Rivers, Roads, Sails, Trails…….and Sling The 3 Meter Print for extra long curtains

Leo Wollner  developed this new 3 meter printing method for a KNOLL design collection produced in PAUSA AG Mössingen / Germany.

Four large designs in various colour ways Rivers, Roads, Sails, Trails and then ….Sling…

Sling is the fifth creation for which Leo Wollner received the International KNOLL award 1971.

This curtain was produced as burnout fabric as well as in  printed versions on cotton. Sling continues the play with a traditional pattern. Amongst other artists also  Josef Hoffmann created  his versions many decades earlier.

The creative path to the 3 Meter Print: The lines…no limits…the colours….

1950/60  Leo Wollner in his atelier in the city center of Vienna. It is a bright space - high  ceilings - 4 meters - furnished with a drawing table, hundreds of colours, paint brushes, pencils …..…the designer in a white work-coat.  He creates design patterns for PAUSA AG, an internationally successful textile printing company nearby Stuttgart in Germany.  

His little daughter is there as well. In front of her a huge white paper on the floor - larger than herself - and she starts painting and drawing with all the colours she wants. Animals, human beings - the family… the little brother, the secretary with a telephone in her hand and this portrait of her father……

Big spaces, clear lines, refined choice of colours… a natural , spontaneous  ability to express creativity joyfully.

Leo Wollner uses all his tools when he creates - a steady skilled hand,  beautiful colour schemes allow a great variety of designs. Thousands - not only for PAUSA AG. The museum of PAUSA still has 484 designs and 2213 textile samples from this decades lasting cooperation.

For the contemporary public: one needs to stress that all was hand made, hand-drawn and hand painted - no digital device existed! Artistic handicraft skills were a natural requirement!

The limiting size of the printing procedure forced a repetition of patterns. There is probably no textile designer who did not have to deal with this limitation over and over again.

To overcome it when dealing with large surfaces was a task given to Leo Wollner already in the 50 - ies when he created the great theatre curtain for the Salzburg festival house. He worked hands on together with printers at PAUSA to produce a design pattern which would not repeat itself but rather become a vast surface of many colours and patterns almost randomly.

Willy Häussler, ceo of PAUSA AG, was his congenial partner and a friend. A refined art collector himself Willy Häussler  sponsored many publications and exhibitions.   The doors of his factory were wide open for many designers and artists.  He loved new ideas and  experiments.

Non repeating patterns

Non repeating patterns… the dream for many designers limited by the size of the regular screens and print tables.  

Leo Wollner made up his mind to go big. With his unique drawing ability he created large sized designs. Then he used oversized screens, which needed four people to successfully manoeuvre  them and of course he was there himself at PAUSA for the development working closely with the crew.

For the industrial production different grounds  were offered like cotton-viscose sateen, using multi-screen processes. 

Here Sails and Trails both printed on cotton.

Rivers in the Saint Louis Art Museum, USA

Genny Cortinovis - Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design , Saint Louis Art Museum :

“In 1972, Austrian design duo and married couple Gretl and Leo Wollner developed their Three Meter Prints series, named for the sheer size of the screen printed designs, produced only in three-meter lengths. Four textiles were made: Rivers, Roads, Sails, and Trails. Intended to be displayed from floor to ceiling, the striking fabrics featured non repeating patterns printed using oversized screens, which needed four people to successfully maneuver them.

Rivers exemplifies the impact of such a large pattern. Thick streams of color travel down a length of white velvet, bleeding into each other and defying the clear boundaries between the organic strips. Rivers was produced in five color ways, and in each example, dyes were mixed during the printing process to give the bold pattern a painterly, soft touch.”

Rivers in the Smithsonian Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt, New York

Rivers is the most celebrated and technically ambitious of the set. It features undulating, tapering rivulets or ribbon-like forms flowing downward on cotton velvet. Colors were mixed on-the-fly during printing, creating spontaneous, watercolour-like gradations and soft, blurred boundaries (e.g., palettes with salmon pink, brown, yellow, grey, or other earthy/soft tones). It started conceptually as bold black lines on white but evolved into fluid, organic color streams. 

Roads in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

….while the 3 Meter Print series are designed as curtains …someone had the idea to hang this design like a picture on the wall…