Jack Lenor Larsen, a textile designer who combined ancient techniques and modern technology to weave fabrics that animated American postwar homes and workplaces and, in the process, became an international presence, died Tuesday at his home in East Hampton, NY. He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed by the LongHouse Reserve, a nonprofit sculpture garden and arboretum that Larsen founded in East Hampton, where his home was located.
Larsen rejected offers for an academic career to open his own textile business in 1952 in New York City, where he dressed the windows and furniture of modern and elegant towers as if they were models and became a striking figure among Manhattan’s cultural elite and the Hamptons. He also influenced important cultural figures of his time.
In the mid-1960s, he convinced artist Dale Chihuly, then a recent graduate in interior design from the University of Washington, to give up weaving glass and trying to blow it out. He instructed architect Louis Kahn, with whom he collaborated in 1969 on hangings for the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, NY, in weaving.
Born in Seattle, Larsen was shaped by the hazy and gloomy landscape of the Pacific Northwest and Asian cultural influences. He traveled the world to study weaving techniques and translated what he learned into nubby, luminous, porous, motley, spider and feather fabrics.
Many of his projects were produced on electric looms for the modern commercial market. Offices, hotel lobbies and aircraft interiors have never received anything like it.
His fabrics are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Musée Des Arts Décoratifs do Louvre, which gave him an individual retrospective in 1981.
Among the houses that contain Larsen fabrics are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Eero Saarinen’s Miller House. In the 1960s, Larsen made a brief detour to design clothing, including shaggy ties worn by Alexander Calder, Leonard Bernstein and IM Pei. Joan Baez asked him to create personalized clothes for her. (He refused.)
He launched ikat and batik patterns on exotic-hungry Americans and co-authored a book on the techniques that produced them. A upholstery fabric called Magnum, designed in 1970, was inspired by Indian fabrics with small mirrors; Mr. Larsen and his associate Win Anderson reproduced the effect with a layer of Mylar film.
His experiments also produced curtains that reduced the brightness of modern glass buildings without impairing their architectural rigor or decomposing into heat and light.
This project was a professional watershed. Larsen, who had moved to Manhattan, recently graduated in weaving at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, received an order in 1951 to design the curtains for Manhattan’s Lever House tower, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The clear walls of the building called for something special – “a translucent weave of lace made of linen cord and gold metal”, as he described in his book “Jack Lenor Larsen: Memoirs of a Weaver”, published in 1998. (He published 10 books altogether.)
Larsen was a pioneer in the use of elastic nylons that could be smoothed over the globular-style seat designs, typical of the mid-century style; velvets printed on canvas (a complicated thing to deal with complex details until he found the correct depth of hair); and bath towels woven on specialized looms to produce double-sided textures and patterns.
“He always thought of textiles in three dimensions, never on flat surfaces,” said Matilda McQuaid, head of the textile department at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This approach, she said, a legacy of his degree in architecture, gave him an unusual grip on the structure of a fabric.
Mr. Larsen was an adventurous colorist. In search of shades that would enhance the dimensions of his beloved cottons and rough sheets, he befriended the yellow family.
“Olives, ocher, caramel and earthy oranges could be used at full intensity without appearing aggressive,” he wrote in his memoirs. They complemented the oiled wood and teal finishes that were popular in the middle of the century. But olives and ocher have evolved into “the sugary avocado and gold epidemic of the 1960s harvest in the United States,” he said.
Jack Lenor Larsen was born on August 5, 1927, the son of Elmer Larsen, a contractor, and Mabel (Bye) Larsen. His parents were Canadians of Danish-Norwegian descent who immigrated from Alberta to Washington State and moved to Bremerton when Larsen started high school.
He enrolled at the University of Washington to study architecture, but struggled with design and found more interest in interior design and furniture. Weaving, a craft then taught in the home economics department, calmed the itchiness of its creator.
He worked with “all the threads available”, he recalled in his memories, “then he wove with straw, bamboo, raffia, wire, rope and rags. Every thread of nature, it seemed, could be woven. ”Taking a break from college, he became an apprentice to a weaver in Los Angeles and taught film star Joan Crawford to” bend “or tie a row of fibers vertically to a loom.
He opened Jack Lenor Larsen Inc. in a donated store on East 73rd Street in Manhattan. In 1997, when he merged his business with Cowtan & Tout, an American subsidiary of British company Colefax & Fowler, he had operations in 31 countries.
Strict standards, elegant behavior and an easy way among influential people propelled him up and out. A mentor in the early 1950s sent him to Haiti to teach residents who were twisting wild magnolia fiber into wicks for oil lamps to turn the threads into fabric. Later in the decade, designer Russel Wright recruited him to work on economic development projects for the State Department, and he traveled to Taiwan and South Vietnam to advise local artisans on creating products for export. In 1972, five years after his friend Jim Thompson, the force behind the international Thai silk weaving industry, disappeared into the Malaysian jungle, Mr. Larsen took over the management of the company’s manufacturing.
Although he worked, by his own account, in more than 60 countries, Japan was the most loved by him. Matko Tomacic, executive director of LongHouse Reserve, remembered to accompany him on one of his 39 trips to the country and to see him communicate effortlessly, even though he did not know Japanese. “We speak the same language, the textile language,” Larsen told him. Her LongHouse home was inspired by a 7th century Shinto shrine.
He continued drawing almost until the end of his life. In March, Cowtan & Tout launched new Larsen collections of fabrics for indoor and outdoor environments, for which he updated two of his mid-century motifs.
He leaves Peter Olsen, his domestic partner.
Helena Hernmarck, a Swedish tapestry who met Larsen shortly after moving to New York in the 1960s, recalled her unwavering support for artisans, architects and industrial designers. “Everyone would go to Jack at one time or another just to talk to him and be recognized,” she said.
He was closely associated with the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, where he taught, led the committee that invited Edward Larrabee Barnes to design the campus and ultimately served as chairman of the board. From 1981 to 1989, he was president of the American Craft Council.
But the LongHouse Reserve, which he lovingly cared for, overseeing the seamless additions and rearrangements of plantations, works of art and landscape features, was his most powerful legacy, his friends and admirers said. Housing its collection of more than 1,000 artifacts, it was opened to the public on 6 hectares in 1992.
There, said Tomacic, he played “with the texture, color and shapes of plants in the same way he played with his fabrics”. It is, he added, “much more a weaver’s garden”.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.