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ABSTRACT
This article explores the work of the designer, Tibor Reich (1916–1996) as part of the material heritage of William Shakespeare. It suggests Reich’s partnership with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is a significant means of investigating the influence of artists and designers of the 1930s diaspora as purveyors of modernism and their impact on the visual arts and interior design in Britain. It situates Reich’s work for the 1964 Shakespeare quatercentenary, an anniversary marked internationally, in the broader context of the cultural and social history to which William Shakespeare’s material heritage responds.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the Collections, Archive & Library staff at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for their help and support; Professor Glyn Parry and Professor Louise Campbell for their comments on early drafts, and the anonymous readers for Cultural and Social History who made such helpful suggestions for revising the initial submission.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Images
Images supplied courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, © estate of the artist.
Notes
1. Levi Fox, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: A Personal Memoir (Norwich: Jarrold Publishing for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1997), 151–180; commission given to Tibor Reich, 162. This research project has included an online exhibition which includes images of many of the items discussed in this article: https://collections.shakespeare.org.uk/exhibition/exhibition/designing-1964-tibor-reich-and-shakespeare.
2. Sam Reich (ed.), Tibor Reich: Art of Colour & Texture (London: Tibor Ltd, 2016) is a visually rich celebration of Reich’s life and work; M. A. Hann & K. Powers, ‘Tibor Reich: A Textile Designer working in Stratford’, Textile History 40, no. 2 (2009): 212–28; K. Powers, M. A. Hann, J. A. Cousens, ‘Patterns of Culture: Tibor Reich, a Life of Colour and Weave’, an essay to accompany the exhibition ‘Tibor Reich, a Life of Colour and Weave’, Ars Textrina 39 (University of Leeds, 2009); Anna Nyburg, ‘Textiles and Exiles’, in Designs on Britain, exhibition catalogue, Jewish Museum, London (2017), 103–5; ‘Textile in Exile: Refugee Textile Surface Designers in Britain’, in Marion Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Nyburg (eds.), Applied Arts in British Exile: changing visual and material culture, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exiles, 19 (Brill, 2018), 221–2; images of many of the textiles and buildings discussed in this article can be found on the website of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at www.shakespeare.org.uk.
3. Alistair Fair, Modern Playhouses: An Architectural History of Britain’s New Theatres, 1945–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.
4. Irene Morra & Rob Gossedge, eds., The New Elizabethan Age: Culture, Society and National Identity after World War II (London: I.B. Taurus, 2016) includes discussion of Shakespeare’s cultural identity post-war in the introduction, as well as a section on how Shakespeare fits into the ‘New Elizabethan’ hypothesis.
5. New Elizabethan Age, 9.
6. Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) 12; Dominic Bradbury (ed.), Mid-Century Modern Complete (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 6–11; Anne Massey, Interior Design since 1900, 4th edn. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2020), 141.
7. Exhibition at Leamington Art Gallery and Museum, summer 2021.
8. E. Maxwell Fry, 'Shakespeare’s Stratford – and ours', Architectural Review, 71 no. 427 (June 1932), 219–21.
9. Louise Campbell, Coventry Cathedral: art and architecture in post-war Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Alistair Fair, Modern Playhouses: An Architectural History of Britain’s New Theatres, 1945–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 45–8.
10. Flower was involved in numerous civic projects, including plans for a new theatre in London that was never built; Fair, Modern Playhouses, 71.
11. Fair, Modern Playhouses, 61.
12. Jane Hamlett, 'The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History', Cultural and Social History 6 no. 1 (2009): 97–107, p. 98, https://doi.org/10.2752/147800409X377947.
13. Fox, Birthplace Trust, 162.
14. Hann & Powers, 'A Textile Designer Working in Stratford', 220–22.
15. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (hereafter SBT) DR543: Tibor Reich Designs Ltd, 1946–1914; two subdivisions, DTR1: Tibor Reich Designs Ltd, 1946–1994; DTR2: Tiatsa Ltd.
17. Henning Engelke & Tobias Hochscherf,'Between Avant-Garde and Commercialism: Reconsidering Émigrés and Design', Journal of Design History, 28, no. 1 (February 2015) 1–14, doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epu042.
18. Nyburg, ‘Textile in Exile’, 213.
19. Sparke, Modern Interior, 13.
20. Daniel Moore, Insane Acquaintances: Visual Modernism and Public Taste in Britain, 1910–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2020), 83–120.
21. Becky E. Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People (London: IB Taurus, 2012).
22. Deirdre Fernand, ‘Peter Moro and the Men from Mars’, in Applied Arts in British Exile, 27–48, for the role of Moro in the Royal Festival Hall and connections between the Festival and artists and designers of the diaspora. Also Fair, Modern Playhouses, 2, 49; Moro was a central figure in the wave of new theatres post-war.
23. Atkinson, Festival of Britain, xx.
24. Anita M. Hagermann, 'Monumental Play: Commemoration, Post-War Britain and History Cycles', in Shakespeare and Cultures of Commemoration, Critical Survey 22 (2), (2010) 105-118, pp. 112-4.
25. Hann & Powers, 'A Textile Designer Working in Stratford', 218, 222.
26. Sue Prichard, ‘The Early Years, Budapest to Vienna’ and ‘Tibor House, 1956’, in Art of Colour and Texture, 16–17, 158; Reich initially wished to train as an architect and designed the house with a local architect.
27. SBT, DTR1/2/13 (previously DR543/26) reprint from Furnishing: the magazine for the furnishing trade (April 1958).
28. H. Dalton Clifford, ‘A Designer’s House at Stratford-upon-Avon’, Country Life (18 September 1958) 609; available online at www.proquest.com/magazines/designers-house-at-stratford-on-avon/docview/1521508234/se-2.
29. Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture, 143–4; Prichard, “Tibor House,” 158.
30. Sparke, Modern Interior, 191; Massey, Interior Design, 146–7, 152–3.
31. Country Life (18 September 1958), 609.
32. ‘World of Interiors’ (March 2017), 96, 98–9.
33. Celebrating Shakespeare, Levi Fox for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (1964), 19.
34. How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior, MOMA, New York, October 2016-April 2017.
35. Courtney Coffmann, “Curtain as Wall,” Interiors, 9, no. 1 (2018), 100–10, p. 101.
37. Fox, Birthplace Trust, 182.
38. Ibid., 152.
39. Ibid., 153.
40. Ibid., 173.
41. Fox, Birthplace Trust, 180.
42. John March, 'Women Exile Photographers', in Applied Arts in British Exile, 49–66.
43. Christopher Breward & Claire Wilcox (eds.), The Ambassador: Promoting Post-War British Textiles and Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2012).
44. SBT, DTR1/2/13 (previously DR543/26), ‘Curtain Call for Tibor’, brochure distributed with The Ambassador.
45. Ibid.
46. Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic & Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 87–8.
47. Katherine West Scheil, Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 49.
49. Christine Boydell, 'The Decorative Imperative: Marion Dorn’s Textiles and Modernism', The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 19 (1995): 31–40.
51. ‘Stratford Herald Quatercentenary Supplement’, Friday 24th April 1964, ‘Tibor Reich Fabrics: Age of Kings’; fabrics designed for the Shakespeare Centre and S400 collection, 4.
52. Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 1. This vast and complex historiography often takes as its starting point E.M.W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944); way-markers can be traced through prefaces and introductions to many volumes including R. B. Pierce, Shakespeare’s History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare, Essays in Cultural Materialism, two editions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 1994); Michael Hattaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dominique Goy-Blanquet, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
53. John Wyver, ‘“A Profound Commentary on Kingship”: The Monarchy and Shakespeare’s Histories on Television, 1957–65’, in New Elizabethan Age, 276.
54. Morra, introduction, and ‘History Play: People, Pageant and the New Shakespearean Age’, in New Elizabethan Age, 9–10, 308–328.
55. SBT, DTR1/2/13 (formerly DR543/26), Shakespeare Festival Celebrations, 1769–1969: Commemorative Printed and Woven Tapestry Panels: leaflet and order form.
57. Fox, Birthplace Trust, 164–6.
58. ‘World of Interiors’, (March 2017), 95–103; https://www.tibor.co.uk includes many excellent images.
59. Michael Dobson, 'Four Centuries of Centenaries: Stratford-upon-Avon', Critical Survey 70 (2016) 50–57, p. 56.
60. Ibid.
61. Paul Edmondson, ‘Preface’, in Paul Edmondson & Ewan Fernie (eds.), New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), x-xiii.
62. University of Birmingham, Shakespeare Institute Library, Box pPR2923; the items sit together in the archive box.
63. Sparke, Modern Interior, 15.
64. Ania Loomba & Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998); Leah Marcus, How Shakespeare Became Colonial (London: Routledge, 2017), the introduction is a useful overview of the main issues and scholarly trajectories; Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 95–107 provides an interesting case-study of some of the key problems in the context of copies of the First Folio.
65. Fry, 'Shakespeare’s Stratford', Arch. Review, 219.
66. ‘Celebrating Shakespeare’, souvenir brochure (SBT, 1964), 8.
68. Tibor Ltd also designed a range of tea-towels to be sold by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
69. Cathryn Enis & Tara Hamling, ‘Shakespeare’s Lost Domesticity: Material Responses to Absence in Stratford-upon-Avon,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2019), 52–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quz003.
70. Ulrike Walton-Jordan, ‘Jewish Refugees at M&S’, in Anthony Grenville (ed.), Refugees from the Third Reich in Britain, Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exiles, 4 (London: 2002), 112, notes that Eric Heim was ‘originally from Austria and had previously been managing director of a textile firm near Prague’, a reminder of the multi-lingual and mobile nature of pre-war commerce in central Europe. The point is restated by Alison J. Clarke & Elana Shapira, Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 3, ‘migration and emigration and the experience of living outside of the respective homeland were part of the dynamic of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Central European experience in the first half of the twentieth century’.
71. Patricia Ashdown-Sharp, 'A fabric and furniture collection', The Birmingham Post, Monday 21 April, 1969.
72. Clarke & Shapira, Émigré Cultures, 3.
73. The New Hungarian Quarterly: Shakespeare Memorial Number, 13 (Spring 1964).
74. Tibor Bognár, 'The Shakespeare Quatercentenary in Hungary', Hungarian Studies in English, 3 (1967), 49–54.
75. Ibid., 51.
76. Kate Rumbold, ‘Shakespeare and the Stratford Jubilee’, in Peter Sabor & Fiona Ritchie (eds.), Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 273; Katherine Scheil (ed.), Shakespeare and Stratford, (Berghahn Books, 2019) is an accessible collection of essays on the construction of the relationship between the town and the playwright; Nicola J. Watson’s afterword “‘Dear Shakespeare-land’: investing in Stratford”, makes the significant point that ‘the history of the idea of Stratford […] has still not been written’.
77. Susan Bennett, ‘Shakespeare: The World’s Premier Cultural Tourist Brand?’, in Robert Ormsby & Valerie Clayman Pye (eds.), Shakespeare and Tourism (London: Routledge, 2023), 285–92.
78. ‘Herald Quatercentenary Supplement’: the most accessible overview of all those who were involved in 1964.
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Cathryn Enis
Cathryn Enis is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in the material and cultural heritage of William Shakespeare and the interaction between this complex legacy and the wider history of the English midlands.