Märta Måås-Fjetterström

Märta Måås-Fjetterström was born in 1873 in Kimstad, a small village in Östergötland, Sweden. At seventeen she entered the School of Industrial Arts in Stockholm, majoring in art and training as an illustrator and drawing teacher. After graduating she taught in the weaving studio at the Lund Museum of Cultural History, Kulturen, where its founder Georg Karlin commissioned her first textile sketches. Some years later she became director of the Malmöhus County Handicraft Association in Malmö, and shortly afterwards moved to Vittsjö, where she met Lilli Zickerman (1858-1949), initiator of the National Association of Swedish Handicraft Societies. Together they directed a new weaving school in which Måås-Fjetterström had her artistic independence and a workshop of skilled weavers to execute the carpets and tapestries she designed.

In 1919, at the age of 46, Märta Måås-Fjetterström opened her own company and weaving studio in Båstad, Sweden, and from there went on to revolutionise the Swedish textile tradition. She employed more than twenty skilled weavers, the first of them former students from the Vittsjö weaving school. Towards the end of 1940 she wrote to her lifelong friend Carl Malmsten (1888-1972): 'But the road is long and instead of decreasing, the projects and sketches in my drawer accumulate, as if waiting to be realised. I wish I could continue on another planet.' She died in 1941 after a period of illness, only 67 years old. The company was about to close its doors when Malmsten and others arranged a fundraiser that saved both the collection and the studio; in January 1942 AB Märta Måås-Fjetterström was launched, directed by the textile artist Barbro Nilsson between 1942 and 1970.