The House of Illustration has three galleries and three exhibitions on at any given time.
Just opened in the Main Gallery is an impressive retrospective of textile designer, printmaker and illustrator Enid Marx (1902 to 1998). Marx was at the Royal College of Art in 1922, where her contemporaries included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, and together with the latter in particular she helped to define the look and feel of mid-20th century commercial design.
The exhibition coincides with the 20th anniversary of Marx’s death and is the most comprehensive retrospective of her work mounted in the last 40 years. It brings together over 150 pieces from private and public collections, many displayed for the first time and is divided among the Main Gallery’s four rooms.
Room 4
Arguably the best way to start is to go to the smallest room (on the left) and watch the five-minute film about Enid which is playing in a loop and which features contributions from fellow print-makers, friends and art scholars.
The film introduces you to what I think are two important elements: she was not a fine artist working in oil or sculpture to make big depictions of the human condition or portraits or nudes; the reverse: she was first and foremost a textile or fabric designer who also tried her hand at designing book jackets, book illustration, posters, stamps, train seats and so on.
And this is the second thought – the diversity of her output. According to a friend in the film she was never happier than when drawing pen in hand, or using the tools to carve out of wood or lino a block for printing.
Room 1
Room one is dominated by a huge blow-up of a drawing of Enid’s studio at number 43 Ordance Road, St John’s Wood, made by her friend Eric Ravilious, which has been printed onto the gallery wall. This sets the tone of a kind of cluttered, homely workspace, of the makeshift setup of a young artist just setting out to forge a career.
Installation view of Enid Marx at the House of Illustration showing the wall-sized sketch of Marx’s flat by Eric Ravilious, wall cases of fabrics and a central display of tools. Photo by Paul Grover
The room introduces us to ten or so large fabric designs, mostly assembled (if I’ve understood this correctly) by carving the original pattern into a woodblock, then inking the block and imprinting it on ready-made fabric, then re-inking the block and printing the section of fabric next to it, and so on, to make repeat-pattern prints. This is a very laborious hand process which made the resulting fabrics quite expensive.
The first of the ten display cases in the exhibition contains the very tools that Marx used in her craft, including a folding holder for wood cutting tools, an ‘ogee’ and ‘spook’ wood block, as well as an invitation to one of her earliest shows, a studio card, a dye recipe book copied out laboriously by hand, textile samples, an order book and so on. All very practical, very business like.
Being a woman
Enid suffered various professional disadvantages from being a woman. At the Royal College of Art she was banned from the Design department where the wood carving equipment was kept, although Ravilious used to sneak her in after hours. She was refused a diploma at the painting school because she was considered too modern. At various points in later life she was blocked out of commissions or not given adequate technical information to fulfil them.
I expected an emphasis on this part of her story, given the domination of art scholarship and art curation by women who feel they have to bring out the grievances and injustices experienced by all women in the past.
Enid Marx working on a textile design post-1945
What was more interesting because less expected was the way one of the historians in the film pointed out that Marx benefited from the growth of women-led shops and businesses in the 1920s and 30s.
After the Great War women emerged more independent, with greater spending power. Thus shops with all kinds of domestic and fashionable goods sprang up to cater for this new market, and alongside them, a network of new women designers, craftspeople, businesswomen and so on.
Thus after leaving the Royal College of Art, Enid became assistant to Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher who were reviving the old technique of using hand-carved blocks of wood. Her work from the 1930s was popular with clients such as the women-led craft shops Dunbar Hay and the Little Gallery.
Her talent was eventually to become widely acknowledged. Among other accolades, she was the first female engraver to be awarded the title of Royal Designer for Industry.
This first room, then, gives us a basic introduction to her life, to some examples of the large, repeat-pattern fabric designs, explained how there was a new market for them in the 1920s, and shows us some of the tools of the trade.
Room 2
Room two is the biggest room and contains an impressive variety of her design output from the 1920s to the 1960s. Where to start?
In 1929 she made her first designs for the covers of books by Chatto and Windus, initially as wood engravings, then as lithographic or line-block reproduction in colour. She designed book covers for the Curwen Press throughout the 1930s and in 1939 won a contract to design the covers of some of the new King Penguins, starting with Some British Moths by Norman Riley in 1945.
Small and discreet and dignified, these stylishly patterned covers are objects of great beauty.
Book cover designs by Enid Marx
In 1937 London Underground commissioned young designers to submit ideas for new seating moquettes, ‘a thick pile fabric used for carpets and upholstery’. The design had to be woven into the fabric not printed on top of it, as Enid had previously done, so this represented a whole new set of technical challenges.
The exhibition includes a couple of big panels showing two of the fabrics she eventually designed and London Transport purchased. Imaginatively, the curators of the exhibition have embedded these samples in a wall-sized blow up of a black and white photo of an old Tube train carriage, showing them in situ.
Installation view of Enid Marx at the House of Illustration showing her designs for Tube train seat covers placed over an enlarged b&w photo of an old Tube carriage
In 1944 Enid was recruited to the Board of Trade Utility Furniture Committee to design curtain and seating fabrics to be sold at a fixed, affordable price to owners of bombed-out homes. She created 30 upholstery and curtain fabric designs using limited wartime supplies of yarn.
In 1951 she was invited to design the stamps to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Next to these rather staid creations, featuring an orthodox photobust of the Queen are displayed the much more funky set she designed 20 years later around the theme of medieval English embroidery.
Stamps designed by Enid Marx, 1976
In 1957 Enid was commissioned to design two London Underground posters featuring London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo. Many of her earlier designs and illustrations had featured animals, birds and fish so this was a great pleasure for her. The results are funky sharp prints full of colour.
The end wall of room two features a dozen or so prints made from woodcuts showing she was a real mistress of this technique. Her woodcuts were used for book illustrations and covers, catalogues, book plates and repeat patterns. There are several impressive big woodcuts of cats and one of sunflowers. To my mind they echo the ‘primitive’ technique of some German Expressionists but utterly transformed into a world of charm and feminine tranquility.
The Main Gallery at the House of Illustration displaying Marx’s prints (on the far wall, left), London Underground posters (on the right wall) and books and children’s illustrations (in the display cases)
Some of the display cases give abundant evidence of the fun she had designing ‘chapbooks’ (cheaply produced booklets), quiz books, story books and so on for children. These were ideal for wartime rationing conditions. She created a couple of sheets of paper titled Menagerie which contained the outlines of animals which could be cut up and folded together to make 3-D toys. She designed a 1939 chapbook with animal stories attached to each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.
Envelope for Menagerie Cut Out Game, Royle Publications (1947) by by Enid Marx. Courtesy of Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections
She wrote a children’s story early in the Second World War titled Bulgy the Barrage Balloon, quickly followed by Nelson, the Kite of the King’s Navy; The Pigeon Ace and The Little White Bear.
Room 3
Room three offers an insight into Enid’s private life. In 1931 she met the historian Margaret Lambert and they were to spend the rest of their long lives together, known to their friends as ‘Marco’ and ‘Lambo’.
They shared an interest in British folk and traditional art, travelling far and wide and collecting a huge range of examples of popular and demotic art. This room is packed with charming and touching examples.
Installation view of some of Edith Marx’s collection of folk art at the House of Illustration
It led to the book English Popular and Traditional Art, published in 1946, which aimed to showcase ‘the art which ordinary people have created for their own lives in contrast to the “fine arts” made for special patrons’.
Enid hoped that folk art would suggest a way ahead for English art which would reject the coldness and brutality of Modernism in favour of an art of ‘gaiety, delight in bright colours and a sense of well-balanced design.’
It’s a lovely note to end on, democratic, open to novelty and eccentricity, profoundly English and deeply affectionate, quietly loving, charming and humorous. Next to this entertaining bric-a-brac are hung three lovely landscape watercolours by Enid. It would have been nice to see more of those.
Marx, Bawden and Ravilious
The exhibition guide – and other sources you read about Enid – laments that she is not as well known as Ravilious and Bawden, both of whose reputations are currently undergoing a revival.
Having just visited the fabulous new exhibition of Edward Bawden at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, I can suggest two reasons for this. One is that – putting aside any assessment of the quality of their respective work – Ravilious in the 1930s, and Bawden much more so on the 1950s and 60s, were lucky enough / proactive enough, to be involved in book-length projects which promoted their work.
Enid certainly did illustrations for, and wrote her own children’s books, as well as making charming woodcuts for nursery rhymes and the alphabet, all of which are in evidence here. But Ravilious produced a set of illustrations for the classic 1938 book High Street (text by the architectural historian J. M. Richards), as well as sets of illustrations like his project to do watercolours of all the ancient figures carved out of the turf on the southern Downs, which had real mass appeal.
An illustration from High Street by Eric Ravilious and J.M. Richards
The large number of gorgeous cartoon-like pictures he did of the English high street or countryside can to this day be repackaged into books, calendars and cards, every one of which is immediately ‘grabby’.
Or compare Bawden’s reinvention of himself after the Second World War as a master of linocut printing, especially of architectural subjects, producing not only attractively stylised images of Brighton, or London landmarks or markets – but sets and series of them, which could be packaged up into books such as Bawden’s London, which also lend themselves to the world of calendars, postcards, posters and so on.
By contrast, although everything she did is striking and attractive, Enid doesn’t seem to have produced the same kind of sets or series designed to accompany a general text, in the way that Bawden and Ravilious did. Maybe this is one reason why her work then, and now, is less easily accessible.
Reason Number Two might be something to do with the nature of commercial and abstract design itself, which is that it works very well in situ, in context, but – taken out of context – loses power and impact.
Patterns and designs by Enid Marx at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover
Each one of Enid’s designs was made for a reason and context (curtain, chair cover, book cover) in which it made a statement. Each one is certainly worthy of study and admiration (I noticed the number of visitors to this exhibition with their noses right up against the glass, studying the detail of the designs). But if you take large numbers of her designs and place them next to each other, it tends to dissipate the impact rather than augment it. For some reason a whole load of snippets of design patterns placed together tend to neutralise each other.
By contrast, if you place Edward Bawden’s six big linocut prints of London markets together they complement and empower each other, making a strong cumulative statement.
Covent Garden by Edward Bawden (1967)
Apart from the strong styling, each of Bawden’s illustrations has a kind of narrative – the element of human figures going about their work – which is both attractive, and builds up interest the more examples you see.
By contrast, Enid’s designs are not only subtle and small-scale (the book covers are only meant to be book sized) but mostly have no narrative or any kind of feature you can take and accumulate. Abstract patterns don’t tell a story.
Summary
To summarise, Enid a) mostly devoted herself to abstract designs, which, taken out of context as snippets, tend to appeal only to specialists, and don’t take well to being displayed en masse in a gallery. b) When she did do more figurative work – in her book illustrations and large prints – the illustrations were for books which remained obscure (wartime chapbooks, the children’s books which haven’t lasted) and the prints, lovely in themselves, don’t lend themselves to packaging up into books with strong themes or selling angles.
Her work, in other words, has a subtlety and understatement which doesn’t lend itself to the variety of commercial exploitation which that of Ravilious and Bawden does. And these may be some of the reasons why her work tends to be overlooked when 1930s and 1940s design and art is discussed.
Anyway, hopefully this lovely, uplifting exhibition will go a long way to raising her profile, winning her new fans and enthusiasts, and to making her name one to mention in the same breath as her contemporaries.
The House of Illustration
House of Illustration is the UK’s only public gallery dedicated solely to illustration and graphic art. Founded by Sir Quentin Blake it opened in July 2014 in King’s Cross, London. Its exhibition programme explores historic and contemporary illustration as well as the work of emerging illustrators, and is accompanied by a vibrant programme of talks and events.
Feline Phantasy. Linocut in four colours (1948) by Enid Marx © Estate of Enid Marx
Related links
- Enid Marx: Print, Pattern and Popular Art continues at the House of Illustration until 23 September 2018
- Enid Marx Wikipedia article
Also currently on at the House of Illustration
- Quentin Blake: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun until 30 September 2018
- Christy Burdock: The People in the Gallery until 8 July 2018
Books & Boots 