Exhibition celebrates overlooked London Underground fabric designer Enid Marx

A new exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire explores the life and work of Enid Marx, whose fabric designs transformed London Underground train interiors.

• The exhibition, titled The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design, opened on Saturday and includes Marx's original 1930s tube fabric designs, including her "Shield" pattern inspired by African art at the British Museum.
• Marx was commissioned in 1937 by the London Passenger Transport Board alongside Paul Nash and Marion Dorn to create brighter moquette seat fabrics that would disguise dirt rather than blend with it.
• The show displays creations from Marx's wider career, including block-printed textiles, utility scheme fabrics from World War II, bow ties, and the collection of mass-produced artwork she and her life partner Margaret Lambert bequeathed to Compton Verney.
• Curator Az Crawford said Marx "was dismissed as decorative but in fact she is taking abstraction very seriously" and "embedding messages about African art, colonial influences, and the way one art form takes from another."