After admiring Google's tip of the hat to Josef Frank this morning, I couldn't help but take another look at his whimsical textile designs. If you're unfamiliar with Frank's work, consider the recent movie version of Mamma Mia! Whether you like musicals or not, the sets in that movie were absolutely breathtaking: clean whites and blues of the Greek coast as backdrop to brilliant textiles, which happen to be, eh hem, Josef Frank designs.
Textile design by Josef Frank featured in Mamma Mia!
Watching that movie, (and yes,
I like musicals), I immediately wanted to know the origin of those fabrics. Leave it to
Design*Sponge to show the way. You know it's good design when even 60 years or more after their original creation, the patterns still seem contemporary. Gotta love those Scandinavians. Design is in their blood.
Textile design by Josef Frank
Exhibiting qualities of whimsy and the baroque as well as a surrealist approach to form, Frank's fabrics invoke such a different side of the imagination than his contemporaries in the Bauhaus and moderne movements. When all was being whittled down to streamlines or orthographic formalism, Frank produced these refined but expressive forms that we still love today.
Textile design by Josef Frank on sofa by Anthropologie
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