Show to honour textile designer who took fashion world by storm
He is the Serbian textile designer and artist born into a Jewish family who escaped persecution by the Nazis while going to art school in Jerusalem – then took the fashion houses of Europe by storm after relocating to Scotland.
Now the life and work of the late Bernat Klein, whose celebrated tweets and mohairs were inspired by the landscape around his home and studio in theborders,aretobehonoured in his adopted country.
Thenationalmuseumofscotland has announced plans to stageamajorexhibitiondrawn from a vast archive of Klein material it acquired in 2010 – four years before he passed away at the age of 91.
It will recall how colourful tweeds and mohairs created in Galashiels came to dominate international catwalks throughout the 1960s thanks to collaborations with Pierre Cardin, Dior, Nina Ricci, Ronald Patterson, Yves St Laurent, John Cavanagh, Hardy Aimes, Mattli and Victor Stiebel.
It will explore how Klein, a champion of modernist architecture and design, designed fabrics for fashion and interiors, working as a colour consultant and industrial designer for various British and Scandinavian firms.
The Klein archive held by the museum encompasses more than 4,000 items, including garments, textiles, paintings, design development work and press material.
The exhibition will also featuredisplaysofnewly-acquired work demonstrating Klein’s influence and legacy, including by textile designers Ascher
Ltd and Tibor Reich. Klein was born in Senta, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1922, into a family involved in the textile industry.
Klein originally studied fine art at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem and painted throughout his life, takinginspirationfromthenatural world,andexperimentingwith colour and texture.
Klein was heavily influenced by modern art and colour theory,andfascinatedbytheworkof French post-impressionist artist
Georges Seurat. He went on tostudyatleedsuniversityand was employed by various companiesinscotlandandengland untilhesetuphisowncompany in Galashiels in 1952.
In the early 1960s, Klein producedarangeofground-breaking woven womenswear fabrics,whichfeaturedboldcolour effects and unexpected combinations of materials, such as velvet ribbon with brushed mohair. Klein experimented to perfect a technique called
‘space-dyeing’, which allowed a single cloth to contain multiple colours.
His breakthrough into the European couture market came when his mohair tweed fabric was chosen by Coco Chanel for her spring collection in 1963.
Klein lived in the Borders in a specially-commissioned Modernist house designed by architect Peter Womersley.
The National Museum, which is staging the exhibition between November and April, said it would chart a 60-year career as a textile designer, artist, educator and colour consultant.
Lisa Mason, assistant curator of modern and contemporary design at the museum, said: “Bernat Klein was a key figure in Modernist design, and one of the 20th century’s most celebrated textile designers. His archive is remarkably broad.”