Pay It Forward: Dorothy Liebes as Mentor
Guest edited by Rhonda Brown of browngrotta arts
Image: Dorothy Liebes samples, from the collection of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. Photo by Tom Grotta. Image above: Glen Kaufman, Banner, circa 1960s. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Dorothy Liebes (1897 - 1972) was an influencer before the term was coined. Known as the “mother of modern weaving,” and initiator of "The Liebes Look” she served as a national arbiter of interior design and fashion trends reaching thousands of people through print magazines, television, film, and significant collaborations with architects and corporations from Frank Lloyd Wright to Dupont. Liebes created luminous, jewel-toned fabrics, often incorporating nontraditional materials and metallic threads. While associated with high-end fashion and architecture projects, Liebes was also committed to making fabrics and good design accessible to the middle class. 
Image: Dorothy Liebes papers, circa 1930-1970. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Liebes's life and design have received renewed attention in the past year as a result of the expansive exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt in New York and the accompanying book, both entitled, A Dark, A Light, A Bright: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes. In addition to upholstery, carpets, and fabrics created for high fashion in her studios, a significant aspect of Liebes's legacy includes the careers she nurtured and the example she set with her successful business. The exhibition could have easily been named, A Dark, A Light, A Bright … A Mentor. In the 40+ years she worked at her design studio, first in San Francisco, later in New York City, Liebes employed many talented designers and weavers promoting their work and encouraging them to reach artistic renown of their own. Among them, Liebes employed painters Emma Amos and Harry Soviak and weavers Geraldine Funk and Ralph Higbee, as Erin Dowding, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Charlotte Van Hardenburgh described in essays for the Cooper Hewitt exhibition.
Artist Emma Amos is celebrated for vibrant paintings termed “visual tapestries,” in which the influence of her years as weaver in Liebes’s studio is evident. After working with Liebes for nearly 10 years creating highly acclaimed carpet designs, Amos left the studio. "She then focused on printmaking and painting," Van Hardenburgh writes, "becoming the youngest and sole female member of The Spiral (a New York–based collective of Black artists).
Image: Emma Amos, Equals, 1992 © Emma Amos.
Amos’s paintings and prints have definitive references to her textile past—she often incorporated fabric as the frame of her paintings, and she treated the representation of textiles within her paintings with astute attention and precise detail.” Harry Soviak, whose art education was in painting, also worked as studio weaver in New York. He left the Liebes studio to work for textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen in 1961. Through his association with Larsen, he also began teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art, where he taught textile design until 1971, after which he moved to the painting department. Across his career, he continued to make art, working in collage, watercolour, and pen-and-ink drawing. 
Image: publication 1947 Life Magazine on Dorothy Liebes. Photo by Tom Grotta.
For Funk, when the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company needed a weaver to head the Fiber Textile Shop in San Juan, it was Liebes' suggestion that Geraldine Funk, then weaving in Liebes's San Francisco studio, be offered the job. Funk moved to Puerto Rico in 1947 to take on the role of designer and manager of the Fiber Textile Shop facilitating a hand-weaving program that utilised the indigenous fibers of the island to create textiles for export abroad.
Image: Mariette Rousseau-Vermette. Portrait by Tom Grotta.
These wild fibers were transformed into sophisticated woven goods for the home and fashion, sold in upscale American department stores, promoted in home and design magazines, used by interior designers and architects, and exhibited in design shows and museums. Liebes called Ralph Higbee her "number one design assistant." She encouraged him to do a Fulbright, sent him to Ahmedabad, India to study textiles and submitted his designs to museum exhibitions including the 1956 Dupont-sponsored Nylon Rug Designs Smithsonian traveling exhibition, in which his work joined that of Trude Guermonprez, Anni Albers, and Jack Lenor Larsen. 
Image: Glen Kaufman at the loom, circa 1963. Courtesy American Craft Council Library and Archives.
Two artists who worked with browngrotta arts in Wilton, Connecticut, Glen Kaufman and Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, were among Liebes’s alumni — their experiences with the designer were evident throughout their artistic careers. Glen Kaufman spent a year at the New York studio from 1960 to 1961, after a Fulbright in Scandinavia. Kaufman was a Cranbrook graduate where he created handwoven pile rugs among other items. At the Liebes studio, he and Harry Soviak, a Cranbrook classmate, concentrated on carpet designs and created pillows in “wild colours." The pair would try to “out-Dorothy Dorothy Liebes,” making pillows using Liebes’s daring colour combinations and metallic yarn Kaufman told Josephine Shea in an oral interview in 2008 for the Archives of American Art. He recalled that the designer “had this reputation of being the arbiter of interior taste. And she would put together things like red and pink and orange, which were absolutely out in left field,…”
Kaufman's work from the early 60s like Banner, paired vibrant colours. In others, like Herringbone, Odd Man In and Polymaze, Kaufman continued to explore carpet making techniques. Over time, however, he adopted a more muted palette. Liebes remained enthusiastic but bemoaned the colour change. In her essay for the Cooper Hewitt exhibition, Erin Dowding quotes a 1967 letter from Liebes to Kaufman in which the designer writes about seeing his works, "which I thought were wonderful. I missed colour, though, and I’m sure you do too.” 
Image: Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Elégante. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Mariette Rousseau-Vermette’s experience with Dorothy Liebes was perhaps the most formative. The details of that year have been compiled and generously shared by Anne Newlands. Newlands is the author of Weaving Modernist Art: the Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette and the guest curator of an upcoming retrospective of Rousseau-Vermette’s work at the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Quebec in Quebec City in 2025.
After graduation from the École des beaux-arts in Montreal in 1948, Mariette then-Rousseau, later-Rousseau-Vermette, looked to the United States to further her education, unlike fellow students who travelled to France. She was inspired by a 1947 issue of Life magazine in which an article titled “Top Weaver” introduced her to the innovative Dorothy Liebes studio in San Francisco. Years later, she described the impact: “The article blew me away -- this magnificent woman was radically changing textiles in the United States, she was returning them to art.
Image: Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Elégante design sketch.
For her, textures, colours, techniques had no limits.” In addition to Liebes’s innovations with non-traditional weaving materials, Rousseau-Vermette said she was captivated by Liebes’s “prophetic instinct for trends in colour.” After graduation, despite the fact that she spoke little English at the time, Rousseau traveled to San Francisco for two reasons: to secure a job or an internship at the Dorothy Liebes studio and to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts in nearby Oakland. Her mornings were spent at the college in Oakland, and in the afternoons she waited patiently in the reception area of the Liebes studio, her thick sample books from the École des beaux-arts piled on her lap, trying to convince the studio to hire her. With a determination that would become legendary, Rousseau-Vermette returned daily and finally Dorothy Liebes relented, saying that she could not pay her (although later she would), but that she would let her work. "At long last, I have found my mentor, I will study under her,” Rousseau-Vermette wrote. 
Image: detail of Elégante final textile. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Like Liebes, much of Rousseau-Vermette’s career was devoted to creating textile works on commission to mediate architectural spaces, notably, The Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto, Exxon in New York City and Arthur Erikson's Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. Working with architects was central to Leibes’s practice. As Alexa Griffith Winton has noted, “Liebes encountered architectural blueprints and quickly learned to read them." Rousseau would follow suit; her most preferred commissions would be those that involved collaborations with architects. Her files were thick with blueprints and architectural drawings. Where buildings were hard and cold, Liebes’s textiles were warm and soft says, John Stuart Gordon, an art historian at Yale. Like Liebes, Rousseau-Vermette’s brilliance came from building and bridging a tension between textiles and architecture. 
Image: Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, Hommage á Dorothy Liebes I & II. Photo by Tom Grotta, courtesy browngrotta arts.
Brilliant colouration also featured in Rousseau-Vermette's work and she utilised unique materials as Liebes’ did. In the 1990s, Rousseau created a series innovative weavings, like Elegante, that incorporate optical fiber. Another work from 2001, incorporates silk, leather and fluorescent tubes, some of it material that Rousseau-Vermette had sourced from Liebes. In its title, Hommage á Liebes, the student explicitly credits the mentor as an impetus for her work.
Liebes also influenced the way in which Rousseau-Vermette would manage her studio. Like Liebes, Rousseau-Vermette created detailed cartons and maquettes for each of the 644 tapestries she created in her career. Her meticulous notes are now in the archives of the National Gallery of Canada. She was motivated by Liebes's success as an independent owner-operator, holding as she did a singular place in the male-dominated business world. Emma Amos, too, took note of Liebes’ example as a female entrepreneur.“Dorothy Liebes . . . showed me how much energy it takes to be a success in a world of male power,” she said.
Image: Installation: A Dark, A Light, A Bright: the Designs of Dorothy Liebes at the Cooper Hewitt Museum 2023. Photo by Tom Grotta.
Liebes’s indelible impact on the careers of so many other artists — as an inspiration, advocate, example — is yet another element of her remarkable legacy.
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