Dorothy Liebes survey weaves the story of her little-known but colourful career

Dorothy who? That’s the query design insiders, together with museum-goers, could ask themselves when New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum opens the primary monographic present in over 50 years on Dorothy Liebes (1897-1972), the influential textile designer and weaver. Liebes performed a key position in mid-century Fashionable American interiors, however now even many consultants within the subject might need bother inserting her.

Liebes’s collaborators, reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and Raymond Loewy, want no introduction. And Liebes herself was amply celebrated in her personal lifetime. However the full scope of her three many years of A-list commissions—which stretched from New York’s United Nations constructing to the set of the 1949 Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy comedy Adam’s Rib—disappeared into archives and museum collections following her dying in 1972, when her studio closed down. A Darkish, A Mild, A Brilliant: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes makes use of practically 200 objects, from code-like pattern playing cards to extant items of glamorous furnishings, to reinstall Liebes as one of many interval’s artistic geniuses.

The curious title refers to Liebes’s motto for how one can devise color schemes, and the present manages to deliver the black-and-white inside pictures of mid-century interiors again to life with preserved examples of Liebes’s palette.

Liebes had initially deliberate to be an artist, explains the exhibition’s co-curator Alexa Griffith Winton, and “her understanding of color emerged from that”. The California native collaborated with vogue designers, in addition to architects, and whereas a 1958 woven-leather pattern card—in numerous shades of yellow—is a examine for a leather-based sample appropriate for sneakers and purses, its putting grid exhibits an artist’s eye at work.

A problem for mid-century Fashionable architects was what to do with all these glass home windows. “You couldn’t have Victorian ruffles,” says Winton, and so Leibes leaped into the fray by serving to to vogue “a brand new paradigm for window therapies”. The present can be wealthy in examples of Liebes’s textiles for shades and drapes. In 1950, simply after Liebes relocated her studio from San Francisco to New York, she collaborated on Henry Dreyfuss’s now legendary redesign of the Persian Room, a nightclub in Manhattan’s Plaza Resort. The present will embody an expanse of luminous inexperienced cloth Liebes later devised for the house, which used artificial Lurex yarn to counsel lights within the drapes.

Liebes was an early and persuasive advocate of incorporating artificial supplies into effective textiles, and the Cooper Hewitt is ready to attract on its assortment for a 10ft-long pattern of a fabulously colored materials known as Mexican Plaid. The 1938 twill could embody conventional cotton, silk and wool—however will get a dose of Twentieth-century sparkle from cellophane.

• A Darkish, A Mild, A Brilliant: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 7 July-4 February 2024