Enid Marx: The Pleasures of Pattern

This is the first monograph on the work of Enid Marx (1902–1998), a leading artist, designer, collector and writer, who played an important role in British cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century. Marx was a leading designer in the first generation to make a distinctive contribution to the growing practice of industrial design in Britain. Her design work, much of it anonymous, including wartime utility fabrics, book illustration and cover patterns, tube train seat fabric and postage stamps, was, in its time, ubiquitous in British public life. As a whole, it remains utterly emblematic of post-war popular visual culture. Drawing on a wealth of research and thoroughly illustrated with high-quality reproductions – many previously unpublished – Alan Powers’ account adds considerably to the existing literature available on Enid Marx and reveals an artist whose work was perfectly poised at the intersection of traditional craft and abstract modernity.