Politics and Trade in Design: Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska's Influential Textile Designs in Needlework Development Scheme Collections

Abstract

This paper discusses the Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska textile collection, the largest collection by a foreign designer in the pre-war Needlework Development Scheme (NDS), set up and funded anonymously by J&P Coats, the Glasgow thread industrialists between 1934 and 1962. The paper seeks to analyze Coats's rationale for the collection, their role in the production of designs alluding to political events or themes in a manner acceptable to the ruling regimes, and their impact on British design. Most of Zweybrück's NDS textiles survive in collections at the National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh), Glasgow School of Art, Dundee University, and Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen). The paper clarifies the provenance and influences on the significant Zweybrück designs held in these collections. Consideration is given to the dissemination of this dissenting, marginal, fragmentary style on British artists, educators and students. Played out in this history are issues of aesthetics, collecting, education and marketing.