The curtains that created my world

A 1950s design which (probably) set the course of my life

Apr 05, 2026

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-7:19

I think these curtains are probably responsible for everything. My longing for travel to warm and distant places. My excitement about the world. My instinct for a strong black line, and my desire to make that line just a little wonky, slightly abstracted.

The curtains were bought by my parents some time in the late 1950s. I have a handmade book somewhere which was made by a Danish ‘au pair’ girl who came to look after me and my brother and sister. The first page of the book shows my parents in their sitting room in their little bungalow on an estate on the outskirts of Edinburgh; Ercol chairs and matching coffee table, gorgeous pottery lamps, my mother with her knitting machine, my father looking serious.

Everything in that room is a vintage rarity now. I find it hard to believe that they just lived in it all then, buying the latest modern fabrics and Bernard Leach-style lamps.

I don’t know if the curtains hung in that room, or in a bedroom. I think probably in a bedroom, and, looking at them day after day, I absorbed them into my bloodstream.

They were made by Sanderson, who still make fabrics today. In the 1950s Sanderson were proud of the up-to-date, modern processes they were using for producing block and screen-printed fabrics and matching wallpaper.

The basic unit of the curtain design is one simple idea, repeated a number of times. Somehow, though, you don’t understand this when you look at the curtains themselves. I, at least, just see a magical, hot place, unfurling endlessly towards an imagined horizon.

This is the basic unit:

I don’t really understand how they did it. You can see a line in the top section (of the whole curtain) which seems to me to be an edge, but then underneath that there are trees which would overlap that line if you continued it downwards, and all the rest of the piece doesn’t seem to have any edges or overlaps of any kind.

I must have pored over these images endlessly, and they still fascinate me.

The design is called ‘Viterbo’, created for Sanderson fabrics by a German artist called Walter Matysiak (1915-1985).

Actual Viterbo, Italy:

I can’t find any record of the curtains online with the right colours, but the V&A have this version:

Walter Matysiak’s father ran a decorating business, and apparently his mother ‘would like to have become a needlework teacher’. At the age of 14 he began an apprenticeship with his father, and a year later had lessons from a painter in Breslau. Apparently during this time he saw an exhibition by Paul Klee, where he saw ‘The Twittering Machine’, which he later described as one of his favourite paintings.

Matysiak studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the State School of Applied Arts in Munich. From 1946 he became a freelance painter and graphic designer, working for a number of textile firms as a pattern-designer, and was also an illustrator, caricaturist, and cartoonist. He later taught drawing and painting at the Lake Constance Art School in Switzerland, and exhibited in France, Germany and Switzerland.

Walter Matysiak was a poet with brush and paint and a highly productive artist who mastered the technique of the Old Masters with virtuosity. His works captivate "with his boundless imagination, his bubbling ideas, his almost high-spirited delight in fables, in inventing the strangest apparitions and stories." He dealt intensively with artists he admired, such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Joan Miro. Urs von Schroeder divides his work into "imaginary" and "funny" images. Many of Matysiak's paintings and graphics captivate with their humor, but often there is a serious level behind them. He also did not shy away from incorporating taboo topics such as sexuality, corruption or war into his work. The techniques he used were oil painting, watercolour, tempera, ink pen and brush, coloured pencil, pencil, drypoint etching, woodcut and linocut and mixed forms.
His multifaceted oeuvre combines contradictions and contrasts, is both figurative and abstract. His work is difficult to classify stylistically: he took up elements of illusionism, cubism and surrealism and irritated (translation?) the viewer by combining stylistic elements in an often grotesque way. It is therefore not possible to speak of an actual development, but rather Matysiak varied styles and motifs as uninhibitedly as he did skilfully.
Wikipedia (German)

Don’t you just love that idea of ‘irritating the viewer’, and it being difficult ‘to speak of an actual development’? I’m sure Paul Klee would have approved.

There’s not much of his work to see online. There are a few textiles in the V&A: