Object of the week: The Red Shoes wallpaper by the film’s designer Hein Heckroth

In 1957, the renowned German company Rasch commissioned Hein Heckroth to create a new wallpaper for their Künstler Tapeten (Artists’ Wallpaper) line. This had launched in 1950, building on an earlier successful collaboration with the Bauhaus to integrate aspects of contemporary art and architecture into the home. The roster of artists steadily grew over the decade and included luminaries of German art, architecture and design, as well as international painters, designers, sculptors and illustrators, such as Bernard Schultze, Lucienne Day, Salvador Dalí, Shinkichi Tajiri and Bele Bachem.

By the time he collaborated with Rasch, Heckroth was back in his native Germany after a successful career in Britain. Already a celebrated artist and theatre designer, he had left Nazi Germany in 1933 and re-established himself in the UK, eventually entering the film industry, initially as a costume designer. The Red Shoes (1948) was his first feature as production designer and it earned him an Oscar for its imaginative and groundbreaking approach, which brought a painter’s sensibility to bear on design for film. 

Heckroth’s wallpaper is at once both dark and playful. It incorporates motifs from ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, the surreal and expressionistic centrepiece at the centre of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film. For this sequence, Heckroth and his sketch artist Ivor Beddoes produced hundreds of designs for sets, costumes and textiles. The wallpaper reproduces key moments and characters  – the menacing shoemaker and his tempting wares, Vicky’s delight and then despair while in thrall to the red shoes, and the dancing newspaper which takes on human form. 

It also judiciously uses darkness and shadow, with the interspersed nightmarish images contrasting with the light-hearted pastel background. Powerfully pulling the whole design together (and demonstrating ‘unexpected red theory’ in action, decades before the term was coined on social media) is the recurring use of the colour red: Vicky’s fiery hair, the hearts and flowers, and, of course, the all-important and central recurring motif of the red shoes themselves.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.