{"id":691175,"date":"2026-07-14T13:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/691175\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T13:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:27:12","slug":"enid-marx-the-maverick-textile-artist-who-changed-tube-commutes-for-ever-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/691175\/","title":{"rendered":"Enid Marx: the maverick textile artist who changed tube commutes for ever | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last time you travelled on the London Underground<\/a>, here\u2019s guessing you didn\u2019t stop to think about how you were sitting on art history. Yet tube fabrics have a fascinating place in the development of British design. And now the woman at the centre of their story is the subject of an exhibition that aims to weave her back into the narrative, after a long period when her contribution was overlooked.<\/p>\n

Enid Marx<\/a>\u2019s designs for what was then the London Passenger Transport Board were discontinued in the 1960s, but the groundbreaking work she did in the 1930s would change the ambience of tube train interiors for ever. Until she was commissioned to create a series of new patterns, the mood board for tube carriages could be summed up in one word: dreary. They were created in-house by the factories that produced the fabric \u2013 moquette, a durable form of carpet-like velvet used to this day \u2013 and were made in a colour palette of browns and greys to blend in with the muck and sweat left behind by London commuters.<\/p>\n

Marx, who was taken on in 1937 alongside Paul Nash<\/a> and Marion Dorn<\/a> to create proper designs for the first time, ran with a different idea. Why not, she wondered, make the seats bright, exciting and cheerful so that instead of blending in with the dirt, they disguised it? That idea has been the guiding principle of London Transport ever since, and visitors to The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design<\/a> at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, opening on Saturday, will see samples of Marx\u2019s very first designs in that vein, including the bright red and green geometric pattern \u2013 eye-shaped ovals that interconnect, interspersed with elongated diamonds of red and green \u2013 that would become her best-known tube fabric.<\/p>\n

\u2018Pattern is political and cultural\u2019 \u2026 a sample of moquette with the Shield design, circa 1935. Photograph: \u00a9 TfL from the London Transport Museum collection\/ The Estate of Enid Marx<\/p>\n

She named the pattern Shield, since it was inspired by African designs Marx had seen at the British Museum. She spent hours there, and also at the V&A, where she was especially interested in Indian woodblocks and their history. \u201cShe was influenced by cubism and purism \u2013 but more than anything, her work was shaped by the ethnographic displays she saw in the London museums,\u201d says Az Crawford, the show\u2019s curator. \u201cAnd though it\u2019s sometimes said she appropriated these designs, she came from a time when empire and nationalism influenced everything else. Her designs show how pattern is political and cultural.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marx\u2019s work also denotes a watershed, says Crawford, between the Arts and Crafts and modern British eras. \u201cShe often referred to \u2018washed-out William Morris stuff\u2019, and she was determined to update the tenor and style of British design. There\u2019s so much richness to her patterns. She was dismissed as decorative but in fact she is taking abstraction very seriously, and embedding messages about African art, colonial influences, and the way one art form takes from another.\u201d<\/p>\n

One intriguing element of Marx\u2019s work, agrees Crawford, is the contradiction between the rigidity of the work she created \u2013 she often took factories to task for failing to work to her exacting standards in reproducing her designs \u2013 and the non-conformity that underpinned her lived experience. Marx\u2019s life partner was the historian Margaret Lambert, and the two were part of what Crawford calls \u201ca sapphic community\u201d, many of whom, like Marx, were designers and makers. Marx went by the name Marco, and she sported her own-design bow ties \u2013 the Compton Verney show will include examples, including some of her lively, brightly coloured Spreyton spot ties, named after the Devon village where Lambert grew up.<\/p>\n

Top Marx:her handblocked textile design Curly Check Photograph: \u00a9 The Estate of Enid Marx<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were a couple, at a time when male homosexuality was still criminalised,\u201d Crawford says. \u201cThey lived against the grain \u2013 but they were both from privileged backgrounds, and their same sex partnership could be seen as a modish style of social privilege than a radical statement.\u201d Marx\u2019s whole persona, Crawford adds, was shot through with paradox: she resisted being categorised throughout her life. \u201cShe didn\u2019t see herself as a feminist. In some ways she was breaking the mould, but in her views she was often conservative with a small \u2018c\u2019.\u201d She\u2019s often said to have been a distant cousin of Karl but \u201cit\u2019s a loose connection – Enid may have wanted to disconnect herself from his history\u201d. For Crawford, Marx\u2019s relationship to pattern links to the constraints she had to live with. \u201cThere\u2019s a visceral quality to her conservatism. She was able to live freely, but there was always a sense of restraint that I think comes from her gender, and from class expectations for women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in London in 1902, the youngest of three children in a middle-class Jewish family, Enid Crystal Dorothy Marx was educated at the prestigious Roedean school in Sussex before studying at the Royal College of Art, where Nash was her tutor, and her contemporaries included Barbara Hepworth<\/a> and Eric Ravilious<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Radical life \u2026 Marx and one of her cats. Photograph: University of Brighton Design Archives<\/p>\n

Her father was an entrepreneur who specialised in paper making, and this inspired her lifelong interest in what she called \u201cpopular art\u201d. But this was deemed vulgar at the RCA, where she failed her final assessment. Popular art, though, would be the backbone of her life\u2019s work: after training in the workshop of influential textile artists Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher<\/a>, she went on to design her own block-printed textiles \u2013 examples of which will be in the Compton Verney show \u2013 but then pivoted to industrial design when she was commissioned for the London Transport patterns.<\/p>\n

During the second world war she became one of the designers for the utility scheme<\/a>, aimed at producing good-quality, low-cost materials for furnishing the homes of bombed-out families. The key was small repeats, which cuts down on waste when making curtains and covering furniture: one of her utility fabrics, Chevron \u2013 a zigzag pattern in brown and blue \u2013 is among the exhibits at Compton Verney.<\/p>\n

In 1944, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to design, Marx became only the third women to be awarded Royal Designer for Industry; but the war years would turn out to be her high point. Disappointments followed: only one of her designs was included in the 1951 Festival of Britain, and while she was commissioned to work on the postage stamps for the new queen in 1952, and though her framing of Elizabeth\u2019s photo was deemed a success, many later stamp designs were rejected \u2013 including one nixed by the sovereign herself who didn\u2019t like Marx\u2019s positioning of the regal head in an oak tree, feeling it might evoke unfortunate memories of her ancestor Charles II who hid in the Royal oak<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blue mood: Marx\u2019s Peacock fabric in a dress Photograph: Laura Bennetto\/Crafts Study Centre<\/p>\n

Her later work included designing book covers for publishers, and creating the wood-block picture book published in 1985 as An ABC of Birds and Beasts<\/a>, later republished in 2000 as Marco\u2019s Animal Alphabet. By then Marx had been dead for two years, having survived Lambert for three.<\/p>\n

But Marx\u2019s love of popular art was not restricted to her own creations: she and Lambert, whose partnership lasted more than 60 years, were avid collectors of mass-produced artwork, which they bequeathed to Compton Verney. The show there will be peppered with the pair\u2019s corn dollies; ceramics including Wedgwood pieces, dogs, and a figure of St George; a plaster model of a gingerbread cat (they always had a pair of Siameses) and other myriad curiosities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an eclectic mix of pieces,\u201d says Oli McCall, senior curator at Compton Verney. \u201cBut it was a lifelong passion for Marx, and you clearly see how the collection influenced her work. She believed there was a space for popular art that was mass produced, that it wasn\u2019t only one-off pieces that constituted \u2018art\u2019.\u201d Among the 165 or so works in the show are pieces borrowed from the V&A, to which Marx left her archive \u2013 some of them, says McCall, haven\u2019t been seen as they\u2019ve been in storage. \u201cShe\u2019s been overlooked \u2013 forgotten \u2013 and this show seeks to explore her life and work with an in-depth examination of the influences on her,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire<\/a> from 18 July to 3 January<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last time you travelled on the London Underground, here\u2019s guessing you didn\u2019t stop to think about how you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-691175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}