Enid Marx: The maverick textile artist who changed transportation forever | Art and design

toThe time you traveled on the London Underground, I guess you didn’t stop to think about the way you were sitting on the history of art. However, tubular fabrics have a fascinating place in the evolution of British design. Now the woman at the heart of their story is the subject of an exhibition aiming to bring her back into the narrative, long after her contribution was ignored.

Enid Marks’ designs for what was then the London Passenger Transport Board were discontinued in the 1960s, but her pioneering work in the 1930s would change the ambiance of Underground interiors forever. Until she was commissioned to create a series of new styles, the mood palette of tube wagons could be summed up in one word: sombre. They were manufactured in-house by the factories that produced the fabric – rugs, a durable form of carpet-like velvet used to this day – and were made in a color palette of browns and grays to blend with the mud and sweat left behind by London’s commuters.

Marx, who had been hired in 1937 alongside Paul Nash and Marion Dorn to create proper designs for the first time, ran with a different idea. She wondered: Why not make the seats bright, exciting and cheerful, so that they hide them instead of mixing with the dirt? This idea has been the guiding principle of London’s transport ever since, and visitors to the ‘Lifestyle: Enid Marx and Modern British Design’ exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, which opens on Saturday, will see examples of Marx’s first designs in this vein, including the bright red and green geometric pattern – eye-shaped ovals that interconnect, interspersed with elongated diamonds of red and green – which would become her most famous tubular weave.

She called the model the Shield, because it was inspired by the African designs that Marx saw in the British Museum. She spent hours there, and also at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she was particularly interested in Indian woodblocks and their history. “She was influenced by Cubism and Purism – but more than anything else, her work was shaped by the ethnographic shows she saw in London museums,” says As Crawford, the exhibition’s curator. “And although it is sometimes said that she appropriated these designs, she came from a time when empire and nationalism influenced everything else. Her designs show how style is both political and cultural.”

Marx’s work also marks a dividing line, says Crawford, between Arts and Crafts and British modern times. “She would often refer to ‘faded William Morris stuff’, and was determined to modernize the tenor and style of British design. There’s a lot of richness in her patterns. They’ve been dismissed as decorative, but she actually takes abstraction seriously, and includes messages about African art, colonial influences, and the way one art form takes over from another.”

Crawford agrees that one of the interesting elements of Marx’s work is the contrast between the rigidity of the work she created—she often blamed factories for failing to work to their exacting standards in reproducing her designs—and the nonconformity that underpinned her lived experience. Marx’s life partner was the historian Margaret Lambert, and the two were part of what Crawford calls the “sapphic community,” many of whom, like Marx, were designers and makers. Marx went by the name Marco, and she wore ties of her own design – the Compton Verney show will include examples, including some brightly colored Spritton ties, named after the Devon village where Lambert grew up.

“They were a married couple, at a time when male homosexuality was still criminalized,” Crawford says. “They lived against the grain – but both were from privileged backgrounds, and their same-sex partnership could be seen more as a fashionable tactic of social privilege than a radical statement.” Crawford adds that Marx’s entire personality was full of contradiction: she resisted being categorized all her life. “She did not consider herself a feminist. In some ways, she was breaking the mold, but in her views she was often conservative with a small ‘c’.” It is often said that she was a distant cousin of Karl but “it is a loose connection – perhaps Enid wanted to separate herself from his history.” For Crawford, Marx’s relationship to type is linked to the constraints with which he had to live. “There’s a deep quality to her conservatism. She was able to live freely, but there was always a sense of restraint that I think comes from her gender, from the class expectations of women.”

Enid Crystal was born Dorothy Marks in London in 1902, the youngest of three children in a middle-class Jewish family, and was educated at the prestigious Roedean School in Sussex before studying at the Royal College of Art, where Nash was her tutor, and whose contemporaries included Barbara Hepworth and Eric Ravilious.

Her father was a papermaking businessman, and this inspired her lifelong interest in what she called “folk art.” But this was considered vulgar at RCA, where it failed in its final evaluation. However, popular art would be the backbone of her life’s work: after training in the workshop of the influential textile artists Phyllis Baron and Dorothy Larcher, she went on to design her own block-printed textiles – examples of which will be at the Compton Verney Gallery – but then turned to industrial design when she was commissioned for London Transport Patterns.

During World War II, she became one of the designers of the Utility Scheme, which aimed to produce high-quality, low-cost materials to furnish the homes of bombed families. The key has been small iterations, which reduce waste when making curtains and covering furniture: one useful fabric for her, chevron – a brown-and-blue herringbone pattern – is among the exhibits at Compton Verney.

In 1944, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to design, Marks became the third woman to receive the Royal Designer of Industry Award; But the war years were the peak of her life. Disappointments followed: only one of her designs was included in the 1951 Festival of Britain, and while she was commissioned to work on stamps for the new Queen in 1952, and although her framing of Elizabeth’s portrait was considered a success, several subsequent stamp designs were rejected – including one rejected by the Queen herself, who disliked Marx’s placement of the royal head in an oak tree, as she felt it might evoke unfortunate memories for her. Grandfather Charles II who hid in the royal oak.

Her later work included designing book covers for publishers, and creating a woodblock picture book published in 1985 as ABC of Birds and Beasts, and later republished in 2000 as Marco’s Animal Alphabet. By then, Marx had been dead for two years, having survived Lambert by three years.

But Marx’s love of popular art was not limited to her own creations: she and Lambert, whose partnership lasted more than sixty years, were collectors of mass-produced works of art, which they bequeathed to Compton Verney. The display there will be filled with the pair’s corn dollops. ceramics including Wedgwood pieces, dogs and a figure of Saint George; A plaster model of a gingerbread cat (they always had a pair of Siamese) and countless other curiosities.

“It’s an eclectic mix of pieces,” says Ollie McCall, chief curator at the Compton Verney Museum. “But it was a lifelong passion for Marks, and you can clearly see how the collection influenced her work. She believed that there was a space for mass-produced popular art, and that works of art were not just individual pieces that constituted ‘art’.” Among the approximately 165 works in the exhibition are pieces on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, to which Marks left her archives – some, McCall says, have never been seen because they were in storage. “She has been overlooked – forgotten – and this show seeks to explore her life and work through an in-depth examination of the influences on her,” he says.