In 1948 Laurence Anton Maix left his position at Knoll, where he had worked since the company’s founding in 1938, to establish his own eponymous textile firm based in New York.¹ Maix sought out well-known architects and designers from across the country to create patterns for drapery and upholstery fabrics for his Campagna series of printed textiles that aimed to represent the breadth and richness of American design. His newly established company influenced the rise of modern textile designs appropriate for contemporary interiors of the postwar era.²  

Bear, designed by the Seattle-based architect Paul Thiry, was one of the textiles included in Maix Fabric’s Campagna series. Composed of frontally facing stylized bears of differing sizes in an asymmetrical arrangement, Thiry’s design creates an illusion of depth and dynamic movement. The bear form is inspired by a mask made by Indigenous Americans that Thiry encountered in the collection of the Seattle Historical Society while engaged in the design of the Museum of History and Industry to house the society’s collection. The first section of the museum opened in 1952 with an exhibition assembled by Thiry, as the director had recently been fired. Through the course of the project, Thiry developed a fascination with the art and artifacts made by the Inuit and Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and ultimately began his own private collection.³ Thiry’s design is indicative of its era, when abstracted and stylized designs based on Indigenous motifs were quite popular and used by many artists and designers as a way to set themselves apart from European Modernism. The copying of Indigenous designs without a deeper understanding of their cultural significance is now considered a form of cultural appropriation.

Paul Thiry is best known as the principal architect of the Seattle World’s Fair (1962), but he also designed residential, ecclesiastical, commercial, and cultural buildings, typically in a Modernist style. Thiry toured Europe in the late 1920s, where he met Le Corbusier and his contemporaries. Impressed by their views on architecture, Thiry returned to Seattle eager to promote the new style. Today, Thiry is credited with introducing the International Style to the Pacific Northwest. —Sarah Marie Horne