Description

Glasgow School of Art Press 1st 2003

4to, tan boards with silver titling to spine. Minor creasing to top edge of d/w o/w F+/VG++

(Order reference 16561)

The first account of the career of a remarkable Scot, artist, and designer, whose work revolutionized design in postwar Britain and who was most widely known in the 1950s and 1960s. Brought up in the Glasgow area, Robert Stewart studied at the Glasgow School Art in the 1940s. He won many awards and became the head of the printed textile department in 1949.

Passionately interested in surface design, he became one of the most significant influences in the field. He made exhibits for Enterprise Scotland (1947), for the Festival of Britain (1951) and for the new Scottish Crafts Centre. During the 1950s and 1960s his designs were used mainly on textile goods sold by Liberty, Pringle, Donald Brothers and shops in Great Britain and North America. He worked on a variety of projects with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company at the Dovecot Studios and there designed tapestries for Glasgow Cathedral and Strathclyde University. He also formed his own company for printed ceramic kitchenware. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he designed and manufactured large-scale ceramic murals for public buildings.

During the thirty-five years of teaching at the Glasgow School of Art, he exerted a powerful influence on the whole school, its students, and its organization. He was instrumental in the recasting of art education in Scotland and his legacy lies in the work of his many successful students now active in the fields of textiles, theatre design, and teaching.