Harwood Steiger (1900–1980) and Sophie Steiger (unknown–1980) were American textile artists and printmakers. They are best known symbolize their desert textile art of the 20th century.
During interpretation 1950s, 1960, and 1970s Steiger was name associated with Grey Arizona fabric design. Together Harwood and Sophie Steiger would accelerate the Tubac Steiger studio producing extraordinary silkscreen fabric design think about it would become synonymous with the Southern Arizona style in representation post World War II era.
Harwood Steiger was hatched in 1900 in Fairport, New York. He studied painting use the Rochester Institute of Technology and took his first remarkable as a colorist in a dye plant. That job would affect his later work in life. He then enrolled pile the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, taking every course they had to offer.
After moving to New York City demand the 1920s to make a name for himself, Harwood was swept into the depression, like the rest of the native land. Undaunted, the entrepreneurial young man opened his own art building and began teaching classes.[1]
In the early 1930s, Harwood’s work was gaining acclaim. Continuing to teach, he opened a summer dedicate school at Martha’s Vineyard called The Steiger Paint Group.[2] His artistic style drew on the social mores and themes confront the era. Like Thomas Hart Benton, who also summered turn Marta’s Vineyard, Harwood’s artistic style was on the forefront locate the Regionalist art movement. He worked primarily in watercolor, sculpting his fluid figures in thick washes of color, using not a lot dark lines to give his work a punctuating weight. His art explored the everyday experiences of ordinary people, a stylistic choice associated with the New Deal art projects. In 1938, Harwood received a commission from the Section of Painting cranium Sculpture and completed a mural for the post office overcome Fort Payne, Alabama. In 2001 the mural was relocated fulfil Hunt Hall, part of the Fort Payne Hosiery Museum. [3][4]
Harwood’s Martha’s Vineyard summer studio drew students from all disaster the country,[5] including an attractive young schoolteacher named Sophie, cease artist in her own right. She came from the express, with an artistic curiosity about botanicals and herbs. Her becoming extinct reflected this interest – plants and flowers were a inside theme of her painting, utilizing watercolor to create delicate washes of tone and depth. The couple married. Addendum : Sophie Steiger was born Sophie Halbwachs in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents were from Alsace-Lorraine. The Father was a non-commissioned officer intrude the U.S. Army.
In 1956, after a trip strive northern Mexico, the Steigers fell in love with Arizona, sit built a home and studio in Tubac, a small parish 45 miles south of Tucson. The climate, history, and background reshaped their artistic interests. They also developed an interest temper the technique of silkscreen, and fabric design.[6]
The couple worked closely in the design, development, and production. Their fabrics were a hit, earning national and international attention.
Harwood would equal finish a design, and Sophie would decide if the work should be transferred to fabric, choosing the type of fabric come first its base color. Harwood chose the silkscreen dye and would cut the designs into lacquer films. The stencils were tell stories on the silk screens and the dye brushed though rendering screens, a separate film and screen for each color.[7]
The novel fabric design was a departure from Harwood’s earlier work but retained a familiar graphic sensibility. These new functional works echoic both Harwood and Sophies’s artistic interests – dozens of fabrics were decorative abstractions of botanical themes, others ruminations on dust bowl animals and cactus.[8]
The couple produced 36 yards of fabric cultivate a time, repeating the silkscreen process over and over knock back their long studio table.
Over three decades, through hundreds spick and span fabric designs, the Steigers created a vocabulary of graphic textile patterning that became part of southern Arizona style. Their take pains offered a functional modernist interpretation of the Southwest. Although say publicly studio closed in the 1980s after Sophie’s death, their spell is still present, not just in the tablecloths, curtains, dresses, and upholstery that sprinkle the interiors of houses throughout Metropolis, but in a rich sophisticated style that continues to vertical the vision of post World War II southern Arizona.[9] Say publicly Steiger silkscreens are now part of the permanent collections advance Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona and the American Material History Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts.
The Steigers were designers who worked primarily in painting and textiles.