What Do People Want From Oriental Carpets? It Depends On The Country

HANOVER, February 6, 2009 -- Many rug dealers say they can tell what kind of rug you will buy as soon as they meet you. If they know your nationality, they feel even more confident.

One such dealer is Khairi Ezzabi, a Libyan who travels the world looking for luxury goods to import back home to Tripoli. He buys and sells in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Along the way, he has learned a great deal about all three markets.

We recently met Mr. Ezzabi in a zimmer frei in Hanover, Germany. The occasion was Domotex, the carpet world's biggest trade show that takes place every January. The show attracts thousands of people, more even than the huge number of hotels in this trade-fair city can accommodate. So, many visitors find themselves taking rooms in private homes, something that leads to impromptu acquaintances.

As the guests come down for breakfast, the lady of the house introduces them to one another. The table is set with all the riches of German hospitality and instantly puts everyone in a good mood. There is bread, rolls, butter, jam, and honey, plates of ham, salami, and different cheeses, soft-boiled eggs, oranges, apples, and slices of kiwi, and then, as if waiting for dessert, an assortment of sweet buns and pound cake.

The conversation flows easily.

"Please tell our guest that the salami is made of lamb, and the ham is made of chicken," Frau Ripphoff says in German. But before anyone can play the part of translator, the well-traveled Mr. Ezzabi waves away the need for words with his hand.

"I was here before, two years ago," he replies in English. "I remember her kindness from before."

Everyone is pleased. The small breakfast corner suddenly doubles in size with the expansive good manners of the East. The windows slowly turn from night-black to gray with the late winter sunrise. Mr. Ezzabi fills a plate with pieces of bread, abstains from everything else, and takes time to talk.

He is a wonderful talker, punctuating with delighted giggles what he knows will be outrageous observations. But he also knows much of what he says will be true. After all, hasn't he seen it with his own eyes?

"What do people want from oriental rugs?" he asks, repeating a visitor's question. "They want different things."

The French, Italian, and Spanish want imperfection, he says. They want to be able to see where the weaver ran out of a particular color here or made a wrong knot there.

"The Parisians pride themselves on being able to recite the whole personal story of the carpets in their home." He giggles.

Visions of tiny, high-priced boutiques that offer just a few nomadic and tribal pieces float before the eyes. The Paris dealers are not selling rugs, they are selling flights of fancy -- like travel agents. Or it that too much of an exaggeration?

But Mr. Ezzabi is too charming to quibble with.

"The Germans," he continues, eyeing the perfect breakfast table before him but taking only some more bread, "want technical perfection."

In Berlin they like a proper relationship between price and workmanship. And they don't like stories that sometimes sound like excuses for a weaver's mistakes.

The Libyan dealer has been all around the world and clearly knows something of human nature. He lovingly pours another cup of strong black tea. He does not want to offend, he likes everywhere he visits. Should he continue?

Arab, Russian, and Bulgarian buyers share a third taste in carpets, he says. They will spend far more for a single carpet than anyone else. And it will be for a big carpet, to fill a big room.

"Prestige," he says. "They like black and gold colors."

It is impossible to know if Mr. Ezzabi has become rich with his formulas. He is dressed in a simple gray suit of light material that looks Italian but has an accent of hand-tailoring in a distant land. He is trim, with impeccably courteous manners, and middle-aged in way that is impossible to pin down.

What are things like in Libya, one asks. After all, one doesn't meet a Libyan businessman every day.

"I only know Tripoli and the capitals of the world," he replies. I am always traveling."

And the desert, with its starry night sky that shines so bright above the vast dark sands?

"The oil men say it is beautiful."

One can only wonder what kind of carpets he has come to Hanover to find. At the fair, there are carpets from everywhere: Iran, Turkey, China, India, Pakistan. What will he choose?

"I don't know yet," he says. "The last time I came I bought just one carpet."

The carpet was from Mirzazadeh, one of the most famous Persian producers from Tabriz. But it was not a classical carpet, it was a pictorial carpet with a scene from Omar Khayyam.

The cost was something over 100,000 euros and the workmanship extraordinary, with some 2,000 knots per square inch (31,000 knots per square decimeter). He took it to Tripoli and put it in the window of his shop in the heart of downtown. Cars crashed into each other on the road when they passed by.

"People suddenly stopped their cars to stare at the window," he says. "They admired it because it was as perfect as a picture, as perfect as a color photograph. No one could believe it was a carpet."

And did he sell it?

"No," he says. "It is to good as advertising for my shop. So, I keep it in the window. And I like it too much myself to sell."

(The photo at the top of this article is of a Mirzazadeh pictorial carpet.)

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

Mirzazadeh Carpets

Arts And Crafts Movement Carpets And The West's Longing For Simpler Days

LONDON, October 24, 2008 -- Is all great art defined by its ability to connect with the soul of a culture?

And, if so, is the soul of Western civilization to be found in simpler times than today -- for example, in the Middle Ages?

We won't presume to debate such points here. But it is interesting to note that one of the more enduring design trends of the modern age was founded on just these principles.

That, of course, is the Arts and Crafts movement of 1870 to 1910. Its designers drew on Medieval art to launch their own style of furnishings ranging from wallpaper to chairs to textiles. Incorporating influences from eastern art -- equally known to the Middle Ages -- they also created their own carpet patterns.

Many of those designs, originally woven in England and Ireland, continue to be popular in the West today. They are faithfully reproduced every year by European carpet producers whose weavers are now in Turkey, India, Nepal, and China.

The founding father of the Arts and Crafts movement was William Morris (1834 to 1896), photographed here at age 37. An architect, artist, and poet, as well as a social reformer, he devoted his life to battling what he saw as the dehumanizing effects of the machine age.

His enemy was real. In the late 1800s, the industrial revolution had already swept away much of traditional life in the West, including artisanal culture. Hand looms were being overtaken by power looms and individual craftsmen who made furniture were being replaced by factories that assembled it from machine-made parts instead.

The products the new industrial processes were ugly –- much less finished than they are today – but highly affordable and omnipresent.

Morris organized a coterie of like-minded artists and friends from his time as a student at Oxford to try to hold back the tide. They described themselves as “Fine Art Workmen” ready to “undertake any species of decoration.” And they took the Medieval Guild system of independent artisans as their model for rescuing workers, including children, from being cogs in the new machines.

The Arts and Crafts movement, as it came to be called, was obviously at odds with its era in every way. It idealized a bygone time when the consumer age was just beginning and full of confidence. And it idealized simplicity and fair artisan wages when Victorian homes were full to bursting with new and ostentatious manufactured goods thanks to labor that was intoxicatingly cheap.

But, amazingly, the movement was commercially successful almost from the start. Delving into Medieval art and other handicraft traditions for inspiration, the Fine Arts workmen created a rich Gothic style that connected with modern Britons the same way their allies the Pre-Raphaelite painters did, or the much earlier ‘Ivanhoe’ (1819) of Sir Walter Scott did. The only difference was that the artisans produced everything that was needed for a total living environment.

Here is the interior of Wightwick Manor, owned by a wealthy patron of the style. The effort to turn the home into a temple of art impossible to build from mass-produced items is fully visible.

All that is in line with Morris’s maxim: “Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.”

This carpet is entitled “Bullerswood” and was woven by Morris & Company, London, in 1889. Its design of scrolling arabesques and stylized flowers and birds is colored with a range of vegetable dyes. It is a prize of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum but its huge size – 4 meters by 7.5 meters – prevents it from being on permanent display.

The Arts and Crafts movement did not completely reject machines and did use some, including for weaving. But its insistence on the finest workmanship eventually priced the products out of all but the wealthiest households. So, the artisans never realized their utopian dream of turning every man’s home, even the most ordinary, into an earthly paradise.

But the movement did set the stage for later schools of design which more populary raised interior design to the level of a fine art. They include the American version of Arts and Crafts, which used machines to lower the cost of craftsman-produced furnishings. They also include Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In all these styles, the handicrafts of Medieval Europe and borrowings from Islamic and Asian sources remained major inspirations.

Morris once acknowledged his debt to Oriental Art this way:

"To us pattern designers, Persia became a Holy Land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected, and from thence it spread to cover for a while the world, east and west."

Today, Morris remains the best-known face of the British Arts and Crafts movement but he is far from its only successful practitioner. Other leading designers are Gavin Morton and G. K. Robertson, who created this carpet woven in Donegal, Ireland, circa 1900:



Original Arts and Crafts carpets now command high auction prices that put them beyond the reach of most collectors. But the patterns are so popular that many are readily available as reproductions. That includes this replica of a carpet designed by architect and painter Charles Voysey:

The design is "Duleek" -- named after one of the towns near Donegal, where the carpet was woven in the 1800s.

A quick look through the internet shows reproductions of designs like this one are available from $ 25 - $ 50 per square foot ($ 269 - $ 538 per square meter). Those low prices are not due to the use of machines, as the artisans of the Arts and Crafts movement might have feared. Instead, they are due to globalization and the outsourcing of Western hand weaving to the East, a future they never envisioned.

(Note: the picture at the top of this article is a detail of the central field of "Holland Park," a carpet designed by William Morris in 1883.)

#

RETURN TO HOME

#

Related Links:

On the Arts & Crafts Movement:

Interactive Textbooks: The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Society

On William Morris:

Wikipedia: William Morris

William Morris Gallery

The Textile Blogspot: William Morris Carpets

The Earthly Paradise: Bullerswood Carpet

Arts & Craft Carpet Reproductions:

J.R. Burrows & Company

The Craftsman Home

Michael Fitzsimmons Decorative Arts

Jax Arts and Crafts Rugs

Poster: Donegal Rug by Morton and Robertson

Brussels Celebrates Savonnerie Carpets With 700,000 Begonias

BRUSSELS, August 29, 2008 – Every summer, Brussels weaves a giant carpet of begonia blooms that covers the entire Grande Place.

The flower carpet does not last long: just three days and four nights. And the amount of work is immense, with hundreds of volunteers arranging some 700,000 begonias (knot count of 300 flowers per square meter) into a meticulously planned pattern.

Still, Brussels considers the effort worthwhile.

The annual event, which began in 1971, reminds the world that Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of begonias -- exporting about 48 million bulbs a year.

Plus, the flower carpet reminds everyone that Belgium also is one of the world’s largest makers and exporters of carpets -- machine-made.

This year, the floral design (shown above) honored France’s “Savonnerie” carpets. Doing so it recalled the days when European weavers first “Occidentalized” oriental rugs on a commercial scale, setting the stage for today’s immensely successful Western rug industry.

Savonnerie carpets were first produced in the early 1600s and combined Eastern pile-rug weaving with French Baroque designs. The success of the patterns – whose motifs include flower bouquets, fleur-de-lys, fruits, and acanthus leaves – was so great that it swung European taste away from oriental rugs for two centuries.

Here is a Baroque carpet in the kind of typical French interior design that defined Western standards of elegance at the time.

Just how that Europe developed its own handwoven carpet industry is a fascinating story with two chapters.

One is a deliberate effort by French kings to monopolize the luxury carpet market in Europe, which was previously supplied from the East.

The other is the coincidence of this effort with a sudden feeling of Western cultural superiority as Europe’s kingdoms first became world powers.

Here are some of the steps along the way:

* King Henry IV (1533 – 1610) decides to revive France’s luxury goods industry, which was decimated in France’s wars of religion. He provides leading artisans, including weavers, with workshops in the Louvre.

** Weaving master Pierre DuPont establishes the style that will become famous as “Savonnerie.” The name is taken from the Paris soap factory which became the location of a major carpet workshop in 1644.

*** European forces defeat the Ottoman army besieging Vienna in 1683. The victory convinced Europe of their cultural supremacy over their Eastern rivals.

**** King Louis XIV bans the import of oriental carpets into France, protecting French production and ending the huge outflow of revenues to buy luxury goods from the East.

Europe’s handwoven carpets had many variations, including Savonnerie and Aubusson in France and, later, Axminster and Wilton in Britain.

This is a 18th century British interior with an Axminister on the floor.

Such carpets were commissioned by courts and by the very wealthy. And their patterns proved adaptable enough to be a centerpiece of furnishing from the Baroque and Neoclassical periods into the Napoleanic era.

It was Napolean, in fact, who gave the Savonnerie factory its last great royal support. Beginning in 1805, he commissioned carpets in the Empire style that defined his age.

The Savonnerie’s story finally ends in 1825 when the manufactory was incorporated with another weaving workshop, the Gobelins, which was famous for tapestries. By this time, the passion for European handwoven carpets had faded under a new set of social circumstances.

One was colonialism. As Europeans expanded across the globe, they came again into direct contact with oriental artwork and renewed their interest in it. By the mid-1850’s imports of oriental rugs were booming, along with Orientalism in general.

But perhaps still more important for the European hand-knotted carpet industry was the invention of the steam-powered loom in 1785. Within 50 years, the great names in European handwoven rugs disappeared or became associated with machine-made carpets as the weaving sector industrialized.

Today, one can still buy Savonnerie carpets but they are reproductions hand-made in China. And one can still buy Axminister carpets, but they are machine-made in England (as pictured here).

Does all this make the Brussels Savonnerie flower carpet a bittersweet image of Europe’s rug-making industry?

Champions of hand-knotted carpets might say ‘yes’ if it reminds them too much of a glorious past now gone forever.

But one can also argue that history must take its course and that the way Savonnerie carpets evolved into today’s multi-billion dollar machine-made carpet industry is as amazing as any other aspect of the rug trade.

In that case, the Savonnerie which bloomed in Brussels Grand Place this year -- from August 15 to 17 -- was good symbol indeed for Europe’s love affair with carpets.

Related Links:

YouTube: Brussels Flower Carpet 2008 - Savonnerie

Brussels Flower Carpet: official website

Wikipedia: Savonnerie

Early Axminster Carpets, by Brenda Rose

Arabesque Mamluk Carpets Mix Perfect Art With Perfect Mystery

CAIRO, June 7, 2008 -- Are Mamluk carpets the most mysterious rugs of all?

The are many reasons to think so.

The rugs were created during the reign of the Mamluk sultans in Cairo from 1250 to 1517 at a time when medieval Islamic art was at its pinnacle in Egypt.

And it is clear that the sultans spared no expense -- from the painstaking weaving of the rugs’ mosaic-like designs to their saturated colors to their superb wool.

But no-one is sure exactly where these masterpiece workshop rugs were woven. Some carpets experts say Egypt, some Spain, some Turkey.

One of the reasons for considering so many places is that the rugs appeared under the Mamluks as if out of thin air. Elisabeth Greenberg observes in her article ‘Jewelled Carpets: Treasures of the Mamluk Empire’ that “prior to these rugs there was no pile-rug weaving tradition in Egypt.”

Examining the rugs for clues just offers more riddles. Their lustrous wool is unlike that used in other Egyptian textiles of the time, but doesn’t clearly come from somewhere else. The wool is spun clockwise, when most carpet wools are spun counterclockwise. And, the red dye is obtained from lac – an Indian insect – at a time when master weavers in Turkey and Iran were using entirely different pigments.

That leaves only the carpets’ designs as a guide. And these are consistent with other artworks created under the Mamluks. That makes many experts conclude that the carpets must have been woven in Cairo under the close supervision of the Mamluk court.

As to who the Mamluks were, their story is no less extraordinary. Although they ruled Egypt and Syria, they originally came to the Mideast as slave-solders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Arab rulers purchased or recruited them as youths from Turkic, Mongol, and Circassian tribes in Central Asia and trained them as elite palace troops.

But the Mamluks revolted and seized power for themselves. And still more surprisingly -- despite a warrior ethos so competitive that, on the average, the Mamluks killed or removed their own leaders every five years – they were huge patrons of art.

When the Mamluk empire fell to the Ottomons in 1517, their distinctive carpets disappeared with them. Today, only one remains in Cairo and the rest of the some 100 or so pieces that survive are the prizes of a handful of top world museums. The images above are of a rug in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Museums rarely display their centuries-old Mamluks for fear they will be damaged by too much exposure to light. But when the rugs are shown, they always amaze viewers -- just as their designers intended.

The Mamluk’s complex Arabesque patterns evoke the harmony and infinity of the divine. Astonishingly, they do so with patterns that appear both perfectly mathematical and perfectly mystical at the same time. And the carpets literally shimmer before the eyes, making a them appear as much like a vision of a rug as a reality.

Small surprise, then, that some carpet producers today are interested in trying to recreate the Mamluks in whole or part.

Woven Legends, a Philadephia-based company, has for several years worked with Turkish weavers to try to duplicate some of the Mamluk Rugs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The results – Woven Legends’ ‘Sardis’ line (right) – have won critical acclaim. The retail price is $ 968 per square meter and the rugs come in a variety of sizes and patterns.

The original Mamluk weavers not only produced the complex geometric medallion carpets they are most famous for but also full-field rugs as well.

The full-field designs are best exemplified by the so-called para-mamluks produced in Damascus. The rugs are often referred to ‘chessboard’ carpets in Europe and are highly coveted collectors’ items.

This one (left) is from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Today, the chessboard designs, too, are inspiring some carpet producers to explore new possibilities.

This rug produced by Afghan weavers in Pakistan, who have become among the most innovative designers for the popular market today.


Simply called 'Mamluk' (right), it is offered by Nomad Rugs of San Francisco, has an Arabesque field with cartouche borders – both staples of Mamluk design.

At a price of $ 488 per square meter, it can only hint at the charms of more complex Arabesque patterns.

But that may be just where many first-time rug buyers would want to begin.

#


RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

Jewelled Carpets : Treasures of the Mamluk Empire, by Elisabeth Greenberg

Mamluk Carpets - Legacy of the Conquering Nomads, by Roy Chatalbash

Art of the Mamluks – Saudi Aramco World, Nov/Dec 1981

History of Mamluks – The Battle of ‘Ain Jalut

The Jazz Age: Gowns, Tuxedos, And Chinese Art Deco Carpets

WASHINGTON, May 30, 2008 -- One of the most elegant times in America was the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 30s. It was a time when, after the horrors of World War I, there was a taste for extravagant clothes and debonair film stars. Long silk gowns, men in 'smoking' attire and, on living room and bedroom floors, not antique Turkish and Persian carpets but – surprisingly – newly made Chinese ones.

Why Chinese? The answer is the strange story of the “Chinese Art Deco” rugs. They were carpets that perfectly fit the spirit of their time and today still evoke that time and no other. But they came about almost by accident.

One of those accidents was the fact that World War I badly disrupted the usual Mideastern trade links for luxury carpets from Turkey and Iran. Another was that people wanted a break from the past in the design of virtually everything, from buildings to furniture to fabrics.

These opportunities were recognized by American entrepreneurs working in Tianjin, China. The port city, south of Beijing, was a major center in the international wool trade and until the 1900s had no history of rug manufacturing. But the expatriate U.S. traders soon turned it into one of China’s biggest weaving areas as they filled the vacuum in the American market, first with traditional Chinese carpets and then with more and more Western-looking variations of the originals.

The most successful design that emerged was something that perfectly fit the Art Deco style of the day. The carpets so complimented what was going on in the West that they became known as Chinese Art Deco even though there was no Art Deco movement in China itself.

One American entrepreneur’s name in particular is associated with the rugs: Walter Nichols. He produced so many of them in Tianjin that Chinese Art Deco rugs are also known generically as ‘Nichols’ rugs. But it has long been debated whether he and other American producers actually designed the carpets or whether the Chinese artists which they employed did so.

Elizabeth Bogen, one of the few rug scholars who has studied Tianjin rugs closely, believes it was the Chinese artists. She finds her evidence in the fact that while the rugs were made for the American market – where Art Deco was characterized by industrial-looking, streamlined forms – great numbers of the Chinese weavings are effusively curvilinear and floral. And those curvilinear patterns seem much less inspired by what was happening in America than by the more naturalist-looking Art Deco tradition in France, half-a-world away.

So how to explain the contradiction in styles? Bogen observes that by the 1920s there were Chinese students who had studied art in many major art schools in Japan and Europe and were familiar with international trends. In Paris, particularly, they found Western art was being heavily influenced by “Japonisme,” or a fascination with Japan’s styles. If these students later became artists for the Chinese Art Deco rugs, it might explain what Bogen calls the rugs’ “exuberant experimentation with Chinese, Japanese, and European design styles and pallets.”

Bogen made these suggestions in her article “What the Wool Trade Wrought,” which appeared in the September-October 2001 issue of Hali Magazine.

The design origins of the Chinese Art Deco rugs may never be fully known. But the whole story leads to some interesting speculation about how Eastern designs get modified for Western tastes and whether the results are in fact Eastern or Western creations.

Bogen argues that the Tianjin rugs were not just the result of an interplay of market forces but also of “contemporary currents in Western art – currents that in turn were heavily influenced by exposure to the arts of Japan and China.”

Put in other words, this is a reminder that the greatest tradition in art, even in the most traditional arts, is to freely borrow ideas across borders. To try to classify art – and particularly the contemporary art of any period – as belonging to one region or another is to miss the excitement of how art reflects a universal human experience as much as it does a local one.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links

Elizabeth Bogen:

Elizabeth Bogen: What The Wool Trade Wrought

Elizabeth Bogen: "In Search of Walter Nichols"

Chinese Art Deco Rug Galleries:

Absolute Rugs

Cyber Rugs

SpongoBongo

Art Deco:

Art Deco Society of Washington, D.C.

ArtLex Visual Dictionary