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...

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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.