Else Regensteiner, Textile Designer, 96

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Else Regensteiner, died of heart failure Saturday, January 18, 2003,
in her Chicago, Illinois, home, at the age of 96.

Modernist textile designer and weaver Else Regensteiner was a
masterful technician and instructor who was instrumental in
transforming the specialty into an art form after World War II,
experts said.

Instrumental in adapting the styles of the Bauhaus movement to cloth,
Mrs. Regensteiner was known for her deft use of color and integration
of materials such as metallic thread, plastics, leather, straw and
found objects.

She also helped touch off a renaissance of the fiber arts at The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a professor there for
more than 25 years, about 14 of them as director of the weaving
department, and wrote three books on the subject.

"She was the person who really established a professional teaching
division [in textiles]" when she joined the staff of The School of the
Art Institute in 1945, said Christa Thurman, curator of textiles,
conservator and head of the textiles department at the Art Institute.
With "her one-of-a-kind weavings" she showed an extraordinary sense of
color combinations, Thurman said.

Carolyn Howlett, professor emeritus of The School of the Art Institute
and a specialist in weaving, said student interest in Mrs.
Regensteiner's courses exceeded that in more traditional media such as
painting and sculpture. Only the number of looms limited enrollment.

Born in Munich, Germany, Mrs. Regensteiner studied at the University
of Munich before immigrating to the U.S. in 1936 with her late
husband, Bertold. She was already an accomplished textile artist by
the time she took a teaching job at Jane Addams Hull House in 1941.

"She was very inventive and experimental and willing to try new
directions. And that was what we wanted," Howlett said.

"The deviation from the standardized look was not complete until we
got somebody who was willing to forget about all those past
influences. She was very much interested in trying all kinds of
materials" and willing to use nature as her reference point.

The school was also eager to exploit Mrs. Regensteiner's ties to New
Bauhaus artists, including Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

While starting her career at the school, Mrs. Regensteiner and Julia
McVicker opened reg/wick, a small studio that supplied interior
designers, architects and industrial designers -- including Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, Raymond Loewy and Henry Glass -- with commissioned,
hand-woven fabrics.

"She was just at that period where weaving changed from being just a
craft to an art form," said her daughter, Helga Sinaiko, who said her
mother loved teaching but lived for her solitary moments at the loom.