K. L. H. Wells, Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York

Abstract

K. L. H. Wells’s Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York is a thoroughly researched examination of western tapestry’s role as a modernist medium. Wells maps out how tapestry became a form attracting key modern artists, including Picasso, Mir o, Matisse, Lurçat, Helen Frankenthaler, Josef Albers and Anni Albers, to its economic worth as multiples or limited editions, reproduced from an original artwork. Wells defines western tapestry in the opening pages of her study. Since the fifteenth century, the standard technique to produce tapestry in the western tradition is on either a high-warp or low-warp loom. For 500 years, the specialised weavers of Flanders, France, England, Italy, Germany and elsewhere carried on the tradition of weaving after a cartoon (fullscale preliminary design) provided to them by professional painters. By the time of the Second World War, many large-scale, expensive European tapestry workshops, such as Arras, Tournai and Brussels, as well as the Beauvais factory in Paris, had little economic viability. The revival of the art of tapestry after 1945 is mainly due to the French artist Jean Lurçat (1892–1966). He gathered around him major contemporary architects and painters such as Le Corbusier and Picasso and persuaded them to design tapestry cartoons. In the 1950s Lurçat was a very successful artist exhibiting worldwide; although he was a painter, not a weaver, most of his works were woven in the historic workshops of the French city of Aubusson. Aubusson tapestries are still recognised as a gold standard throughout the world. Lurçat believed that tapestries should be given front-door access to museums and be acknowledged as a type of monumental art, collected and promoted by curators and private buyers alike. As Wells points out, French patrons such as Marie Cuttoli encouraged artists to embrace tapestry as heir to a rich artistic tradition and sold their work well and at high prices (pp. 131–33). It is one of the strengths of Wells’s book that she positions western tapestry as part of a broader marketplace modernism in which artists produced work for corporate locations and churches as well as for museums, galleries and private homes. Indeed, for Wells, tapestry was a model for the modernist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. As she argues, ‘tapestry enabled the rise of modernist abstraction to its position of dominance, most obviously expanding the market for modern art but also in subtler ways in which tapestry served as a conceptual and formal model for modern artists’ (p. 3). The term ‘marketplace modernism’ is very useful in Wells’s study. As coopted by the marketplace, modernism quickly became the most efficient and effective means to sell to a public eager to recover some form of comfort and satisfaction in a traumatised post-war world. For example, Pablo Picasso, as a leader of the avant-garde, was a model for other artists, and his commercial strategies reveal the market not merely as a site of exchange but rather the dynamo of the art world, where critics, collectors and curators joined with artists and dealers to confer artistic standing. Witness Nelson Rockefeller, the American tycoon, commissioning Picasso to create large-scale tapestries between 1958 and 1975, based on some of his best-known paintings, to