During 1945-1947 the celebrated fabric designer Zika Ascher, collaborated with numerous artists on his Artist's Squares Collection. Prominent artists of the time all contributed, including Calder, Derain, De Staël, Moore, Nicholson, Picasso and Wou-Ki. In 1953, Zao Wou-Ki was hired by Roland Petit's Ballets de Paris to design the sets and costumes for La Perle, a one-act ballet by Louise de Vilmorin. Jean Cocteau and Jean Denis-Malcles had previously collaborated with Ascher and worked extensively with Roland Petit at the Ballets des Champs-Élysées, It is most likely that Zao Wou-Ki was introduced to Zika Ascher through these mutual connections. 'Paysage Bleu' clearly annouces his move towards complete abstraction in the late 1950s, when colour would become dominant.

ART GOES TO FASHION
The Zika Ascher Artist’s Squares: London- Paris – New York, 1947
Article by An Jo Fermon, MA Art History

Art and Fashion have enjoyed a century-long love affair, with artists and movements influencing fashion silhouettes of the different epochs of the 20th Century and beyond. However, never have art and fashion come together as during the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Czech textile printer Zika Ascher published his silks printed with designs by famous artists of the time, making a silk artwork wearable and turning a wearable accessory into a work of art. Ascher’s range of his so-called Artist’s Squares is a testimony to his original vision to join forces with the vast artistic talents of Post-War Europe, including Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Cocteau, Ben Nicholson, Marie Laurencin, Andre Derain, Alexander Calder and Oscar Dominguez.
Fashion designers in the early years of the 20th Century could choose from an array of fabrics printed with stylized organic Art Nouveau or flat abstract Vienna Secessionist motifs. Artists of the time took a serious interest in fabric design. As such the exchanges between the alluring fashion designer Emilie Flöge and the painter Gustav Klimt are well documented. Klimt’s apparent love of costume and fabrics is expressed in the many photographs he took of Flöge modelling her own creations made from fabrics he had designed. Throughout his career, Klimt repeatedly used fabric-like backgrounds in his paintings.
During 1910, Parisian women were mesmerized by the exoticism of Léon Bakst’s stage costumes for the ‘Ballet russes’ performance of Schéhérazade. This ‘Arabian Nights’ fantasy so caught the mood of Parisian women that it brought about a revolution in fashion. Without delay, French couturier Paul Poiret launched his day to evening collection of harem trousers and turbans in bold coloured silks and velvets.

During the 1920s, the use of artist’s designs for clothing was exemplified in Sonia Delaunay’s ‘Simultaneous Dresses’. First created in 1913, they sought to match the energy of the new imports of the Foxtrot and the Tango. In an age when the 20th Century felt ‘new’ to people, Delaunay’s dresses in bright colour and bold patterns radically broke down the traditional distinctions between the fine and applied arts as an artist, designer and printmaker.
In the same way, many a design for tubular dresses and rounded cloche hats which had turned women’s bodies into geometric shapes, were directly inspired by Cubism, which had shocked the world with its dissected rendering of reality.

Despite the influence of Art on Fashion during the 20th Century, it was only with textile printer Zika Ascher’s ambitious collaborations with artists that Art and Fashion really merged.
Born in Prague, Zika Ascher found himself on honeymoon in Oslo when Germany annexed Czechoslovakia in 1939. Instead of returning home, Zika took his beautiful wife Lida to London, carrying with them only their travel possessions.
In London the young couple started a small textile business, which Lida ran whilst Zika joined in the army. Upon his return to London, Zika turned his creative energy into a plan to collaborate with known artists on a range of artist designed silk squares. Whilst during the Second World War, British women had taken to wearing colourful headscarves to brighten up the dark days of worry and stringent austerity, now Zika Ascher turned the headscarf into a work of art.
Fittingly, in an article headed by the title ‘Modern Art for Daily Wear’, The Illustrated of 28 July 1945 warned husbands that they may see their wives ‘blossoming out as walking art galleries’.
During 1944, Zika Ascher established exclusive arrangements with Henry Moore and Feliks Topolski, who both worked closely with Ascher in his printing studio and went through the painstaking efforts of months of experimentation to come to the desired results. Ascher gave his artists an open brief, in order not to restrict the confines of creation to the technical problems of printing. The difficulties of translating the design into separated screens for printing on textile, was his to solve. Some of the drawings and designs required no less than twenty separate screens to produce the level of satisfaction of the final product .
With the end of the War heralding an era of optimism and enterprise, the enthusiastic Ascher was ready to take his ambitious new venture of Artist’s designed silk squares to the Continent.
During 1945 Ascher set off to the French capital with the aspiration to commission Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Derain and Bérard, but his ideas were met with reserve. Matisse’s agent even went as far as to reject Ascher’s request informing him that he could not possibly ask the master to contribute to the ‘inferior’ art form of textile design. Ascher gathered his spirits and telephoned Matisse directly. The bedridden painter told Ascher promptly that he would be happy to contribute to such an exciting project. Not only did Matisse supply a design for an elegant silk square with coral motifs, he also mounted paper cut-outs on his wall, which he then asked Ascher to replicate. The two large wall hangings, named ‘Océanie, La Mer’ and ‘Océanie, Le Ciel’, are still a masterwork of printing just by their sheer scale. At this stage Ascher had also asked Henry Moore to think big in textile design and as a result Ascher could put his name to two more large wall hangings ‘Two Standing Figures’ and ‘Reclining Figure’. These artworks were supposed to cover a whole wall, echoing the use of tapestries in medieval times. Both Matisse and Moore took great personal interest in the production of these ambitious works. (ILL) Henry Moore was a frequent visitor to the Ascher printworks and Ascher corresponded at length with Matisse, just to get the correct shade of the specific sandy beige colour of the wall, which was the background of Matisse’s cut-outs at his home in Nice.
Alongside, Ascher continued to add to his range of Artist’s Squares with two designs by Christian Bérard and no less than five designs by André Derain, of which Boy and Girl with and their Dog, is regarded the most charming. (ILL)
Ascher also established contact with Picasso and Braque. The Spaniard was off-hand,but Françoise Gilot, his lover at the time, sent Ascher one of Picasso’s drawings of doves, which Ascher never commercialised for lack of Picasso’s express permission. Braque made Ascher a wholehearted promise for designs he never produced.
Around the same time, Ascher also signed up many other European artists, including Marie Laurencin who designed a personification of the River Seine (ILL), Jean Cocteau who produced one of his typical faun-like faces (ILL), Oscar Dominguez who handed in a more surreal design with Le Jour et La Nuit, and Alexander Calder, who came up with the visually powerful design for La Mer (ILL). First printed in black, Calder then asked Ascher to also print it in yellow-orange and red.
Some artists such as Chagall, Kokoschka and Epstein were willing to submit designs but only for a fee, which Ascher could not afford. Back in London Ascher also added Barbara Hepworth (ILL) and Ben Nicholson (ILL) amongst other famous Modern British artists to his range of Artist’s Squares.
The first Ascher office in Paris, located 13 rue de l’Abbaye, opened in 1947. A former art gallery, the space perfectly suited Ascher’s ideas to present the squares as art works, displayed in picture frames. Press coverage was encouraging with Lida being invited to appear on the BBC (ILL) and articles in British Vogue (April 1947) and American Vogue (15 July 1947).
During September 1947, the Levefre Gallery, London, held a first show of the Ascher Artists’ Squares, along with the Moore and Matisse wall hangings. ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ of September 1947 reported that ‘it is a symptom of the real importance of these textiles that they should hang in a gallery of such high prestige…’. Following the success of the Lefevre exhibition, the Ascher Artist’s Squares were exhibited all over Britain and in October 1947, Lida and Zika took them to New York on their first visit.
As impressive large-scale artworks, the Moore and Matisse wall hangings were also exhibited in art galleries abroad. In 1949-50 the Museum of Modern Art New York arranged for these remarkable panels to be shown throughout the United States. They puzzled the Tax Office, which had difficulty in deciding whether they should be counted as works of art or textiles. And although the public’s reaction on the panels varied, the works were considered important art works by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Centre Pompidou, who respectively acquired Moore’s Two Figures and Reclining Figure and Matisse’s Océanie-la Mer. Recently, one of the edition of 30 of this panel was sold at Christie’s London during June 2011 for a record $4.8 million.
Success in New York opened the road to exhibitions worldwide. Visitors to the Ascher shows in Montreal, Zurich, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Geneva, Boston, Montevideo, Sydney, Amsterdam and Cape Town marvelled at the high level of technical achievement emanating from Britain during such difficult years of restrictions and lack of raw materials. Despite the high acclaim, the Artist’s Squares were not a commercial success. Ascher grew frustrated with selling through department stores, where the sales staff did not know the difference between a Moore and a Hepworth. In the end, the full editions of the Squares were never printed.
Alongside his artistic ventures, Ascher also produced fashion fabrics, which during the 1950s until his death stood synonym for superior quality. Christian Dior was the first to use his silks with large flowers in his 1952 collection. Subsequently Ascher’s fabrics entered the collections of Elsa Schiaparelli, Christobal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin and Jeanne Lanvin.
The Ascher studio and print works remained a family business headed by Zika and his glamorous wife until his death in 1992. Five years earlier Ascher had been honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which gave the Artist’s Squares central stage.
The Artist’s Squares were marketed as framed works of art by the Lefevre Gallery in 1947, and from 1948 by the The Carson, Pirie, Scott and Co. department Store in Chicago. From the early 1950s they were available through Liberty’s, London and during the 1960s through Harvey Nicholls, London.
Today, Whitford Fine Art, London, works closely with the Zika Ascher Estate to market the archived remainders of stock of Ascher Artist’s Squares. Whitford offers hand-mounted on conservation fabric and framed Artist’s Squares by Alexander Calder, Marie Laurencin, André Derain and Jean Cocteau. Prices range from $10.000 to $18.000.
Testimony to Ascher’s legacy of uniting Art and Fashion are the many partnerships that fashion houses take up with artists today. The dialogue between Art and Fashion was taken one step further only this year with the London 2012 Festival commissioning ‘Britain Creates: Fashion + Art Collusion’, teaming up fashion designers with artists, to create a unique work of art, thus giving fashion designers and artists to learn from each other.

An Jo Fermon


For further reading about Fashion and Art:
HUSSLEIN-ARCO, Agnes and Alfred WEIDINGER. Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge. Hamburg, 2012.
PRITCHARD, Jane. Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909 - 1929. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2010.
MORANO, Elizabeth and Diana VREELAND. Sonia Delaunay Art into Fashion. New York, 1987.
MENDES Valerie and Frances HINCHCLIFFE. Ascher, Art, Fabric and Fashion. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1987.