If asked, most people would put Andy Warhol at the beginning of modern art’s fascination with repetition, the appropriation of tools of mass production, and a blurring of the border between fine art, fashion and commercial graphics. However, the current exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada runs counter to that assumption and ends with the Factory master after providing an enlightening revision of the 20th Century’s reigning art historical narration through a comprehensive collection of artist textiles. In addition to challenging the status of the prince of Pop Art, the exhibition also repudiates two resilient Modernist prejudices: one against beauty and the other against commerce. 
Salvador Dali, Number, Please?, 1947
To be honest, the first prejudice collapses under scrutiny and is really only representative of one particular aesthetic narrative, but it’s always nice to be reminded that visual art can be pleasing to the eye as well as the mind. It’s also helpful to remember that stylistic shifts bleed over the turn of the century, so the 19th lasts well into the middle of the 20th and what we call contemporary is still only a recent anomaly. Which is just to say that Constructivist rugs and scarves by Henry Moore, Henry Matisse, and Alexander Calder all look lovely hung on the wall, while fabrics by Marc Chagall and Joan Miró make for stylish frocks. 
Andy Warhol, Happy Bug Day, c.1955
The trickier second prejudice is also subject to collapse, but the tension it introduces is most evident in the work of Hammer Prints Ltd., a pair of British avant-gardists (Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson) who, along with their spouses, textile designer Freda Paolozzi and anthropologist Judith Stephen, anonymously produced fabric designs that mashed up science, ethnography and children’s drawings. The exhibition suggests that their fellow artists regarded consumerism with disdain, but a photograph of a young Princess Margaret in one of their dresses is an effective retort to that complaint.
In retrospect, Warhol’s radical innovations seem inevitable and the graphic design he created in the fifties binds the generations in the exhibition like a jaunty belt cinching the waist of a summer dress.
Textile Museum of Canada: http://www.textilemuseum.ca/home
Artist Textiles: Picasso to Warhol continues until October 4.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Artist Textiles at the Textile Museum, Toronto
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