Lanette Scheeline
ABOUT LANETTE SCHEELINE
Born in northern California, Lanette Scheeline (American, 1910–2001) was an American textile and wallpaper designer. She graduated from the College of Fine Arts at the University of California at Berkeley in 1932. She also took a textile design course at UCLA and a year of coursework at the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco. After teaching art for one year, Scheeline began to work for Louma Prints, a textile silkscreen factory in San Francisco. Her work with Louma was cut short by World War II, when she relocated to Marin county to work in a shipyard. She resumed her career after the war, establishing her own design studio in Mill Valley, California.
After 1945, Scheeline began designing wallpapers for William Katzenbach, the primary partner for the New York–based avant-garde wallpaper firm Katzenbach and Warren. Around 1955 Scheeline produced a new type of mural decoration for Katzenbach, the Tree series. Designs by Scheeline were often custom and created using block printing, intaglio, and machine printing techniques. She also experimented with printing designs on Japanese paper. Her designs were largely influenced by natural forms and botany, which can be seen in her works in the Cooper Hewitt collection.
HIGHLIGHTS
![A delicate tree with wide, splaying branches covered in light blue and purple blossoms and green leaves. Above the tree are a few paragraphs of miniscule text titled [The Flamboyant Tree], and below the tree is larger text that reads [The Flamboyant Tree, designed by Lanette, Katzenbach and Warren, Inc.].](https://www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Scheeline-1998-29-74-150x150.jpeg)
Lanette Scheeline's lyrical interpretation of the California landscape translated into environmental wallpaper murals that enhanced the modern domestic interior.
In mid-twentieth century San Francisco, two women explored new directions in weaving and the design of fabrics and wallcoverings. Join us to discover the works of émigré Trude Guermonprez (1910-1976), an inventive and inspiring weaver, textile designer, and teacher, and her contemporary Lanette Scheeline (1910-2001), a Bay Area native who operated a successful textile and...
This delicate floral design by Lanette Scheeline was one of the early wallcoverings printed on Tyvek. The design consists of a fairly small repeat, actually, a single small bouquet of mixed flowers, perhaps wildflowers, repeated two across the width and repeating vertically on the diagonal. The flowers are rendered in a stylized manner, and printed...
I wanted to share this beautiful wallpaper with you. Columns of delphinium flowers captured at their peak, printed in intense shades of blue and white, are interspersed with a mix of smaller red flowers, all printed against a black background which makes the colors pop. It is a rather dense design but I think the...
In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. This floral paper stuns with its bright warm colors and energetically-rendered flowers. The Cooper Hewitt has three other colorways of this particular design, each equally eye-catching and bold. This particular paper, though printed by a New York-based...
A very novel idea in the mid-1950s is the running-over-onto-the-ceiling idea of this mural design. Lanette was a prolific textile and wallpaper designer and I think this concept is unique to her work. Murals were very much in demand in the years following the Second World War, following in the footsteps of the block-printed scenic...
