UFO Info Week-End

The design therefore had to be bold but because it was for a moving

The design, therefore, had to be bold but, because it was for a moving vehicle, should not be dazzling to passengers. The patterns included propeller-driven planes – “much later I had to take the propellers off to modernise the designs”.Marx was then spotted by Christian Barman and Frank Pick and was asked by the London Passenger Transport Board to design the hard-wearing, cotton- velvet seating fabric, known as moquette, for use on London bus and Tube seats. The scale of the repeatwas governed by the economy of cutting up upholstery for seats of divergent sizes.The results are the strong and timeless geometric designs still in use today.Marx always embraced the challenge offered up by tackling many different types of work and during the war years began writing and illustrating her own children’s books – one, Bulgy the Barrage Balloon, could only be completed after the Ministry of Defence gave Marx permission to depict a barrage balloon. In order to achieve the right effect strong contrasting tones had to be used, combined with changes of texture, from cut to uncut moquette. Publishers recognised that the designs would work well on book jackets. The first, in 1929, was a book on the work of the engraver Albrecht Durer.

Then came jackets for Chatto and Windus where a commission for two designs prompted Marx to produce 15, of which the publisher bought 12. And, for Curwen Press, Marx completed her first range of patterned papers.In the late 1930s Marx and her long-time friend Margaret Lambert teamed up for their first folk art project and began collecting print ephemera, scrapbooks, valentines, paper peepshows, children’s books and toys for a book entitled When Victoria began to Reign, published by Faber & Faber in 1937.Immediately before the Second World War she designed imprinted PVC and rayon linings for Whatajoy Luggage. I used to hide jam tarts up my knicker legs.”After Roedean, Marx attended the Central School of Art and then the RCA. Her first work was for the renowned textile design team Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. The potter Norah Braden had introduced Marx to them and their textiles and in 1925 she joined their Hampstead studio as an apprentice.A year later she started her own workshop – in a cowshed on Hampstead Hill – designing and making hand-blockprinted textiles. The work was sold through the Little Gallery, off Sloane Street, and later at Dunbar Hay, a gallery in Albemarle Street opened in 1936 to show the work of young designers.Marx’s designs, usually abstract and geometric, soon became extremely fashionable and sought-after – customers included Gerald du Maurier and Gertrude Lawrence. “Roedean practically let me do drawing full-time in my last year.” The pupils learned carpentry too – “so I got a grounding in the use of tools.

I also did a lot of cookery there during the war because it was a way to get more to eat. But her fellow-student Eric Ravilious sneaked her in after hours and taught her what he had learned that day. Marx failed to get a diploma because she insisted on drawing in an abstract manner. It was at this time that she first thought of becoming a textile designer.However, the seeds of her interest in textiles had been sown in childhood when an employee in the local draper’s gave her a collection of ribbon samples:I was aged about four, and to my mother’s consternation, invited the whole department to tea, telling them to bring their own cups! I remember the ribbons well; they were pasted on cards with loose ends for feeling.

I was especially pleasedwhen he gave me wide samples of fancy ribbons, with plaids or flowers and deckle edges. The narrow baby ribbons were of no interest to me, but I took them out of fear I’d not get the wider ones. I never did anything with them except hoard them.She also collected French poetry books covered in pattern papers, children’s books and toy theatre sheets – she and Eric Ravilious used to visit Pollock’s shop in Hoxton where they watched women employees hand-colour the pattern sheets.Her first encouragement to draw had come at Roedean School where the enlightened Head of Art, Dorothy Martin, let her young pupils draw from nudes. “Pattern- making comes as second nature,” she once said.
Marx, second cousin thrice removed of Karl, was petite and charming, industrious and a perfectionist, outspoken and campaigning. Indeed outspokenness and wilfulness occasionally landed her in trouble; a secret government job during the Second World War was short-lived – she was requested to leave after asking for extra paper to doodle on.Her refusal to toe the line also meant she failed to achieve her diploma from the Royal College of Art, where she studied in the 1920s. The thought of producing the required “washed-out William Morris stuff” was untenable – she had just discovered the excitement of Picasso and Braque.Sir Frank Short refused to allow her into his wood-engraving class; he said she drew so badly she wasn’t worth teaching. But it was the creation of new patterns for which Marx was celebrated.