Femme Ecoutant

This printed cotton was one of a series of dress and furnishing textiles launched by Fuller Fabrics of the USA in the mid 1950s. The firm commissioned renowned artists such as Picasso, Miro, Chagall, and Leger to make designs for their Modern Master Prints and worked closely with each artist on the choice of designs for reproduction, the final design, and the colourways, so that the end result reflected the artist's palette and technique. The quality of the printing was exceedingly high. A film documented the project, and it received much publicity, via an exhibition opened at Brooklyn Museum in Autumn 1955, and a five-page article in Life magazine illustrated with photos taken in the artists's studios.

In 1956 Fuller's Decorama Division introduced the series for home furnishings.They were directed at a more exclusive market than the dress textiles and were available only through decorators. Miro's Femme Ecoutant reconfigured his painting 'Woman listening to music' (Femme entendant la musique), created in 1945.

These textile collections were significant for American design at the time because of the collaboration of textile manufacturers, museums, commercial art galleries and artists in an attempt to raise the standard of American textile design and widen the market for contemporary art. Similar initiatives took place in Australia, Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands in the 1940s and 1950s.