunately, the V&A has drawings like the ones below, by the great poster designer E. McKnight Kauffer, which show the process at work. In the pencil sketch, you can see his first, second and third thoughts. But the final ink rendering (produced using tracing paper, not literal erasing) has an inevitable, almost mechanical quality produced through the elimination of such uncertainty.
 
 
 
Like many run-of-the-mill design processes, erasing has also been subject to conceptual experimentation in recent years. The 'Erased Classic' rug designs of German designer Jan Kath are a great example. They look almost like pencil drawings that have been rubbed out, or perhaps woven carpets in a state of advanced wear, which have had their colour leached out.
 

 
In fact they are woven by craftsmen based in Kathmandu, Nepal, and then treated with acid. Interestingly, according to my colleague Myriem Naji, what Kath is doing is only an exaggeration of what many craftspeople in Northern Africa and the Middle East do anyway. Because tourists and other buyers prefer old carpets, weavers bleach and distress their work when it's brand new, not unlike the manufacturers of acid-wash jeans.
 
A final example in the V&A collection takes us back to the realms of fine art, but to an expressive register that is the direct opposite of Rauschenberg's Oedipal act of defacement. Paraguayan artist Claudia Casarino makes drawings using a brush dipped only in water - no ink, no paint. Her subjects are drawn from intimate female experience (the one below shows, or rather doesn't show, a woman shaving her own legs - another act of erasure). It's a political work, certainly - a Feminist graphic equivalent to the silent marches of antiwar protestors. But Casarino has also found, in the nearly absent, a hidden terrain of self-expression. When you know what its barely perceptible traces represent, this blank sheet of paper seems filled with meaning.
 
 
 
 

This post has been contributed by special guest star Dr. Philippa Hubbard, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.
 

This endearing pen and ink sketch, from around 1770, of drawing-master Thomas Johnson is a draft design for Johnson’s advertising trade card.  Trade cards were typically single-sheet engraved or etched prints that combined text and image to promote the goods or services for a wide variety of individual tradesmen and shopkeepers.  These black and white images were popular in Britain from the middle of the seventeenth century until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when intaglio engraving techniques were superseded by colour lithographic printing. 
 
Tradesmen and shopkeepers commissioned their cards from designer-engravers and occasionally even provided sketches showing how they wanted their card to look.  Johnson’s drawing from the British Museum’s trade card collection is a rare example of a design from which an engraved plate was cut and multiple paper copies printed.  When a trade card was the product of a creative collaboration, the names of the producers were inscribed in the bottom corners of the print alongside the words ‘fecit’/’delin’ and ‘sculp’ to indicate the dual roles of designer and engraver. Glass-manufacturer Colebron Hancock presented Morrison, an engraver located in Moorfields, with a design which Morrison then replicated on copper.  In this example from the V&A trade card collection (below left), the names of Hancock and Morrison both appeared at the bottom of the card to advertise the role each played in the production process.
 

 
The technical production of trade cards differed little from other engraved print genres.  First, a sketch of a design was made in pencil or ink and applied to the copperplate for cutting.  A draft copy of the advertisement for Newcastle-based chemists Taylor and Parker (above right) , designed by Thomas Bewick, illustrates Bewick’s method of drawing designs in reverse of the final image.  This assisted with the engraving of the copperplate, which was cut back to front in order for prints to be reproduced correctly.
 

Once a reverse image was marked onto a copperplate, an engraver used a ‘burin’ or ‘graver’ to cut away the lines and a ‘scraper’ to remove the excess copper.  The inked plate and a sheet of paper were finally run through a high-pressure rolling press by a skilled printer who pulled the prints individually and hung them up to dry.  Single sheets were produced in this way with each print revealing the pressure mark of the metal plate indented around the image, as seen in the example for metal-worker Henry Price (right).
 
It was imperative for trade cards to be correctly designed and printed as the same card might be in circulation for many years.  Proof copies of trade cards were usually produced without the accompanying text, which was later applied by the engraver or a professional calligrapher.  An impressive card for upholsterer Christopher Gibson, from the 1730s, survives in a proof state with handwritten text inserted into a simple cartouche at the top of the print.  On occasion, the same image was used for multiple tradesmen, with personalised information used to differentiate the advertisement from comparable others. Trade cards were usually produced in batches of hundreds and distributed to privileged shoppers within commercial spaces.  They enabled the goods and services of individual tradesmen to be recognised within an increasingly competitive marketplace.
 
For Thomas Johnson, his trade card (below) provided an opportunity to create a highly individual design, promoting his skills as a master draughtsman.  By carefully sketching the design before it was applied to a copperplate, Johnson insured that his business card fully represented his expertise and unique services.
 

 
Trade cards circulated as commercial notices and artistic prints in the eighteenth century.  The visual splendor of many cards propelled them into the category of collectable artwork, and they continue to inspire interest today - at least for me!  These fascinating prints survive in museums and libraries across the world, and the V&A’s own fine collection is housed in the Prints and Drawings Room.

Since beginning this blog early in 2009, I have been trying to come up with examples in which preparatory sketches have a direct impact on a finished design. But only now, as 2010 is upon us, has it finally occurred to me to write about the activity in which this happens most directly of all: folding. With no tools at all, you can take a piece of paper, marked in all the right places, and turn it into a sculpture.
 
 
 
The most sophisticated type of folding there is, of course, is the East Asian craft of origami. Normally the papers used are either blank or decorative; they don't have layout lines marked on them, for the simple reason that as the object is being folded you would rapidly lose track of the diagram. It's more usual for the folding process to be depicted like this:
 

 
More recently however, advanced practitioners like Philip Chapman-Bell and Robert J. Lang have developed 'crease patterns' to record the process of making their complex origami creations. Chapman-Bell has a terrific blog about experimental work in the medium, while Lang's story is told in this fine article written for the New Yorker magazine by Susan Orlean. He is a mathematician whose academic interests led him to radically expand the possibilities of paper folding. Here is one of Lang's amazing beetles, made from a single piece of  folded paper, and the pattern that shows you how to do it.
 
     
 
I've enjoyed exploring the world of extreme origami, but it hasn't really taken me to what I was looking for: a sketch that can itself be folded into an object. For that, I had to turn to the world of art and design. Here is a lovely project by the Dutch designer Chris Kabel - a napkin that carries its own instructions for decorative folding.
 

 
Without a doubt though, the best example I have found is this more conceptual project by the wonderful artist Janine Antoni. Made for an exhibition entitled the Paper Sculpture Show in 2003, it is its own set of detailed instructions.
 

 
If you follow them exactly, folding along every line, you'll have a crumpled ball of paper, exactly the same as a crumpled ball that Antoni made herself, and which she used as a model for the work. It took her only a second to do that, of course; she's asking you to go through a painstaking feat of craftsmanship to get something that looks like rubbish. But at least it will be just like hers. (For those who like their art crumpled, by the way, check out the 1991 project where Tom Friedman produced two exactly identical pieces of wrinkled-up paper - how he did it is anyone's guess - and at the downbeat end of the spectrum, this work by British artist Martin Creed.)
 
I love the perversity of Antoni's DIY project. And in a way it's exactly what I was looking for in the first place - a way of making the product exactly the same as the sketch. After all, when a designer is done with a preliminary design, she usually tosses it in the bin.
 
Happy New Year out there, everyone!
 
 

This post has been contributed by Polly Hunter, a second-year MA student on the V&A/RCA Course in the History of Design. In it she discusses two extraordinary promotional images that she discovered in the course of her research, which focuses on design in extreme environments, such as oil drilling platforms. (Images courtesy of British Petroleum Plc.)
 
Recently, in the BP (British Petroleum) archive at the University of Warwick, I ran across this unusual watercolour:
 
 

 
 
Little information was attached to it, but I could determine that it was an artist's impression of a drilling and production platform, originally designed for use in 1970s oilfields in the North Sea east of Aberdeen, Scotland. As the legend on the sketch reads, the platform, 'some 550 feet in height from the seabed…is shown superimposed on a drawing of Princes Street, Edinburgh, 1972'. This is one sketch that bears no direct impact on the design of a product. A colossal structure, necessarily highly engineered for use in a hostile context, has here been left marooned on land. For whom does this image exist? 
 
Stylistically, the image is reminiscent of artists’ impressions of future housing developments. 
 
 
 
 

Here, it is as if the design manifests everything we had imagined for that space; our own desires for an ideal environment lay before us.  Usually we ourselves are also depicted, strolling along landscaped boulevards or relaxing in wifi-integrated atriums.   The artist's impression is the friendly face of a future that has already been planned, designed and paid for. 
 
The sketch of the oil platform, in contrast, is not intended as a realistic projection.  In this juxtaposition of two distinct environments, we lose any frame of reference; the image is more like a science fiction fantasy.  It is not intended to make us feel comfortable about the design, but rather to heighten our sense of awe in confronting the indescribable enormity that is the very frontier of technology.  The alien character of the platform is enhanced by its location within the familiar scale of the streets of Edinburgh, as if it had landed from outer space.  
 
The huge scale of offshore oil exploration has always borne an easy analogy with space travel, not only in terms of the exceptionally sophisticated technical demands but in the sense that both seem to operate beyond the realms of our imagination, somewhere improbably and indescribably remote.  By depicting the oil platform within a more familiar, conventional context, the artist not only emphasises its enormous size but exaggerates its mysterious novelty.  
 
Simultaneously, however, this image brings the industry home.  Adopting as its foundations the historic cityscape, this technological masterpiece rises up amongst the other vertical monuments that punctuate the Edinburgh skyline.  BP is here proclaiming a new monument developed from the very anatomy of the land on which it stands and symbolic of an industry which would guarantee a future for the citizens beneath.  To ensure national support of what, at that time, appeared as only the abstract and decidedly risky prospect of profitably extracting oil from a remote, hazardous North Sea, a certain level of propaganda had to be employed. 
 
Another related drawing held in the BP archive shows a drilling platform called the 'Sea Quest' in comparison with Piccadilly Circus, London, in 1965. 
 
Sea Quest was a real-life structure. Ordered by BP in the summer of 1964, it was an early example of the larger, semi-submersible rigs that the deeper, rougher waters of the North Sea demanded.  The significant national finance (approximately £300 million) invested in the platform was such that a press release, for which this picture was intended, needed to emphasise the extraordinary scale and unparalleled ambition of the project.  Such a domineering impression suggests a certain level of assurance, and could help maintain a common anticipation of the evidently vast rewards to be reaped once the rig was to be installed and producing oil. (In the event, it took five years to get that far.)
 
In this second image, the platform fits snugly between the once impressive buildings of the capital as if adding another commercial layer to the city. This time, the intended destination of the rig is evident in the background.  The sea fills the horizon, rolling ominously towards us. If this were a diptych, might we expect to see London submerged and the platform left victorious? Those on board proclaimed citizens of a new 'oil city', not dissimilar to Ron Herron's seemingly fantastic 'Walking City' proposal in an Archigram pamphlet published in the same year? 
 
 

 
And so is it possible to ask, as with any sketch, whose visions are being described? Are they those of the engineer or the national corporation?  The tax-payer or the politician?  The avant-garde architect or the accountant?   The extent of the impact of these megastructures resounds in the scale operating within these early visions.

 
Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I am to work at the V&A, and the past week has been one of those times. First we opened the majestic new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, and now we have a new exhibition about the the present day, or maybe even the near future. The show is called Decode: Digital Design Sensations. Tightly conceived by the V&A's Louise Shannon and Shane Walters, director of onedotzero, and sensitively designed by Francesco Draisci,  the exhibition works brilliantly on a lot of levels.There's a lot to see and do: a lot of eye candy swirling around, and many of the works (like Mehmet Atken's piece Body Paint, shown above) are interactive. But there is also a lot to think about.
 
What it made me reconsider, of course, is the sketch. Several of the 'objects' in the exhibition are driven by data captured from out there in the real world. One example is Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin (my favorite work in the show, against stiff competition). It's a digital animation that charts the passage of airplanes over North America over the course of a day, sped up so that 24 hours pass by in less than a minute.
 

 
It's a stunningly simple depiction of a dizzying array of variables: geography, work patterns, harrowing nocturnal flights from the west coast to New York, America's relations with Mexico and Canada, and many more. It looks like a sketch, but all the visualization is done by the work itself, which 'draws' something out there in the world, at a level of complexity that a human hand could never achieve.
 
Yet despite this backwards high-tech structure, there's something here that is quite similar to the more traditional sketches discussed on this blog. Koblin still had to make a lot of decisions in realizing Flight Patterns, from the standard-issue design concerns of palette and format to more specific questions arising from the work. For example, it would not be nearly as poetic - or watchable - if it were a different speed. And if it focused on a different chunk of geography, it would have a very different political feel.
 
What this suggests to me is that these digital works still involve the same back-and-forth of concept and sketch that older forms of design do; it's just that the work does most of the sketching. What are the consequences of this reversal? One phrase in Decode that caught my eye really seemed to sum it up. It was hiding at the bottom of the label for the work Nature, by John Maeda (the influential former head of the MIT Media Lab, where many of the technical and aesthetic ideas in Decode were developed, and now the President of the Rhode Island School of Design).
 

Like Koblin's work, Maeda's is a digital animation, fed by code. And it is described on the label as an "edition of one." I love this wording, because it seems like a contradiction in terms. "Edition" usually refers to a work made in multiples, like a print or a photograph. It's the opposite of a unique work. But in the context of Decode, the phrase makes a weird sort of sense. It captures the combination of the immateriality of a work like Nature (our sense that it exists as pure information) and also the obvious fact that we encounter it as a physical thing in space, materially composed of monitor, hardware, and the gorgeous play of light. In an introductory text panel, Shannon and Walters describe the works on view as 'bespoke and tailored,' and it seems to me that this craftsy language does capture something real in the designs.
 
Works like these revisit an old conundrum from the days of Conceptual Art in the 1960s: can a work be 'dematerialized'? Some artists tried, and even got close. Robert Barry sent radio and radiation waves through gallery spaces; Yves Klein filled a gallery with nothing, calling it the Void. This absent-mindedness never achieved true dematerialization, of course; not even philosophy can happen without the physical traces of words. But what seemed an impasse back then seems, in Decode, to be a whole new world of possibilities. Via the digital, the immaterial and the material are interlocking in completely new ways. In the process, the contingent aspects of design  that used to be confined to preparatory processes are brought center stage. Now, they happen right in front of our eyes, making the work and being made by it all at once. We can even join in. That's what I call a sensation.

The V&A's current exhibition, Maharaja: The Spendour of India's Royal Courts, got me looking around for related design drawings in the collection. I came up with this example made in about 1850, for a portrait of Ram Singh II of Kota - one of the main figures in the exhibition.
 

 
What strikes me most about this delicate line drawing is its complete lack of colour. Annotations give a sense of which tints were to be used, but if you compare it to the below (similar) image of Ram Singh, which has its full paint job, and you realize what a leap of imagination was required during the initial outlining.
 

 
Here is an even more astounding pairing, dating from the late 1980s - two  preparatory sketches for a billboard for a new park in Operto, by the Portuguese graphic designer Joao Machado. On the left is the pencil preparatory study, and on the right, the coloured finished sketch. Machado achieved these vivid contrasts using paper masks and an airbrush, an anticipation of the computer 'fills' that have become the norm since. It's amazing to think that he had this vibrant palette in his head as he was carefully laying out the design. (My thanks to historian Graca Magalhaes for the images and information on Machado.)
 
   
 
How do designers like Machado plan for the huge changes that adding colour will bring to their work? It is one of the most difficult aspects of the preparatory process, because hardly ever do the materials (and hence, the hues) of the sketch correspond to those of the final product.
 
Designers have come up with many ways to compensate for this problem. One of the most common is to include swatches alongside the drawing. This can be done with lots of different materials, but it is especially common in textiles. Here is one example, a  design by Christopher Farr for a carpet to be installed in the British Embassy in Moscow. The rug is drawn in bodycolour, with samples of the handspun dyed wools to be used physically attached to the sheet.
 

 
Another option, I suppose, is to make a design that is nothing but colour. Here are two studies for theatrical costumes by the great British designer Oliver Messel: on the left, for the Barber of Seville, and on the right, Le Comte Ory (both operas by Rossini). Each discrete dab of color corresponds to the costume of one character within the company.
 
     
 
The difficulty of approximating the colours of real fabric has been turned into a pretext for free-floating abstraction. Messel has created a self-enclosed world of complementary colours, a palette to inspire himself and his collaborators. For all the rapidity of these offhand sketches, they functioned something like a contemporary fashion designer's carefully assembled 'mood board.' For Messel, getting the colours right wasn't a problem: it was pure pleasure.

A small show currently on view in the V&A's Architecture Galleries, Europe and English Baroque: English Architecture 1660-1715, got me thinking about cross-sections in design drawings. The display features works by Christopher Wren and other architects of his era. (Those who saw the excellent exhibition Compass and Rule at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford will see some familiar names - that show will open at the Yale Center for British Art soon.)
 
There are two especially striking examples of cross-sections in the V&A show. First, Christopher Wren's sketches for the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. On the left is one of the earliest surviving drawings for the building, in which Wren is calculating the curves of three separate parabolic shells. On the right is a modern drawing showing the construction in detail.
 
        
 
Wren's idea was that the dome could hold itself up, thus allowing him to give it extra height. (Filippo Brunelleschi did something similar for the dome at Florence Cathedral, which has two shells.)  
The most spectacular object in the 'English Baroque' show is a model for Easton Neston, a country house designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor that still stands in Northamptonshire. On the left is the model assembled, and on the right, the object exploded into its three elements as shown in the exhibition.
 
    
 
This is a very early survival of an English architectural model. The ingenious multipart construction allowed Hawksmoor to show his client the unconventional layout of the interiors.
 
What I love about these objects is the way they show things that are impossible to see in real life. Not until the advent of X-rays in the 1890s did it become possible to see through objects. But this is exactly the effect that Wren, Hawksmoor and other architects achieved in these 17th-century preparatory designs.
 
Below is another example by William Chambers, best known for his design of Somerset House. This drawing dates from the 1770s and is an unrealized design for a church near Oxford Street. I like the combination of real and unreal in the drawing, with shading used to define the interior volumes, the timber frame construction for the dome, but also a surreal pink used to signal where a wall is being seen in cross-section.
 

 
More recent cross-section drawings show how architects and designers continue to rely on this 'impossible' view to specify the most functional concerns about a design. Computer Aided Design (CAD) has made this leap of imagination more precise than ever, so that a cross-section can be a virtual reality version of the object. Here for example is a drawing of the London City Hall by Norman Foster's architectural firm, showing various environmental measures that were built into the structure - including pipes that pull cold groundwater up into the building to cool it.
 

 

To the left is a CAD concept drawing for a 'mould blown' plastic refrigerator, by the designer Roberto Pezzetta for the Italian manufacturer Zanussi. By pairing the exterior view of the fridge with cutaways, Pezzetta subtly implies a link between the object's sensuous, fluid surface and the functional details of its interior design - as in the curvilinear shell that slides down to cover a vegetable drawer at the bottom.
 
There is something truly seductive about cross sections. Though they are among the most functional and informative of design drawings, they also give us the sense of seeing into the designer's mind, as if we were literally inside the process. Perhaps this is why the British jeweller Vicky Ambery-Smith chooses to use cross-section views in her architecturally-inspired work. Below is her own take on St. Paul's Cathedral. The brooch (you can see a similar one on view in the V&A's jewellery galleries) is only about 5cm high, but it seems to be a whole world that we can enter in our imaginations.
 
           
 
 
 
 
 
 

One of the fascinating things about design drawings, at least to me, is that you often can’t tell whether they are for presentation, for working out a design concept, or just recording an object once it’s finished. Sometimes, perhaps, there is a bit of all three going on. The confusion really sets in when you see aesthetic touches on what you would otherwise expect to be a ‘working sketch.’ For whose benefit has the drawing been prettied up? Maybe the draftsman was taking pride in the work. Maybe there was an internal politics in play, where the designer wants the boss, or even the executor of the object, to take the job seriously. Maybe the drawing would be shown to a private client or retailer, as well as being used internally. As I said, it’s confusing.
 
 
These thoughts were prompted recently by a group of drawings for silver that are held within the Edward Barnard & Sons archive. Most of the archive was recently donated to the V&A’s Archive of Art and Design by Barnards' parent company, Padgett and Braham. It’s an extraordinary body of material, recording the firm's work in detail throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - although it traces its origins back to c.1680. (Incidentally, you can see other design drawings for metalwork in the Silver Galleries at the V&A).
 
 

 
In addition, the archive includes business ledgers, glass negative photos, pattern books (including some 19th and even 18th century ones that the company collected for design inspiration), and lots and lots of parts that could be used for casting. The drawers full of handles, spouts, and other bits and pieces of teapots, sugar bowls and who knows what else are like a Deconstructivist’s junk shop.
 
 

 
Most of the drawings in the Barnard archive seem to be quite utilitarian. They capture profiles, and sometimes show multiple sizes of a single design layered on one sheet.
 
 
    
 
The shop used its drawings to capture lots of information, including dates (sometimes more than one, presumably each time the piece had gone into production), dimensions, the names of clients, and also symbols that linked the drawing to boxes of patterns.
 
When going through such a large body of apparently workaday material, it was a real surprise to find a few drawings of a more artistic nature. They aren’t exactly still life paintings, but for some reason, the draftsmen at the firm sometimes went to the trouble of rendering the reflective surface of the metal objects. Here are a couple of examples: an art deco sweet dish from the 1930s, and a low tray, probably in silver-gilt.
 
 
     
 
In the dish on the left, in particular, the draftsman even added a touch of blue to give a convincing effect of silver. More research about the Barnard archive is definitely called for (the museum needs to get the huge body of material organized first), but I think these drawings were doing double-duty. They suggest direct communication with a prospective client, whom Barnard & Sons were probably trying to impress with a shiny surface, but also were used in-house to work up and/or record the design.
 
One last fascinating drawing from the archive dates to the shop’s final year. In this case we know the date precisely, because what was kept was not the original but a fax, sent on 13 November, 1990. This must have been one of the very last objects made by the firm, and it shows that Barnard & Sons had turned to ‘outsourcing.’ It was sent by the firm to a certain Bernie, who would ‘spin’ the main elements of the vase - that is, form sheet metal over a wooden profile using a lathe. (See this video for footage of this process in action.) The drawing is wonderfully specific about the making process, noting that the spun elements would be joined together with a cast knop between the foot and the body, and that ‘fancy wire’ would be added near the rim.
 
Of course smiths have relied on 'outsourcing' for centuries - making silver, like many other traditional crafts, was a specialized trade that lent itself well to the division of labor long before factory production was the norm. But this fax still seems eloquent to me of the decline of the silver industry. By 1990, Barnard & Sons had gone from being one of London’s leading decorative art manufacturers to a very small operation. In general, the twentieth century wasn’t kind to silversmiths. Their key sales items were formal dining and commemorative pieces, both of which went way out of fashion after World War II and haven't come back in since. Most craftspeople still working in the medium are either ‘studio artists,’ working alone and often employed in teaching; or reproduction makers who don’t do much in the way of new designs. That so much expertise and history went by the wayside so recently is a bit heartbreaking. But thanks to the preservation of this archive, we can at least get some sense of this firm, and how it went about bringing a bit of a shine to the British home for almost two centuries.
 
 
 
 

Here's a pop quiz for you. When was this chair designed?
 

 
If you guessed 'last year,' I don't blame you. It's got a fashion-forward pinkness about it, and the combination of circle, curve and triangular wedge has the minimal snap of the latest out of Milan. Or perhaps you went for '1981'? I wouldn't blame you. The chair does look pretty postmodern, and even bears a passing resemblance to Peter Shire's iconic 'Bel Air' chair of that year.
 
    
           
 
Both the mystery chair and Shire's Postmodern design have similarly disjunctive compositions, with curved, angular and round shapes smashed together. They are like almost-accidental masterpieces.
 
But no. The pink chair was designed way back in 1968, and by someone you may never have heard of, unless you are an insider in British design circles. Her name is Jane Dillon. Here's a picture of her, sitting in one of her other chairs from the late '60s.
 

 
Back then she was going by her maiden name of Jane Young, and young she was, too: a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, in her mid-twenties. She found her way to the Milan studio of Ettore Sottsass, the famous Italian designer. For the most part she worked on colour studies for a line of office furniture he was doing at the time for Olivetti. But she also worked out some absolutely amazing chair designs. 
 
Dillon has just given the Archive of Art and Design at the V&A some precious archival materials, including the pictures I've included in this blog post, and also some of the preparatory sketches for the chairs. Here are one of the earliest development drawings - with a tentative title of 'T-Time,' a reference to the idea of including an integral table in the design - and a geometric  study showing the plan of the chair (as if viewed from above).
 
        
 
And here's another motion study, a quick sketch in red pen.The two vignettes at lower left again show the chair in use from above. The idea being shown is that as the sitter shifts her weight from side to side, the seat beneath her (and the other elements of the chair) will move on a swivel joint.
 

 
As stylish as the chair looks today, from Dillon's perspective it was mainly an exercise in dynamic ergonomics.  The motion study above indicates this, but it's clearer still in the final preparatory drawing below, which shows how three of the chair's four parts swivel in coordination according to the user's shifting posture. She thought of it as a functionalist experiment, more late Bauhaus or Gerrit Rietveld than Pop or Postmodern.
 

 
You'll notice that like many designers, Dillon does many types of drawing depending on what she was thinking about. As she put it to me in a recent interview, "my drawings very much reflect my mental state."
 
The chair was put into limited production by a company called Planula - Sottsass made the connection for her - and was produced in several variations of shape and colour, including the green version at right, as well as a version in white leather and gold, of which 12 were purchased by a man that Dillon remembers as a "sheik." It was received well by the design community (Joe Columbo saw and liked it, and it was reproduced in the magazine Domus).  In 1972 the chair was nearly included in an important exhibition about Italian design at the Museum of Modern Art called 'The New Domestic Landscape'. Unfortunately the curators decided Dillon didn't count as Italian. Unfortunately again, in that same year she came down with an illness and came back to Britain to recover with her new husband Charles. The chair never went into wide production, but Dillon kept going. She designed for Habitat, Herman Miller, and Cassina. She went back to the Royal College of Art to teach, and formed a partnership with Peter Wheeler and Floris van den Broecke. More recently, she has teamed up with designer Tom Grieves to create some innovative environmentally sustainable furniture. Keeping up to date today seems to be more important to her than having been ahead of the curve in 1968; still, she's able to marvel at what she came up with back then. "It's the most amazing kind of object. Only when it's in use does it become a new kind of chair."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
The last time I blogged about an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, it was after the show had already closed. Not this time! Beyond Bloomsbury, an exhibition about the designs and decorative arts of the Omega Workshops, will be on view until 20 September, 2009. So there's plenty of time to catch these early examples of British modernism. Many objects are borrowed from the V&A, but (as is often the case when you work for a really large museum) I'd never had the chance to see them before.
 
The Omega Workshops (founded in 1913) are often criticized as a hothouse environment, lacking the radical social vision of the Russian Constructivists (see my previous post Russian Arc) or the Bauhaus. But as the historian Christopher Reed shows in his brilliant book Bloomsbury Rooms, this was one moment where life and artistic ideals were intermingled in many and complicated ways. Under the leadership of art critic Roger Fry - one of the first British observers to really understand the Postimpressionist art then being made in Paris - a group of painters and sculptors including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell played at design. Their objective was to create a truly 'non-traditional' domstic interior, complete with textiles, ceramics, furniture, and other wares. Their aesthetic was basically expressionist. So the key objective for the Omega designers was to retain the freshness of touch that they could achieve in a handpainted object like the Japanese-style screen to the left, with its obvious indebtedness to Matisse. Notice in the detail of the screen below how they painted over the sides of the panels, and right across the hinges.
 

 
How to retain this sense of immediacy in a design for production, though? Textiles are a particularly interesting problem, because their grid-based construction of interwoven warp and weft threads lends itself to rectilinear designs but not to wild gestural composition. It's almost funny to see the free-spirited Omega designers trying to use graph paper when planning out their textiles. Here's an Omega drawing for a rug and a detail - notice how the blue line just wanders aimlessly off the grid.
 
      
 
As Alexandra Gerstein puts it in the excellent catalogue for the Courtauld show, this drawing 'could not have been of practical use to a carpet-maker; the grid would have simply provided a framework or matrix for working out abstract designs and proportions.'
 
One obvious way to escape the grid in a textile is to paint or print the image on to the cloth, rather than weave it in. One example of this approach in the show was Vanessa White's printed linen 'White,' which features blotches of colour scattered willfully across the surface, in no consistent relation to the overprinted linear design (which itself has a hand-drawn quality, thanks to the use of a stencil technique). In the detail to the left, a stray, tiny drop of red testifies to the speed with which the textile was created. But it's in a woven textile like a carpet that you can really get a sense of Omega's complicated relationship to the grid - which was, for them, both a geometric structure in which to play, and a constraint on the expressionist gesture. The African-influenced carpet design at right was created by Duncan Grant for the Ideal Home Exhibition held at Olympia in 1913. It shows only one-fourth of the whole pattern (on the same principle discussed in my blog post Game of Two Halves, it was replicated for each corner of the final carpet). For the manufacturer of the carpet,  it presented an obvious problem: how do you weave a textile that has the brushy quality of the black lines and hatch-marks in the drawing, which give it so much life and energy? The ingenious answer arrived at by Grant in conjuncton with the weavers at the Royal Wilton Carpet Factory (who probably made the carpet) is visible in the details below of the drawing and the finshed rug. As you can see, the draftsmanship of the sketch is conveyed in the textile through a series of 'steps' in each black woven line. As Fry wrote of the (unidentified) weaver, 'he has taken a theme of almost daring simplicity, but not relying only on the broken quality of the knotted surface of the rug, he has deliberately broken his rectilinear by small steps up and down; he has also made his shading sometimes perpendicular and sometimes diagonal.'
 
    
 
Though this solution depended almost entirely on the judgment of the manufacturer, the carpet nonetheless realized Fry's stated goal of 'substituting wherever possible the directly expressive quality of the artist's handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction.' It's a great example of how the passage from sketch to product, and from one set of hands to another, can be the occasion for avant garde experiment.