Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist's family
With Anthony d'Offay, London
Acquired from the 1991 exhibition by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Hayward Gallery, Vorticism and its Allies, 27 March-2 June 1974, cat.no.123
New York, Davis & Long, Vanessa Bell, A Retrospective Exhibition, 18 April-24 May 1980, cat.no.19
London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, The Omega Workshops, Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1911-1920, 18 January-6 March 1984, cat.no.6
New York, Vassar College Art Gallery, Vanessa Bell 1879-1961, 18 April-24 May 1984, cat.no.6
Barcelona, Fundacio Caixa se Pensions, El grup de Bloomsbury, 1986, cat.no.42 (ill.)
New York, Hirschl & Adler, British Modernist Art, 14 November-9 January 1988, cat.no.106
London, Spink, Duncan Grant & Vanessa Bell: Design and Decoration 1910-1960, 23 October-22 November 1991, cat.no.5 (ill.b&w)
London, The Tate Gallery, The Art of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 4 November 1999-30 April 2000, cat.no.94 (col.ill.); this exhibition travelled to San Marino, The Huntington Library, 4 March-30 April 2000 and New Haven, Yale Centre for British Art, 20 May-2 September 2000

Literature
Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, G. Fraser, London, 1976, p.89 (col.ill.)
Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999, p.172, cat.no.94 (col.ill.)
Alexandra Gerstein (ed), Beyond Bloomsbury. Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19, Courtauld Gallery, London, 2009, pp.116-17

The non-figurative textiles produced by artists at the Omega Workshops in 1913 are perhaps the Omega's most radical contribution to modernist design. In an article in 1941 Nikolaus Pevsner recognised the quality of their innovation, remarking that it was not until the 1920s that such abstract applied design became widespread among French, German and Russian artists. Two stencil-printed linen textiles by Vanessa Bell were produced in time to be sold at the opening of the Omega in July 1913; they were available in different colour combinations and sold well, alongside other linens designed by Frederick Etchells, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Bell's were named Maud and White; a third textile by Bell, completely abstract and brilliantly coloured, was not however printed and the gouache design is in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. The present work is unusual in that it is carried out on graph paper which suggests that the design was also intended for carpeting, the squares indicating the individual knots for execution by the maker. Bell designed no more printed textiles until the early 1930s but none is as startling as Maud's pared-down geometrical repeat, outstanding in European textiles before the First World War. Examples of the textile as printed are in the Victoria & Albert Museum. For a recent and illuminating discussion of Omega textiles, see the Courtauld catalogue listed here under 'Literature'.

We are grateful to Richard Shone for compiling this catalogue entry.

Please note that this work has been requested for the forthcoming exhibition Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) to be held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 February–4 June 2017.