The Art of the Repeat: America in Silk, 1927–1947
Between the late 1920s and the close of the 1940s, the United States emerged as an unlikely yet assured leader in printed silk. As the First World War disrupted European trade routes and artistic exchange, American manufacturers faced both scarcity and possibility. Deprived of Parisian direction, they asked themselves a pressing question: how might a nation weave its own design identity — not in rhetoric, but in repeat?
The exhibition American Printed Silks, 1927–1947 at the Cleveland Museum of Art gathers luminous examples from four pioneering firms: Stehli Silks Corporation, H. R. Mallinson and Company, Silks Beau Monde, and Onondaga Silk Company all helped define what ‘Expressively American’ might look like in cloth. Together, they reveal a period when silk became a site of ambition: commercial, cultural and aesthetic.
Rhapsody (No. 700), 1927, John Held, Jr., Stehli Silks Corporation, 1889–1958
For Stehli, a Swiss-founded enterprise that established vast mills in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1897, American identity was both business strategy and creative provocation. Its celebrated Americana line fused the sleek geometry of Art Deco with motifs drawn from skyscrapers, stars and the machinery of modern life. Under the direction of Kneeland L’Amoureux “Ruzzie” Green, artists such as Charles Buckles Falls devised bold, graphic compositions — planes of saturated colour arranged with billboard clarity. Released in limited print runs and promoted as collectible yardage, these fabrics were marketed as distinctly national products: wearable declarations of speed, progress and optimism.
Zambezi, 1929, H. R. Mallinson and Company (United States, 1895–1952).
H. R. Mallinson, the silk trade’s self-styled ‘marketing magician’, likewise grasped the narrative power of pattern. His themed series, from The American Indian to National Parks, translated landscape, folklore and frontier mythology into rhythmic repeats. Silk was no longer merely a substitute for European luxury; it became a storyteller, carrying images of canyons, pioneers and industrial triumph into department stores and domestic sewing rooms.
Fish in the Net, 1947. Designed by Waldo Peirce for Onondaga Silk Company.
Technically, the exhibition charts a shift in process as much as in mood. The roller-printed silks of the 1920s and 30s, with their crisp edges and tightly engineered repeats, give way in the 1940s to the freer language of screenprint. Silkscreen allowed for larger scales and more painterly gestures, and a looseness visible in Waldo Peirce’s Fish in the Net, produced through Onondaga’s ambitious 1947 American Artist Print Series. In collaboration with Midtown Galleries and leading ready-to-wear designers, paintings were translated into yardage and ultimately into dresses that appeared in the pages of Vogue — art stepping confidently from canvas to street.
Indian Nobility, 1947, Brooke Cadwallader, Inc.
The Cleveland Museum of Art recognised the vitality of these textiles as they were made, acquiring dozens directly from the mills. What remains is more than an archive of swatches. It is a portrait of a nation articulating itself through silk — colour by colour, repeat by repeat — inviting women to quite literally wear the modern American dream.
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Further Information:
American Printed Silks, 1927–1947 is on show until 8 November 2026 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Red Poppy, 1947, Design: Dong Kingman for Onondaga Silk Company. Image credit: Cleveland Museum of Art Collections.
All further images as credited in captions, and courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art Collections.