The early 20th Century witnessed a series of significant changes within the domain of art and design. The seeds of these changes had already been planted well into the 19th century through the writings of A.W.N. Pugin and John Ruskin who, by idealising the pure, artisanal qualities of the pre-industrial medieval world, which made no real distinction between designer and craftsman, greatly influenced the thought of modern world pioneers such as William Morris. The revolution in design was soon imprinted by Owen Jones who, in his The Grammar of Ornament, compiled a plethora of reformed patterns which placed emphasis on flatness and two-dimensionality. This sourcebook proved to be fundamental towards the development of a modern iconography, especially as it pertained to the language of rugs.

The various trajectories taken by these innovative design reforms gradually led to the birth of the first artistic movements across Europe. In 1902, the Belgian Architect Henri Van De Velde was named the artistic director of the Weimar School (which later became the Bauhaus), designing its flagship building in the Art Nouveau style. In 1907, he co-founded the Deutsche Werkbund, a German craft union which brought together a dozen manufacturers with an equal number of designers, and from which resulted a whole community of highly influential artists such as Josef Hoffmann, who designed the Palais Stoclet in Brussels and was one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstatte.

This early movement engendered a ripple effect throughout Europe. Even the storied traditions of France would eventually comply to these new directions in design, as we read in the catalogue of the 1910 Salon D’Automne, in which the art critic M.P. Verneuil suggests learning something from the German guests of the exhibition, although ultimately maintaining one’s Esprit Français. Already at the first Salon des Artistes-Décorateurs Modernes, held in 1907 at the Pavillon de Marsan, the controversial works exhibited by the young designers were in part a reaction to the commercial character of what had been shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which consisted mainly of objects which were essentially reproducing French Louis XV and Louis XVI styles.

The first ones to follow the lesson were Paul Poiret and Louis Süe, who had visited Vienna together and were greatly in awe of the work of the Wiener Werkstatte.  In 1911, Paul Poiret created the Ecole Martine, which was a workshop composed of young women of no formal artistic training who were encouraged to design and weave floral rugs distinguished by a child-like spontaneity. The success of this project prompted the establishment of many other ateliers, such as Primavera in 1912, directed by René Guilleré, the products of which were marketed through the large department store Le Printemps. The trend continued unabated by World War I, with the opening of La Maitrise in 1921, managed by Maurice Dufrène (which sold through Galerie Lafayette), then Atélier Pomone in 1922, supervised by Paul Follot (whose outlet was the famed Au Bon Marchè) followed, in the same year, by Studium-Louvre, directed by Etienne Kohlmann and distributed through Les Grands Magasins Du Louvre. In 1912, Louis Süe founded the Atelier Français, whose aim was to derive a new style from a revisitation of classical French design. Le Nouveau Style, an essay written by André Vera in 1912 for L’Art Decoratif, became the manifesto of the group. For the 1911 Salon D’Automne, Louis Sue presented a colourful carpet composed of a curvilinear garland of flowers overlaying a geometric, ‘Secessionist-style’ framework. This treatment of pattern was to become extremely inspirational for the artists most frequently associated with the Art Deco period (such as Paul Follot and Edouard Bénédictus), who were also known as Les Coloristes for the daring colour juxtapositions of their rugs and textiles. Louis Süe would then ally with André Mare, founding the Compagnie Des Arts Français (known also as Süe et Mare). For over a decade, they designed and produced furnishings inspired by stylisations of forms taken from the Louis Philippe period, yet adding Fauvist and Cubist overtones.

By the 1920’s, quite a number of artistes-décorateurs were involved in the manufacture of high-quality furnishings commissioned for the luxurious interiors of the Parisian upper class or for the capacious rooms of the French ocean liners—the opulent paquebots connecting Europe to America. Among these we cite important figures such as Pierre Chareau (represented here with a carpet he had commissioned to another artist, Jean Burkhalter), René Joubert and Philippe Petit (founders of D.I.M. – Décoration Intérieure Moderne, a leading Parisian interior design firm, of which a major work is included here), and Ivan Da Silva Bruhns. The latter is widely considered to be the leading figure in carpet design throughout the Art Deco years and his signature Cubist-inspired patterns are synonymous with the period.

By the time of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, originally planned to open in 1916 but postponed because of the war and finally held in Paris in 1925, carpets were a firm presence in every respectable interior space. The show was in every respect a huge success, and its title was simplified by the French media to ‘Art Deco’. Consequently 1925 became the year which inaugurated the Art Deco style, although it should be clear by now that this style resulted from over a quarter century of design reform, and comprised a multitude of artistic expressions. It provides us, however, with a convenient starting point from which we will witness the advances in progressive design throughout the remaining part of the century as well as into the new millenium.

While the U.S. didn’t participate in the exhibition, they were quick to embrace some of the new ideas coming from Europe, incorporating them in the fast-growing architecture of its major cities. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York soon began to host a number of exhibitions dedicated to the modern decorative arts, stirring a considerable interest among the local artistic milieu. One of the leading innovative figures in the textile arts was Ralph Pearson, who took the traditional American hooked rug to a whole new level by employing local artists deeply steeped in Modernism. We are pleased to include here a superb example of this type, which condenses all of the explosive creativity of that period.    

The burgeoning possibilities offered by the textile medium attracted great interest from the art world. Marie Cuttoli, then wife of a French senator and owner of the Maison Myrbor, gradually transitioned from fashion design to producing rugs in Algeria that were designed by leading Parisian avant garde artists of the period, namely Pablo Picasso, Jean Lurçat, Louis Marcoussis, Fernand Léger and Joan Mirò. These hand-knotted carpets, woven with the same technique as traditional north African rugs and conceived both for the floor and wall, had now officially entered the world of art in their own right as the subject of seminal exhibitions in Cuttoli’s Galerie Myrbor in Paris. Subsequently, the manufacture of these weavings was moved to Aubusson in France, which had an established weaving tradition since the 18th century and was the mill of choice for most of the floral carpets designed by the artistes-décorateurs of the period. We are particularly honoured to be able to present an exquisite and very rare example from Myrbor, a small Cubist-design rug by Marcoussis woven in Sétif during the early Algerian years. Modern artists were continuously involved with the woven medium throughout the remaining part of the century, especially as there had been a growing awareness of how rugs could be especially helpful in representing minimalistic compositions made of blocks of pure colour. Included here is a monumental work by Frank Stella, commissioned in India on the occasion of a landmark exhibition held in New York in 1970.   

At the 1925 Exposition, one could already sense the beginning of the more austere, rigorous forms that would characterise Modernism throughout the 30’s and beyond. Le Corbusier soon began encouraging designers to embrace a more minimalistic approach to craft, heralding the shift from brightly-coloured floral patterns to abstract designs in muted tones, with an emphasis on texture and technique rather than composition and polychromy. An aesthetic revolution was soon to take place— the Bauhaus being a principal influence. The weaving workshops of the Bauhaus were essentially managed by two leading women, Gertrud Arndt and Gunta Stölzl, and their pioneering work was to mould the entire domain of the textile arts. We are especially pleased to include here a rug with a Cubist-inspired pattern, which quite possibly resulted from the collaboration between Gunta Stölzl and Johannes Itten in the early Bauhaus years. Northern Europe had steadfastly followed the lessons of the Bauhaus since its inception, and one can appreciate this in the ingenious work of Scandinavian women such as Marta Maas-Fjetterström and Laila Karttunen, the latter being included in this exhibition with two of her iconic works.

The Art Deco style was quickly adopted by Oriental weavers as well. While a few French designers had already established their own workshops in Morocco, China was able to offer a highly organised infrastructure to enterprising companies such as Helen Fette (whose Chinese partnership was called Fette-Li) and Nichols & Co.,who in the late 1920s inaugurated their weaving workshops in Tianjin, supplying the American market with Art Deco inspired colourful rugs embellished by large scale botanical motifs. Among these we rarely find carpets with abstract patterns typical of Art Deco, which were commissioned by designers such as Betty Joel.

Art Deco was instead quite popular in India with the local aristocracy. Manik Bagh (‘The Jewel Palace’), a true icon of the Art Deco style, was designed in 1930 by Eckart Muthesius for the Maharaja of Indore, stylishly decorated with furniture from the leading Parisian designers, including a series of carpets by Ivan Da Silva Bruhns. This prompted a fashion for this movement, which soon resulted in an indigenous production of cotton or wool rugs with patterns taken from European fabrics of the period, as well as a more limited output of dhurrie cotton flat-weaves with Cubist-inspired designs in the manner of Da Silva Bruhns.

The quest for Modernism in rugs eventually conquered Persia as well. This is documented by relatively small group of weavings characterised by a decidedly European Modern flavour. These were commissioned by the local cosmopolitan elite, in a period between 1940 to 1960, to some of the most prestigious weaving workshops in Mashad, who until then were exclusively known for their finely knotted carpets with intricate Persianate patterns. Traditional ateliers from Khorasan such as Amoghli and Saber would sign some of these minimalist compositions, in what can be seen almost as a quest from the younger generation to break from the past.

Following World War II, hand-weaving became too costly and inefficient in supplying the heightened demand for floor coverings from a burgeoning real estate market. Through the detailed exploration of structure, one could devise the necessary conditions for creating prototypes for mass production. One of the main endeavours of both Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus was the mechanisation of weaving, and while this has indeed been one of the results yielded by Modernism, the world would eventually come full circle.

We are now witnessing a social and aesthetic distancing from the industrial, with calls to embrace the recyclable, the sustainable and the artisanal.  The new millennium has witnessed a renaissance of hand-weaving among contemporary textile artists, many of whom have made good use of the advances in computer design so to enable them to program their patterns. Our gallery embarked in a series of collaborations with leading carpet designers such as Zöe Luyendijk, whose highly complex patterns inspired by her surroundings are precisely translated to the rug medium through a clever blending of different fibres, to visionary artists such Madeline Weinrib, Jan Kath and Jürgen Dahlmanns, all of whom have contributed greatly in positioning the contemporary rug at the crossroads between art and design. The quantum advances in rug design technology which took place over the last two decades have attracted visual artists such as Simone Haug, who could finally add a textural dimension to her compositions, as well as talented architects like Clara Bona and renown interior decorators such as Barbara Frua, whose quest for the ideal rug is met by customising it knot by knot.

This last century has been pivotal towards a much needed redefinition of the arts and crafts. Modernism has inaugurated a succession of movements in art in general and in the decorative arts in particular, from embracing revivalism to creating new forms and textures. Rugs gradually became a fundamental element of the interior, as well as an expression of the designer’s vision. The hand-knotted carpet has reached the highest level of sophistication, and is able to satisfy the most exacting demands. What seemed almost impossible to create only a quarter of a century ago is now firm reality. Who knows what the next century will have in store for our floors.

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