The girl with the golden touch

Shunning the discrimination between canvas and textiles, painter and fabric designer Althea McNish was a onewoman colour explosion who made the impossible possible, finds Ian Collins

- Ian Collins

WHATEVER the painter and fabric designer Althea McNish touched turned to gold—and pink, orange, lime and purple. She was a one-woman colour explosion against the grey conformity of post-war Britain.

That golden touch was demonstrated only two days after she completed her studies in printed textiles at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) in the 1950s. Existing work was snapped up by Liberty department store, the head of which, Arthur Stewart-Liberty, then packed her off in a taxi to meet ‘The Mad Silkman’, Zika Ascher. A Czech émigré artist, designer and businessman, Ascher was noted for uniting radical art with chic design. He promptly commissioned a scintillating new collection from the recent postgraduate, which would be bought by leading French fashion houses Dior and Balenciaga.

This dream start in professional life was all the more remarkable because McNish was part of the Windrush Generation, having left her native Trinidad with her mother in 1951, to follow her father to England. She landed, aged 27, with an amazing maturity.

Her images in paint and on printed fabric were as lush as Jean Rhys novels, but without their underlying melancholy—that pervading sadness borne of exile, colour bars and female powerlessness in a world of men. Together with terrific creative talent, McNish had a steely conviction that she could overcome all obstacles by advancing her ‘tropical’ eye.