Cafe thumbnail 1
Not on display

Cafe

Furnishing Fabric
1951 (designed)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

Gerald Holtom is best known for the symbol he designed for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, now used internationally as a peace sign. In the 1930s he had a furniture shop in Totenham Court Road called 'furniture for the small home' which sold his own block printed furniture fabric and also imported rugs from Cyprus. After the war he set up a workshop in Twickenham, Gerald Holtom Ltd. for 'theatre curtains and printed textiles.'

Object details

Categories
Object type
TitleCafe (assigned by artist)
Brief description
printed, 1951, British; Groag, Jacqueline for Gerald Holtom. "Cafe"
Dimensions
  • Width: 64cm (Note: Taken from Registered Description)
  • Length: 76cm (Note: Taken from Registered Description)
Object history
Registered File number 51/2684 taken from Departmental Record
Summary
Gerald Holtom is best known for the symbol he designed for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, now used internationally as a peace sign. In the 1930s he had a furniture shop in Totenham Court Road called 'furniture for the small home' which sold his own block printed furniture fabric and also imported rugs from Cyprus. After the war he set up a workshop in Twickenham, Gerald Holtom Ltd. for 'theatre curtains and printed textiles.'
Bibliographic reference
The following excerpt is taken from Galloway, Francesca, 'Post-War British Textiles'. Robert Marcuson Publishing, London, 2002: "Jacqueline Groag, a Czech by birth, was a talented textile designer, as well-known and as influential as [Lucienne] Day in the 1950s; she continued designing textiles until the 1980s. Groag was a student of Josef Hoffmann and Franz Cizek in Vienna and designed for the Wiener Werkstätte before moving to Paris in 1929. There she designed dress fabrics for Chanel, Schiaparelli and Lanvin. She married the architect and follower of Adolf Loos, Jacques Groag, whose preference for severe functionalism in architecture had some influence on her style. They moved to London in 1939 where her success must have been immediate given the number of textiles she designed for the 'Britain Can Make It' exhibition at the V&A in 1946. The columnar design, launched by David Whitehead for the Festival of Britain in 1951, was adapted from an earlier design commissioned from Groag by the Rayon Design Centre in 1948."
Collection
Accession number
CIRC.222A-1951

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Record createdJune 24, 2009
Record URL
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