1. Bernat Klein CBE was a Serbian textile designer and painter.
16 Facts About Bernat Klein
1. 2.
Bernat Klein was born in 1922 in Senta, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
3.
Bernat Klein was employed by various textile companies in England and Scotland, until 1952 when he established Colourcraft Ltd.
4.
Bernat Klein created innovative textiles, building up trade with producers such as Marks and Spencer.
5.
Bernat Klein was renamed Bernat Klein Limited, and a major stake in the business was acquired by a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco.
6.
Bernat Klein resigned from this company in 1966, setting up on his own again.
7.
Bernat Klein based himself at his home near Selkirk, where he commissioned a studio building from the architect Peter Womersley, who had designed Klein's house, High Sunderland, in the 1950s.
8.
Bernat Klein established a cottage industry of hand-knitters, employing up to 250 people.
9.
Bernat Klein drew inspiration from nature for his textiles and paintings.
10.
Bernat Klein won the Design Council Award in 1968, and was awarded an honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University in 2003.
11.
Margaret Bernat Klein hand-knitted a range of patterns using his textiles, which were showcased in catalogues.
12.
Bernat Klein integrated a space-dyeing or random dyeing process so that he could include up to eight colours in a single yarn, in other words, up to 32 colours in a single cloth.
13.
Bernat Klein's clothes were highly textural, which met the demand for clean-lined coats and suits in high fashion of the 1960s, and were often made out of woven mohair, wool, silk, and synthetic fibres.
14.
Bernat Klein deconstructed images from nature into flat planes of colour, and created oil paintings with a technique called impasto, in which oil paint is applied on a board in thick layers with a palette knife to yield dynamism.
15.
Bernat Klein was inspired by post-impressionism paintings, especially the pointillism of Georges Seurat's works.
16.
Bernat Klein commissioned Dovecot Studios to produce ten tapestries based on magnified sections of his impasto oil paintings.