WALL ART
Hand-painted paper used as a wall decoration was invented in China 2,000 years ago. Chinese artists made it by covering a mixture of mulberry bark, bamboo fibres, linen and hemp with beautiful designs and then rolling them up ready for transportation along the Silk Road across Asia and the Arab world to Europe. You can read about this odd invention, and many other extraordinary versions of wallpaper, in Geneviève Brunet’s The Wallpaper Book. Brunet takes us on a journey through the history of wallpaper design from the first century AD to the present day.
In France in the 1790s there were 40 wallpaper companies in Paris alone that, as well as creating patterned papers, designed panoramic views and representations of historic events in wallpaper form. The French company Zuber, one of the most innovative wallpaper designers founded in the same period, still operates today. Indeed, one of its panoramic wallpapers was reproduced for a room in The White House for Jackie Kennedy, when John F Kennedy was President.
From left: Cowcumber from the Frontier collection, Cole & Son; Deborah Bowness challenges expectations with her Wallpaper Frock; Albemarle Piccadilly from Cole & Son
It was the Industrial Revolution in England, however, that made wallpaper widely available. At the beginning of the 19th century, French manufacturers started to use the more e cient and faster English machines to produce papers – a mixed blessing, as it turned out. With an ever-increasing market, some companies in England and France began to go for quantity over quality.
William Morris, one of the great names in wall-paper design, was determined to set himself apart with papers produced in a traditional manner, selling inherited, rather controversial, shares in an arsenic mining company, to do it – arsenic was used to colour wallpaper green and a number of people had died from poison fumes. Morris’s ideals of craftsmanship were echoed in Austria (the Secession Style) and Jugendstil, or art nouveau, in Germany. The rest of Europe embraced geometric and pattern and plain-textured papers designed at The Bauhaus School. These are still made today by German company Rasch.
Bold patterns and tripes in Rasch's Vanity Fair 2013 collection
After the Second World War, modern motifs such as those by Lucienne Day, a prominent designer of the 1950s, were modelled on atoms and have become fashionable again today. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Swedish wallpaper company Sandberg began to interpret traditional motifs in a contemporary way.
Cole & Son, founded in London in 1875, has an archive of 1,800 block-print designs, 350 screen-print designs and a huge quantity of original drawings and wallpapers representing styles of the last 300 years. The company still prints using blocks and screens, which allows customers to re-colour, and in some cases alter, designs from the archives. The Royal Family has used traditional patterns from sources such as these, as has The Lady, which has a stunning Cole & Son Hummingbirds pattern on the walls of the editor’s office. For more modern settings there are designs by Tom Dixon and Vivienne Westwood.
Hand-painted style in Bouquet from the Wild Flora collection by Anna French
Blocks and screens are expensive to make but digital printing has greatly reduced the set-up charge for printing wallpapers. Therefore designers can a ord to print small runs of original patterns that might have limited appeal.
Wallpaper is now a form of expression for ne artists. Designer Deborah Bowness, loved by Philippe Starck and Paul Smith, will rework digital graphics by hand. Anne Gelbard, whose fans include many of the most august fashion houses of Paris, adds diaphanous metal leaf embroidery to her wallpaper. Gabor Ulveczki’s work uses gold leaf, copper and aluminium, which would please an ancient Chinese Emperor.
For lesser mortals, thanks to easier and cheaper printing techniques and more public access to archives, the choice of wall coverings has never been greater.
The Wallpaper Book by Geneviève Brunet is published by Thames and Hudson, priced £29.95.
A 1925 issue of The Lady gives a detailed plan for decorating an entrance hall
Anne Gelbard: www.annegelbard.com
Cole & Son: 020-7376 4628, www.cole-and-son.com
Deborah Bowness: 01757-248500, www.deborahbowness.com
Morris & Co: www.william-morris.co.uk
Rasch: www.rasch-tapeten.de
Sanderson (for Morris & Co wallpapers): 0844-543 9500, www.sanderson-uk.com
Zuber (London): 020-7824 8265, www.zuber.fr