Cooper Hewitt says...
Laura Jean Allen (American, 1916-2003) studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School in Philadelphia and graduated in 1939.
As a print designer, she was one of the most prolific of the Associated American Artists designers. According to Art for Every Home: An Illustrated Index of Associated American Artists Prints, Ceramics, and Textile Designs (Mariana Kistler Beach Museum of Art, 2016), products featuring her art included Stonelain ceramics as well as textiles produced by Riverdale Fabrics and by M. Lowenstein & Sons for the Signature Fabrics series. Her textile designs were featured widely from 1952-1956 in Vogue and Vogue Pattern Book, Simplicity Patterns, Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. Her textile designs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Allen’s artwork appeared on 16 covers of The New Yorker from the 1960s through the 1980s.
She also wrote and illustrated several children’s books, including A Fresh Look at Flowers (Franklin Watts, Inc., 1963), Ottie and the Star (Harper & Row, 1979), Where is Freddy? (Harper & Row, 1986), and the Rollo and Tweedy books (HarperCollins). She created Mr. Jolly’s Sidewalk Market (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), a wordless picture book. Her illustrations appear in Mary Furlong Moore’s Your Own Room: The Interior Decorating Guide for Girls (Grosset & Dunlap, 1960).
