Colour Wars: Personality, Textiles and the Art of the Interior in 1930s Britain

Abstract

Throughout the interwar period, the British home became the battleground on which a colour war was waged by interior decorators and theorists alike. All-white schemes, embodied in the work of Syrie Maugham, for example, were contrasted with interiors furnished with colourful printed textiles, which were said, by some interior decorators, to be better suited to adding personality and character to the modern British home. By the 1930s, printed textiles were also seen as a way of resuscitating a moribund national industry while responding to aesthetic developments occurring in countries such as France and Germany. This article seeks to uncover how colour, in the form of printed textiles destined for the home, was a primary agent in the definition and elucidation of a distinctly British sense of modernism in the 1930s, at the very moment when continental styles were making their way onto the island. Toward this end, the article turns its attention to the colour-soaked interior landscape produced and advocated by painter, designer and textile manufacturer Allan Walton (1892–1948), whose furnishing textiles were largely the product of collaborations with leading British painters who, for him, were the fulcrum in the renewal and growth of national industries.

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