November 30, 2002
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON
Mary Bright, an innovative curtain
maker whose work for the Museum
of Modern Art, Calvin
Klein, Wendi
and Rupert Murdoch, Jean-Georges
Vongerichten, Lauren
Bacall and other clients moved the traditional craft of cutting, sewing
and pleating curtains to the realm of modern art, died yesterday in New
York Presbyterian Hospital. She was 48.
The cause was lung cancer, said
her husband, David Paskin, who was Ms. Bright's partner in Mary Bright Inc.
He is her only immediate survivor.
Ms. Bright was born in Edinburgh,
Scotland, in 1954. She studied fine arts in London and fashion and millinery
in Leeds. She was never formally trained
as a designer.
Ms. Bright's first career in New York, where she moved in 1979, was as a hat
maker.
"I couldn't find a hat I was willing to wear," Ms. Bright told The
New York Times in 1983, offering an explanation for her constructivist-like
head pieces. To complement them, she also designed clothing, including a cocktail
dress with a revealing back blocked in, as though to foil window-peepers,
by slats from a Levolor window blind.
Ms. Bright's first curtain design, for the actress Ellen
Barkin in 1983, redirected her professionally into a field that she was
acknowledged by design professionals to have redefined — almost single-handedly.
Ms. Bright preferred experimenting with new or unorthodox materials, like corrugated
paper or rubber
or fine metal meshes,
to cutting and sewing linen or wool, though her fabric designs also refined
and renewed the idea of a simple curtain into something that went well beyond
window covering.
Ms. Bright, asked in an interview this year why she had chosen something as
homely as curtain making to make her artistic mark in the world, said, "I
decide that if I was going to do something out of the ordinary, that I'd better
start with something ordinary. I respect people who hate
curtains."
Copyright
2002 New York Times (Registration required)
9:17:47 AM 
|
|
