Marguerita Mergentime

Marguerita Mergentime (1894–1941) was an American textile designer best known for printed fabrics, making her mark in the 1930s with table linens in bold colors and innovative patterns created to enliven American households. Mergentime also designed sheets, towels, and tableware. In New York City in the 1930s, Mergentime worked with some of the best-known designers of the day, including Donald Deskey, Russel Wright, and Frederick Kiesler. Her work was featured in The New Yorker, House & Garden, House Beautiful, and Vogue.

Born Marguerita Straus on March 3, 1894, in New York City, she was the daughter of Max and Adelaide (Ottenheim) Straus. Mergentime graduated from the Ethical Culture School. She pursued art studies through classes at Teachers College from 1923–1927, as well as with designer Ilonka Karasz and through museum study rooms. In 1914, she married Charles Mergentime, a businessman and investor, and they had two daughters. The interior of the Mergentime’s New York apartment was designed by Frederick Kiesler, including furniture, bookshelves, and lighting, and it also displayed paintings by Milton Avery and Arshile Gorky. Mergentime’s design studio featured cabinets by Gilbert Rohde.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Mergentime, unable to find the types of table linens she wanted, set out to fill this niche by becoming a textile designer. She began to educate herself, conducting research in museums and studying the arts with designers such as Ilonka Karasz. In addition to textiles her studies covered diverse areas including bookbinding, music, photography, and painting. Mergentime become a member of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC) as early as 1929. Mergentime’s AUDAC colleagues included numerous influential designers whose works define 20th-century modernism in America, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Egmont Arens, Donald Deskey, Norman Bel Geddes, Eliel Saarinen, and Russel Wright. Her textiles were included in the 1931 AUDAC exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, along with those by Mariska Karasz; the press release for the exhibition states: “Miss Mergentime is a designer of textiles, packaging, wallpaper, and is the designing stylist for the Kleinert Rubber Company.” Mergentime was also a member of the Fashion Group.

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