The Divine Art: 400 Years of European Tapestries

Ancient Tapestry from Art Institute of Chicago

The Textile Society of the Art Institute under the guiding hand of Christa C. Thurman produced an un-paralleled tour de force in 2008:  The presentation of seventy works that had been part of a 13 year conservation and restoration project of the Art Institute’s unparalleled tapestry collection.  Many of these exquisite works were found rolled in the basement, in dire need of repair. All of them were so dirty that the colors were nearly indistinguishable one from another. Christa Thurman took on this daunting labor of love, raised the money, found the laboratory in Belgium and accompanied all the pieces from Chicago and stayed until they were safely home again.

Tapestries were considered paintings in fiber.

Although it is not known exactly when the first tapestry was produced in Europe, by the early Middle Ages workshops throughout the continent were producing treasured wall hangings for the well to do. In the 14th century suddenly stories were appearing in these weavings instead of simply decorative patterns. Suddenly tapestry was raised to the level of painting. They also had the unique advantage of being very portable, enabling the nobility, clergy and wealthy merchants to take them along on their travels. They acted as room dividers, party decorations and cut the drafts in unheated castles, abbeys and manor houses.

Tapestries were frequently produced in “suites,” a series that allowed the whole story to be told. The golden age of tapestry was 1500 to 1750. The painters who made the designs were usually well known. The master weavers were respected.

These manufactories became an economically important factor in their regions and were often tax exempt. A visit to the Gobelins manufactory in Paris makes a fascinating afternoon. The old looms, the size of a large room, are still in use. You can see how the artisans work from behind the tapestry and follow the progress of the weaving with a mirror all the while referring to the cartoon (the full sized desired pattern). The cartoons were valuable in themselves and reused many times.

There are two kinds of looms: high warp on which the warps run perpendicularly to the floor and low warp on which the warps are parallel to the floor. On the low warp the cartoon cut into strips was laid under the tightly stretched strings. On the high warp, the weaver used a mirror to look behind his seat to the full-sized cartoon hung on the wall.

Pomona tapestry

Tapestries have always been affected by European politics. The Eighty Years War (1568-1648) sent Netherland artisans scurrying to France, England and Italy. During the French Revolution (1789-1799) many of the tapestries were either defaced or destroyed to retrieve the gold from the threads, not to mention destroying the symbols of monarchy and nobility.
The mechanized culture of the Industrial Revolution led to the near demise of this hand-labor intensive art form. However, William Morris established a tapestry workshop at Merton Abbey to combat the “soul-lessness of art” this mechanization encouraged.

Chemical dyes, synthetic and analine, were not invented until late into the 19th century. The radiant, luminous, exuberant colors in these tapestries were produced by woad and indigo for the blues; mustard gave the yellows; Red in all its glory was produced from brazilwood, the cochineal insect and madder. The lustrous beauties of the colors after they had been cleaned was really indescribable.

Tapestries are only recently beginning to be taken seriously as works of art, not merely desirable decoration. When Mrs. Thurman graciously took the Textile Society on a personal tour with anecdotes, the gasps were audible as she described how this or that work was cut to go around doorways or fit into a particular space or go behind a particular chest. The modern mind boggles at the lack of respect for both art and craft. Like so much that comes from human hands working long and carefully, we seem to be able to value it the more, the farther away we go.

The Yarn Paintings of José Benitez Sánchez

Yarn Painting by José Benitez Sánchez

Art critic, Corinne Geeting of the Christian Science Monitor commented, “Paintings with yarn? Such a technique sounds contrived and unsophisticated until you see the masterworks of the Huichol Indians of Mexico. The fluidity and richness of coloring almost surpasses even that of the lushest oils.”

The master of Huichol yarn paintings is José Benitez Sánchez who was born in 1938 in the Sierra huicola de Nayarit. He was trained as a shaman* and chose to dedicate his life to creating these religious masterpieces that are a direct reflection of his divine inspiration. He has only contempt for the newer artists because “they work only for money.” The Huichols protect their people from the divine. It is forbid­den, but also relies on man’s need to transgress! Any initiate into the esoteric aspects, particularly shamanism, must participate in a series of transgressions, learning things that are too dangerous for the ordinary man, being willing to wreck the lives of those around him in his quest and committing himself to carrying out impossible acts.
Those who do not “reach the place where the sun rises” are characterized by horror vacui, a ritual of frenzy and repetition without renewal or result. Peyote and sleep deprivation create ritual ecstasy. There is animal sacrifice, renunciation of money-making, sleeplessness and endless dancing and physical deprivation and exhaustion, abstaining from consuming salt; all of this to achieve nierika, the gift of sight.

To create these works a board is spread with beeswax and the contours of the design drawn out. The figures are outlined and filled in. The artist signs the back and writes an explanation of the symbolism. “The cosmic mythology of the great nayar explains how the world itself is a textile woven from the hair of the first goddess. This divinity, equivalent to the Spider Woman of the Pueblo Indians, wove the world in a diamond shape and her sons did a ceremonial dance on top of it to stretch it out.”

This art form combines the taste of earth and animal fiber with the occult and spiritual. José Benitez Sánchez is the grandmaster. He is considered one of Mexico’s most creative artists.

The Lake

Duet by Julie Ressler

The Lake, those two words define where we in Chicago-land live, inspire us, amuse us and comfort us. One of our art­ists calls our Lake Michigan, the “soul-washer.” When the boats come back to the harbors in the late spring this begins the season of being out in the air. The dog beaches open. The young and agile appear, running, jumping, bicy­cling, breathing in the fine air that comes down from Canada to clean our spirits and renew our sense of wonder. The marvelous physical energy that pulses through this land begins again. Older couples sit on the benches and hold hands gazing at the light- play that the sunset brings to the sky and flutters along the waves. Artists take their pads and paints and head for the shores of Lake Michigan to paint the people, the lighthouses, the rocks and the water anything natural, en plein air.

Art Fairs begin. The lines of white tents containing “The Work,” announce the artists’ moment to show what they’ve been doing inside all winter. Just being out in the fresh air is enough. Sales are great, but if not, at least you’ve been outside. You were part of the scene. We absorb the summer into our souls because the winter is so hard and long. The thought is, “Just don’t bother to come inside!”

Picnics, barbecues – spoken of reverently, lustfully all winter come forth hesitantly in the still chilly Spring, but spring up every­where as soon as the temperature brings daffodils and tulips. …. The air is suffused with burgers and brats…and “the beer flows like wine.” Now I understand about the Russians and others from grotty climates who love their gazebos and pergolas. It’s a way to be outside even in the rain! even in the dark! I love to go along the Lake on weekends and see every sort of family enjoying being together, watching the boats, watching each other, playing out in the air. The Lake adds a limitless horizon to Chicago-land that is reflected in our optimism and openness to new ideas.

The Power of Fiber Art

Fiber Arts are usually thought to be woman’s art. Penelope was at her loom. The

Identity 7 by Michelle Sales

house-proud housewife’s needlework distinguished her and made her family seem precious and comfortable. When my daughter was born, my stepmother made her a dimity christening dress with Irish lace and tucks and a bonnet. Every stitch was sewn by hand. She said it was the only way she knew to get enough prayers into one little dress and bonnet. When my elderly aunt took a long time dying in the hospital, I sat with her and crocheted a baby blanket using my Russian grandmother’s pattern for a young friend’s new baby. These ways go very deeply into the human psyche. They defy definition as “craft” or even “fine craft” …they are art, life art, even though the execution can be very flawed, they retain a rich archetypal value.

Coral Garden by Cathy Mendola

It is only within the last 40 or 50 years that things

like

Handmade Fabric by Jan Gerber

“homemade,” “prayer,” “feeling precious” and having enough time at home to carefully and individually be “at home” has come into such a confusion of definition. It is part of having too much, personally and as a society. There are too many people doing too many things for us. We work too much outside our homes and bring the world too much into our homes with TV and computers. We haven’t enough time to exhale. We go to spas instead of our homes. Our young mothers are so tired. It used to be Dad was far away, but now Mom is also in Iraq or in London working hard away from home. Yet, one of the brightest “corporate” members of WAG crochets jewelry as she flies and waits in airports. Handwork is powerful.

Leaf Fall by Barbara Schneider

An Artist Goes to Paris by Julie Ressler

Paris is called the city of light, but especially in the dark, it is gorgeous! I shamelessly snap pictures of everything from store windows TO light reflections on rainy evenings a la Brassai, the famous French photographer whose moody shots of dark streets have enchanted us for many decades. If you will see, you must give yourself time. How much time?… As much as is necessary, as much as you have…  Answers like that drive “counting people”, left -brained talented people mad” “Well, how much DO you need?” They demand. “Well I don’t know,” we artists reply, hoping they’ll just not ask that again. A painting, an essay, a story, an idea can happen very quickly or can wait until we end up missing the plane! “It’s all good!” we say and watch those around us expire with aggravation, but, in our heart of hearts, we don’t care. We got what we came for.

There is the same intriguing duality to the French. There are the “bourgeois” shopkeepers, the baguette prepared fresh every morning, the regularity of habit that makes such refined living possible and yet, a deep enjoyment of eccentricity, the flamboyant and the exotic. The highest, outrageous fashions are made with devotion by people who go home on the trains to their families each night and come back to sew each morning. They make the extraordinary possible and they know it.

For touring, comfort with a little panache seems just right. Comfortable shoes, raincoat, umbrella are essential, but do as the French women do and wear a great scarf over your raincoat or a small bouquet of violets on your lapel in the Spring, you will be forgiven all faux pas and lack of French. If you’re a man, wear a beret! Frenchmen love their hats. The French covet little bits of paper, tickets, petit mots, receipts. Do save and paste them into your diary. It’s part of the difference. 

Every photographer knows that “The Shot” takes hundreds to get “The One.” Well, painters are the same way. A painting may need its own space, a life of its own. An artist is the instrument of the process. The process is composed of the Gestalt of fate, experiences, desires, the feelings, the smell and the textures have to “get into you.” We become de-sensitized by the familiar. “It’s all the same,” we say mournfully. That’s why we have to go away to wake up. This is what makes Paris so satisfying. It is never the same. It is always a little unfamiliar, yet reliably wonder-filled from centuries of nurture.

In “Shakespeare in Love” the theater owner says to the financier, “It will all turn out well.” “How will that happen?” He asks doubtfully. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” Is the reply. This is what I will tell you about your trip to Paris.

Off the beaten path, but my favorites:

Tea at Mariage Frères on rue du Bourg-Tibourg. Have a madeline, a pot of tea and think of Proust’s A La Recherché du Temps Perdu. Go upstairs to the tea museum and imagine.

Parc Butte Chaumont before noon when the light is perfection. On a clear day there are fabulous views of Sacre Coeur and Montmartre, the rocks, the caves, the carved benches and fences. Don’t miss this!

The Jardin du Luxembourg on Sundays is filled with French families. The rocks on the paths look like caramels. Men are sailing model boats on the pond. This is like a Monet scene in modern garb. My favorite statue in the world stands there announcing the inevitable fall of innocence out of youthful mischief.

The Paris Mosque on weekday afternoons for green Tunisian pastries that taste like fresh grass and sweet mint tea served in glasses. You enter through the SE corner. It is unmarked!

Le Défenseur du Temps: Paris – Beauborg: Quartier de l’Horloge near Centre Georges Pompidou arrive a little early and order a coffee in the café across the street and wait.

Musée Gustave Moreau- an easy walk downhill from Montmartre – He was an amazing symbolist painter and teacher of Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault to mention just two of his famous students.

Alexandre Nevsky Cathedral 12 rue Daru: Go on Sunday morning for the experience of Russia before 1905. The timber of the men’s chorus goes right through your bones. The real gold has real flash! The icons are a different way of connecting with divinity than most of us are used to. It is very interesting!

Musée Jacquemart-Andre, 158 blvd Haussmann – sumptuous!

In St Germain de Pres listen for the bells of St Sulpice which have a different tonality than any of the other bells in Paris. They seem to say, ‘Doom! Pray or Doom! Doom is at hand.” in a very off key minor tone.

Paris is called the city of light, but especially in the dark, it is gorgeous! I shamelessly snap pictures of everything from store windows TO light reflections on rainy evenings a la Brassai, the famous French photographer whose moody shots of dark streets have enchanted us for many decades. If you will see, you must give yourself time. How much time?… As much as is necessary, as much as you have…  Answers like that drive “counting people”, left -brained talented people mad” “Well, how much DO you need?” They demand. “Well I don’t know,” we artists reply, hoping they’ll just not ask that again. A painting, an essay, a story, an idea can happen very quickly or can wait until we end up missing the plane! “It’s all good!” we say and watch those around us expire with aggravation, but, in our heart of hearts, we don’t care. We got what we came for.

There is the same intriguing duality to the French. There are the “bourgeois” shopkeepers, the baguette prepared fresh every morning, the regularity of habit that makes such refined living possible and yet, a deep enjoyment of eccentricity, the flamboyant and the exotic. The highest, outrageous fashions are made with devotion by people who go home on the trains to their families each night and come back to sew each morning. They make the extraordinary possible and they know it.

For touring, comfort with a little panache seems just right. Comfortable shoes, raincoat, umbrella are essential, but do as the French women do and wear a great scarf over your raincoat or a small bouquet of violets on your lapel in the Spring, you will be forgiven all faux pas and lack of French. If you’re a man, wear a beret! Frenchmen love their hats. The French covet little bits of paper, tickets, petit mots, receipts. Do save and paste them into your diary. It’s part of the difference. 

Every photographer knows that “The Shot” takes hundreds to get “The One.” Well, painters are the same way. A painting may need its own space, a life of its own. An artist is the instrument of the process. The process is composed of the Gestalt of fate, experiences, desires, the feelings, the smell and the textures have to “get into you.” We become de-sensitized by the familiar. “It’s all the same,” we say mournfully. That’s why we have to go away to wake up. This is what makes Paris so satisfying. It is never the same. It is always a little unfamiliar, yet reliably wonder-filled from centuries of nurture.

In “Shakespeare in Love” the theater owner says to the financier, “It will all turn out well.” “How will that happen?” He asks doubtfully. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” Is the reply. This is what I will tell you about your trip to Paris.

Off the beaten path, but my favorites:

Tea at Mariage Frères on rue du Bourg-Tibourg. Have a madeline, a pot of tea and think of Proust’s A La Recherché du Temps Perdu. Go upstairs to the tea museum and imagine.

 

Parc Butte Chaumont before noon when the light is perfection. On a clear day there are fabulous views of Sacre Coeur and Montmartre, the rocks, the caves, the carved benches and fences. Don’t miss this!

The Jardin du Luxembourg on Sundays is filled with French families. The rocks on the paths look like caramels. Men are sailing model boats on the pond. This is like a Monet scene in modern garb. My favorite statue in the world stands there announcing the inevitable fall of innocence out of youthful mischief.

The Paris Mosque on weekday afternoons for green Tunisian pastries that taste like fresh grass and sweet mint tea served in glasses. You enter through the SE corner. It is unmarked!

Le Défenseur du Temps: Paris – Beauborg: Quartier de l’Horloge near Centre Georges Pompidou arrive a little early and order a coffee in the café across the street and wait.

Musée Gustave Moreau- an easy walk downhill from Montmartre – He was an amazing symbolist painter and teacher of Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault to mention just two of his famous students.

Alexandre Nevsky Cathedral 12 rue Daru: Go on Sunday morning for the experience of Russia before 1905. The timber of the men’s chorus goes right through your bones. The real gold has real flash! The icons are a different way of connecting with divinity than most of us are used to. It is very interesting!

Musée Jacquemart-Andre, 158 blvd Haussmann – sumptuous!

In St Germain de Pres listen for the bells of St Sulpice which have a different tonality than any of the other bells in Paris. They seem to say, ‘Doom! Pray or Doom! Doom is at hand.” in a very off key minor tone.

When Artists Drew Maps by Julie Ressler

One of my favorite childhood memories was sitting on the floor in a sunny spot next to the radiator in my grandfather’s study looking at his stacks of National Geographic. In my youth we had not yet experienced the explosion of images that now make the exotic seem ordinary. Then, the bare-breasted ladies or mysterious women in chador with henna painted hands or Chinese roofs seemed almost unendurably romantic, strange and so fascinating. I unfolded the large, wonderful map that came in every issue. I spread it out in front of me and my five-year-old self went fearlessly everywhere the world had to offer. Even today, I can’t resist a map. A map contains a huge expanse of possibilities. Put a globe in front of me and I am gone for hours, tracing routes and turning it slowly. This is a love that may flicker in life’s course, but then returns in full force at a chance encounter.

Just such a moment occurred for me when I stopped in the Monckton Gallery in Hubbard Woods to ask Nancy Monckton what was her most powerful, personal experience with a work of art for an article that I was writing. She said without hesitation, “The Field Museum’s recent show of antique maps!”

“The Festival of Maps was a celebration of cartography through the ages. The Queen’s Collection, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris contributed. From Michelangelo to Rand McNally, these maps provided the opportunity for people to travel from the ancient world to mythical lands, and from the celestial heavens to the depths of Hades. There were centuries old manuscript maps drawn on cloth, maps hand carved into primitive artifacts, and maps hand engraved into blocks of wood or copper plates, multi-dimensional topographic maps and GPS systems.” Nancy enthused.

She showed me some of the examples in her own collection including two from NC Wyeth that National Geographic Society had commissioned in the late 1920s. They were so beautiful with Poseidon and many other mythological references. There was also an original print from Ortelius’s Atlas in 1570/75 seemed amazing to me. The color, four and half centuries later, is still so vivid. The two brilliant copperplates used to reproduce Rusch’s map from 1508 is spectacular. The engraver was as much an artist as the original draftsman.

Questions like how did they know, when did they know, how did they get it so right, raced through my mind. Nancy said that I had to speak to her husband Jack who is very knowledgeable in historical geography. Jack explained to me that it may have been artists that drew these wonderful works from explorer’s descriptions and the sketches of artists who may have gone along, but it was royalty and commercial enterprises that paid for them. Wars and trade routes are still big business. “You have to know where things are and how long it will take to get there and back.” He went on to explain dead reckoning, positional fixes, and other elementary but effective tools that have been used since a man’s foot gave us distance.

Antique maps are as decorative as any print or graphic. The prices cover a wide range from a wonderful calendar of the celestial bodies at bookstores for $5.95 to EBay’s NC Wyeth reproductions, to the exquisite antique maps that are available from Monckton Gallery and, many local antique stores. The Field Museum is a magnificent resource. With suitable framing these maps are sensational conversation pieces and stimulating art for children of all ages.

The Concept of Palimpsest

Example of Palimpsest

The Pastel Journal in October 2010 had an editorial by Anne Hevener about the concept of “palimpsest”. This odd word is derived from the Greek palimpsestos which means scraped clean again. Usually this refers to a manuscript that has been erased and used more than once like the Codex Nitriensis by Severus of Antioch written at the start of the ninth century on palimpsest leaves taken from sixth-century manuscripts of the Iliad and the Gospel of St. Luke. However, the original meaning of the word has evolved as the concept into other disciplines . It has come to mean a layering of information.

As we extend this into layers of influences, images, ideas and practices that lie one on the other, every “new” work is a conceptual palimpsest of leaves of everything that went before. Every “new” work is the result of what we know and what those before us knew and used then was scraped away and used again but leaving imprint on imprint in a rich palimpsest.