Ever-fashionable white.

Today, with literally thousands of shades of color to choose from, white is still the most popular color in an interior designer's arsenal. This is nothing new, since in the nineteenth century American white-work textiles, print-work embroideries, and marble-dust drawings flowered simultaneously with a predilection for the color white. In the neoclassical period fashionable women favored simple, white empire-waist dresses of the type frequently seen in portraits by artists such as Ammi Phillips.

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Continuing the theme of last year's exhibition devoted to blue, the American Fok Art Museum in New York City has moved on to white in a show entitled White on White (and a Little Gray), which may be seen until September 17. Nearly forty objects are on view, chiefly drawn from the museum's collection and supplemented with loans from private collectors.

Cotton became one of the leading crops in this country in the opening years of the nineteenth century, and, with the inventions of Eli Whitney's cotton gin and Samuel Slater's waterpowered spinning factory, it became much more affordable and pervasive. It eventually supplanted flax, which was earlier bleached to create a brighter white or spun into cloth in combination with cotton.

White work (white stitching on a white ground) encompasses a series of complicated sewing techniques that were used to adorn bedcovers and smaller household textiles. It grew out of two textile traditions: French textiles known as Marseilles work because the textiles were exported from that port, and single-color wool or silk whole-cloth quilts, which had been produced by American women for many years. White work required great skill because the sewer had to master a number of complex techniques. Indeed much of the perceived beauty of white work derives from an appreciation for the intricacy of the stitching.

The nine bedcovers in the exhibition span the nineteenth century, from 1796 to 1897. Some of them incorporate nonrepresentational patterns, while others, like the 1796 example, which is the earliest in the collection, has an ambitious tree-of-life motif, clearly a reinterpretation of brightly colored and expensive palam-pores imported from India.

Stuff work was one of the many techniques used to embellish these textiles. Sometimes called trapunto, it called for stitching both sides of the outline of a motif and then filling in the empty middle with batting. This raised motif could then be ...