Tapestry and tableau: revival, reproduction, and the marketing of modernism

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TAPESTRY AND TABLEAU:
REVIVAL, REPRODUCTION, AND THE
MARKETING OF MODERNISM

by

K.L.H. Wells

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

August 2014

Copyright © 2014 K.L.H. Wells

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abstract
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Logic of Revival
La Tapisserie Française du Moyen-âge à Nos Jours
Medieval Modernism
The (In)Visibility of Weavers
The American Market for Parisian Modernism
The International Tapestry Biennial
Revival and Repetition

Chapter 2. Authorship in the Art Market
A Collector’s Copies
The Weaver as Translator
Curators and the “Original”
The Dealer’s Multiples
The Artist’s Series
The Death of the Artist

Chapter 3. Art as Decoration and Tableau
From Rugs to Tapestries
Verticality
Art for Modern Architecture
Portability

Chapter 4. Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles
Medium Specificity before Greenberg
Clement Greenberg on the Decorative
Greenberg’s Tapestries
On the Limits of Medium Specificity

Chapter 5. Revival Redux: The Demise of Modern Tapestry
Corporate Tapestry v. The Print Renaissance
Feminism and Fiber Art

Conclusion. Tapestry as Model
Illustrations
Bibliography
ii
vi
xi
1
18
21
30
41
62
67
73

77
80
98
107
116
124
130

137
139
151
164
181

191
196
211
218
232

238
242
258

279
286
369

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. I.1 Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937 286
Fig. I.2 Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Guernica, 1955 286
Fig. I.3 Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach and René Dürrbach working 287
on Fleur du Mexique,1952
Fig. I.4 Goshka Macuga, Nature of the Beast, 2009-2010. 288
Fig. I.5 Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast, 2010. 288

Fig. 1.1 Cover and museum plan from exhibition guidebook, 289
La Tapisserie Française du moyen-âge à nos jours
Fig. 1.2 Lyonel Feiniger, Cathedral for the Future, 1919 290
Fig. 1.3 The Lady and the Unicorn: A mon seul desire, late fifteenth 291
century
Fig. 1.4 Jean Bondol and Nicholas Bataille, Apocalypse, 1377-1382 292
Fig. 1.5 Dom Robert, Terribilis, 1946 292
Fig. 1.6 Detail of a tapestry by Jean Lurçat and the carton numeroté on 293
which it is based
Fig. 1.7 Robert Doisneau, “Aubusson,” 1946 294
Fig. 1.8 Doisneau, Untitled, 1946 295
Fig. 1.9 Doisneau, Untitled, 1946 296
Fig. 1.10 “Les fils pairs et les fils impairs sont écartés à l’aide de la pédale 297
ou ‘marche.’ […],” 1969
Fig. 1.11 Doisneau, “En basse lisse ce sont les jambes de l’exécutant qui 298
séparent les fils pairs des fils impairs de la chaine,” 1946
Fig. 1.12 Untitled, 1969 299
Fig. 1.13 “Workshop and Looms” and “Looping the threads to knot the 300
stitch and handling of the thread-cutter to cut the stitch and
from the pile,” 1946
Fig. 1.14 “Tracing the pattern and use of comb,” 1946 301
Fig. 1.15 View of the Court of Justice, High Court Building, 302
Chandigarh, 1987
Fig. 1.16 “The execution of the tapestries for the High Court at 303
Chandigarh,” 1960
Fig. 1.17 View of the weaving workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, c. 1927 304
Fig. 1.18 View of the weaving workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, c. 1927-1929 305
Fig. 1.19 Otti Berger on a loom, Bauhaus Dessau, 1928 306
Fig. 1.20 Detail of a loom, Bauhaus Dessau, n.d. 307
Fig. 1.21 Werner Peiner, Le Char des Taureaux, 1941 308
Fig. 1.22 Jean Lurçat, Liberté, 1943 308
Fig. 1.23 Exhibition Plan, Second International Tapestry Biennial, 1965 309
Fig. 1.24 Installation view of the Second International Tapestry Biennial 309

List of Illustrations Wells iii
Fig. 2.1 Picasso, Femmes à leur toilette, 1976 310
Fig. 2.2 De la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 311
1958
Fig. 2.3 De la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Night Fishing at Antibes, 312
1967
Fig. 2.4 Picasso, Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939 312
Fig. 2.5 Carol K. Uht, Diagram correcting the color transparencies of 313
Night Fishing at Antibes
Fig. 2.6 Carol K. Uht, Diagram correcting the color transparencies of 313
Night Fishing at Antibes
Fig. 2.7 Carol K. Uht, Diagram correcting the color transparencies of 314
Night Fishing at Antibes
Fig. 2.8 Carol K. Uht, Diagram correcting the color transparences of 314
Night Fishing at Antibes
Fig. 2.9 Page 32 from the 1982 catalog of The Nelson Rockefeller 315
Collection, Inc .
Fig. 2.10 De la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Three Dancers, 1967 315
Fig. 2.11 “On the wall hangs a tapestry reproduction of the great painting 316
of 1906/1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”
Fig. 2.12 Helen Rubinstein and Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, c. 1938 317
Fig. 2.13 Joan Miró, Hirondelle Amour, 1933-34 317
Fig. 2.14 Salon of Marie Cuttoli’s Paris apartment, c. 1947 318
Fig. 2.15 Music Room at Kykuit 318
Fig. 2.16 Henri Matisse, cartoon for Polynésie: Le Ciel, 1946 319
Fig. 2.17 Matisse, cartoon for Polynésie: La Mer, 1946 319
Fig. 2.18 Installation of Lydia Delectorskaya’s restorations of Polynésie 320
at the Musée national d’Art moderne
Fig. 2.19 Matisse, Le Luth, 1943 320
Fig. 2.20 Matisse, cartoon for Le Luth tapestry, 1946 321
Fig. 2.21 Matisse, Le Luth, 1947-1949 321
Fig. 2.22 Matisse, variation of Polynésie: Le Ciel, 1949 322
Fig. 2.23 Matisse, variation of Polynésie: La Mer, 1949 322

Fig. 3.1 Jean Lurçat, Le Jardin, c. 1930 323
Fig. 3.2 View of entrance to Jacques Doucet’s studio 323
Fig. 3.3 Interior of Myrbor boutique 324
Fig. 3.4 Georges Braque, Nature morte au Guéridon, c. 1938 325
Fig. 3.5 Braque, Guitar and Still Life on a Guéridon, 1922 326
Fig. 3.6 Advertisement for Galerie Jeanne Bucher-Myrbor, 1935 327
Fig. 3.7 Raoul Dufy, Monuments de Paris, 1936 328
Fig. 3.8 Dufy, Paris, 1934 329
Fig. 3.9 Dufy, sofa from Orpheus suite, 1939 330
Fig. 3.10 Dufy, chairs from Orpheus suite, 1939 330
Fig. 3.11 Illustration of Vicara Rug 331
Fig. 3.12 Installation photographs of tapestries at the Galerie Denise René 332
List of Illustrations Wells iv
Fig. 3.13 Man Ray, Tapestry, 1911 333
Fig. 3.14 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955 333
Fig. 3.15 Pablo Picasso, Le Violin, 1914 334
Fig. 3.16 Installation of Water Lilies rugs with surround by Henri Rapin 334
Fig. 3.17 Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond, Clouds, 1915-1926 335
Fig. 3.18 Monet, The Water-Lily Pond with Willows 1914-1918 335
Fig. 3.19 Interior of Air France B707 with tapestry by Alfred Manessier 336
Fig. 3.20 Lurçat, La Conquete de l’Air, 1953 337
Fig. 3.21 Interior of Air France B707 with tapestry by Camille Hilaire 338
Fig. 3.22 Photograph of Sheila Hicks weaving tapestry for Air France 339
Fig. 3.23 Photograph of Sheila Hicks weaving tapestry for Air France 339
Fig. 3.24 Photograph of Sheila Hicks with Air France commission 340
Fig. 3.25 Air France publicity photograph of B747 340
Fig. 3.26 Lurçat, Apocalypse: The Lady and the Dragon, 1947 341
Fig. 3.27 Robert Motherwell, lobby mural for B’Nai Israel synagogue 341
Fig. 3.28 Library of Gordon Bunshaft’s New York apartment 342
Fig. 3.29 Unidentified photograph of Le Corbusier’s Les Mains tapestry 343
Fig. 3.30 Lobby of the Marine Midland Bank Building 343
Fig. 3.31 View of Fernand Léger’s L’Homme à la pastèque and Fleur du 344
Mexique tapestries
Fig. 3.32 View of Joan Miró’s Femme, fleur, étoile tapestry 344
Fig. 3.33 View of Miró’s Hirondelle d’amour tapestry 345
Fig. 3.34 View of Miró’s Composition tapestry 345
Fig. 3.35 Peter Blake, reconstruction of model for Ideal Museum. 346
Fig. 3.36 Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, 347
New York, 1950
Fig. 3.37 Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, 347
New York, 1950
Fig. 3.38 Cecil Beaton, “Short Ball Gown,” 1951) 348

Fig. 4.1 Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, 1884-1886 349
Fig. 4.2 Helen Frankenthaler, The Cape, 1962 350
Fig. 4.3 Frankenthaler, after The Cape, 1963 350
Fig. 4.4 Frankenthaler, Point Lookout, 1966 351
Fig. 4.5 Frankenthaler, after Point Lookout, 1966 351
Fig. 4.6 Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1975 352
Fig. 4.7 Paul Jenkins, Phenomena Peal of Bells Cross, 1972 352
Fig. 4.8 Jenkins, after Phenomena Peel of Bells Cross, 1973-1979 353
Fig. 4.9 Jenkins, after Phenomena Mandala Spectrum Turn, 1978-1981 354
Fig. 4.10 Morris Louis, Equator, 1962 355
Fig. 4.11 Louis, after Equator, 1970 355
Fig. 4.12 Example of a Louis “veil”: Morris Louis, Tet, 1958 356
Fig. 4.13 Example of a Louis “unfurled”: Morris Louis, Alpha-Phi, 1961 356
Fig. 4.14 Example of Louis “stripe”: Morris Louis, Number 28, 1961 357

List of Illustrations Wells v
Fig. 5.1 Kenneth Noland, after Seventh Night, 1972 358
Fig. 5.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Tapestry, 1968 359
Fig. 5.3 Page from Modern Master Tapestries Inc. 1973 catalog 360
Fig. 5.4 Mark Adams, Great Wing, 1965 361
Fig. 5.5 Double-page spread of Judy Chicago and Ann Isolde 362
Fig. 5.6 Double-page spread of the San Francisco Tapestry Workshop 362
Fig. 5.7 Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan Red, 1969 363
Fig. 5.8 Tadek Beutlich, Archangel I, 1971 364
Fig. 5.9 Tadek Beutlich, Eruption, 1970 364
Fig. 5.10 Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, Dafé, 1971 365
Fig. 5.11 Magdalena Abakanowicz, Installation at Pasadena Art 365
Museum, 1971

Fig. II.1 Piet Mondrian, New York City, 1942. 366
Fig. II.2 Jean Lurçat, Chant du Monde: L’eau et le feu, 1958. 366
Fig. II.3 André Lurçat, Fondation Jean Lurçat, Villa Seurat, Paris. 367
Fig. II.4 Françoise Hugier (photographer), Salon of Fondation Jean 368
Lurçat, Villa Seurat, Paris.

vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the many individuals and institutions whose intellectual,
emotional, and financial support made this dissertation possible. The University of
Southern California funded my research with a Dornsife College Doctoral Fellowship
and the Russell Endowed Dissertation Fellowship. I am grateful to the Visual Studies
Graduate Certificate program, the Department of Art History, and the Graduate Student
Government for numerous travel awards and research grants. A generous fellowship from
the Swiss National Science Foundation allowed me to join the Textile Project at the
Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Zürich, and a Harmon Chadbourn Rorison
Fellowship from the Institut Français d’Amérique at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, allowed me to continue my research in France.
These fellowships and grants would have produced far less without the
professionalism and patient guidance of many archivists, curators, and librarians. For
their thoughtful assistance, I wish to thank the staff of the Archives d’Air France, the
Archives Départementales de la Creuse, the Archives Nationales de France, the Archives
de la Ville de Lausanne, the Avery Library of Columbia University, the Bauhaus Archiv,
the Dedalus Foundation, the Fondation Le Corbusier, the Galerie Chevalier, the Getty
Research Institute, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Musée Départemental de la
Tapisserie in Aubusson, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, the Rijksbureau voor
Kunsthistorische Documentatie, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Roy Lichtenstein
Foundation, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Xavier Hermel of the
Académie des Beaux-Arts allowed me to visit Jean Lurçat’s Paris studio and shared his
copious knowledge of the artist’s career. Jean Vittet of the Mobilier National granted me
Acknowledgements Wells vii
access to the records of the Manufactures Nationales and interviews about their complex
history. Giselle Eberhard Cotton of the Fondation Toms Pauli made me familiar with the
phenomenal records of the Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie. Anne Dressen of the
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was a valuable interlocutor who welcomed me
to contribute to her exhibition Decorum. Glorvina Céléier and Kore Yoors opened both
their homes and their family archives to me with extraordinary kindness and trust. Their
memories brought the world of modern tapestry weavers to life.
I benefitted enormously from my coursework with Karen Lang, Andrew Perchuk
and Lucy Bradnock, Priya Jaikumar, and Sean Roberts. I first explored many aspects of
tapestry’s relationship to modernism in seminar papers for these professors, and their
feedback profoundly shaped the subsequent project. Glenn Adamson, Gérard Denizeau,
and Dominique Paulvé offered crucial advice and encouragement at an early stage. Ann
Marie Yasin and Catherine Anderson invited me to give lectures to their students that
enabled me to develop related areas of research. During the last stage of my dissertation,
newcomers to the art history department Megan Luke and Kate Flint generously stepped
in to help shepherd me to completion. As chair of our department and a director of the
Visual Studies program, Professor Flint has gone above and beyond to support my work.
Tristan Weddigen’s scholarship has inspired me throughout the dissertation process, and
the Textile Project he directed at the Universität Zürich provided an important forum for
my research. I wish to thank Professor Weddigen and all of my colleagues at the
Kunsthistorisches Institut for their critical insights and friendship.
This project would never have begun without my adviser, Nancy J. Troy, who,
during my first semester at USC, handed me a manila folder with some clippings on
Acknowledgements Wells viii
modern tapestry and casually suggested I might do something with the topic. Although
she probably never suspected that I would take it so far, her commitment to this material
and her faith in my interpretation of it have never wavered. During the past five years,
Professor Troy has generously shared her own scholarly process and advised me with
proactive dedication despite institutional changes and difficult distances. She is a scholar
whose diligence, critical thinking, respect for diverse approaches, and attention to the
structural forces that shape the development of modernism have served and will continue
to serve as my model.
My other committee members have also been invaluable mentors. Vanessa
Schwartz has supported this project enthusiastically, and I have benefited enormously
from her alternative perspective on the material, her critical readings of my chapters, and
her innovative approach to studying modern France and visual culture. Her formidable
energy and intellectual rigor continue to inspire. Richard Meyer’s scholarship on
twentieth-century American art has been an important influence and his insightful
questions have improved my work. I am very grateful that he also continued to serve on
my committee despite institutional and geographical distances. I am equally grateful to
Elinor Accampo for stepping in from the history department. Her generous attention to
my work has enabled me to hone my project and consider additional scholarly audiences.
While my committee has greatly enhanced the present dissertation, any remaining errors
are entirely my own.
My fellow graduate students have been an indispensable source of encouragement
and intellectual exchange. I would not have made it through the writing process without
Emily Liebert, Claire Rifelj, and Virginia Solomon: our dissertation group helped me
Acknowledgements Wells ix
craft viable chapters from rambling drafts. Erin Sullivan, Kris Tanton, and Nadya Bair
also generously read and discussed my work. Patti Nelson went above and beyond in
reading the entire dissertation and assuring me that it was actually worth reading. Her
insights helped me clarify my overall arguments and dramatically improved the final
result. I am particularly grateful that my project led me to meet Barbara Caen and Cindy
Kang. Their research on nineteenth-century tapestry provided me with valuable
information, but their friendship and good humor provided me with much more. I have
had too many excellent colleagues at USC to name individually, but I thank them all for
their intellectual engagement, their interdisciplinary approaches, and, not least, their
determination to enjoy all that Los Angeles has to offer. Among my many friends in LA,
I wish to specially thank Karen Huang and Edward Kozaczka for being my home away
from home.
Among all the gracious people who listened patiently to me expound on tapestry
at the slightest pretext, I especially thank my family for understanding my commitment,
my deadlines, and the nature of my work. My sisters, Jessica and Laura, understood when
I needed to talk about my dissertation and, even more important, when I needed to talk
about anything but my dissertation. My parents, Heidi Hartmann and Jack Wells, were
often the source of surprisingly helpful advice, and their belief and obvious pride in me
helped me through discouraging moments. Their commitments to research and
intellectual dialogue and their passion for their work inspired me to pursue my own Ph.D.
I am so grateful that they encouraged my education and my interests in the arts at every
opportunity. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my late grandfather, A.
Judson Wells. The first member of his family to attend college, he earned a full
Acknowledgements Wells x
scholarship to Harvard in 1934. On the way to earning his Ph.D. in chemistry, one of his
favorite classes was in art history. He went on to send all six of his children to college on
condition that they each take at least one art history course. I like to think he would be
glad that he turned out an art historian, at last.
xi
ABSTRACT

During the three decades that followed the Second World War, dozens of
canonical modern artists and architects, prestigious dealers and curators, and significant
collectors participated in a revival of tapestry as a medium for modern art. These tapestry
revivers included artists as diverse as Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella,
architects Le Corbusier and Gordon Bunshaft, dealers Sidney Janis and Denise René, the
founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the noted art
critic Clement Greenberg. By revealing these and other figures’ participation in the
modern tapestry revival, this dissertation demonstrates not only how integral tapestry was
to modernism and but also how we must reconsider our received narratives of modern art
in order to account for its historic inclusion of tapestry.
Both tapestry and modernism reached unprecedented critical, economic, and
institutional success during the same historical moment, the twenty-five years following
World War II. The coincident rise of tapestry and modern art is a mark of the dialectic
relationship between them, particularly the close relationship between tapestry and
modernist painting. This dialogue between modernist painting and tapestry occurred both
on a conceptual level, through similarities in how they were described and understood,
and on a structural level, through similarities in how they were commissioned, circulated,
marketed, and collected. This dissertation thus proposes that tapestry, as both a medium
and a concept, actually enabled the successful marketing of modernism during the
postwar period. By working through the medium and concept of tapestry, modernists
were able to emphasize the novelty of modern art while situating it in a historical lineage,
to reproduce works by celebrated modern artists for multiple collectors, to advocate a
Abstract Wells xii
decorative function for modern art as part of modern life, and to articulate the flatness
and textile qualities of modernist painting. Examining modern tapestry illuminates how
modernists justified and disseminated their art, and how they marketed modernism
through exhibitions, reproduction, architecture, and criticism.

1
INTRODUCTION
On February 5, 2003, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at the
United Nations (UN) in New York to present the Bush administration’s case for war in
Iraq, he took press questions in front of a blue curtain that covered and obscured from
view Pablo Picasso’s well-known anti-war image Guernica. This Guernica, however,
was not the painting Picasso made in 1937 in support of the Republican government of
Spain (Fig. I.1), but a tapestry woven in France in 1955 that was commissioned by
Nelson A. Rockefeller (Fig. I.2). The UN insisted that it had covered the tapestry to
create a neutral backdrop for the news cameras, as some crews allegedly complained that
the tapestry was too busy a background.
1
But the press nevertheless largely interpreted
this as an act of censorship initiated by US government officials who did not want their
imminent invasion of Iraq to be compared with the event that Picasso’s 1937 painting
protested, the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica.
The censorship of the Guernica tapestry and its coverage by the press was
predicated on the assumption that the tapestry expressed the same anti-war message as
the original painting, an assumption that attributed the tapestry to Picasso and his leftist
political views.
2
The tapestry and the painting were collapsed into a single work,
Guernica, produced by a singular artist, Picasso, and carrying a unified, original
meaning. But we could just as easily attribute this work to a different proper name,
Rockefeller, and understand him as originating the tapestry through his act of
commission. This attribution would give Guernica a very different political import by

1
Claudia Winkler, “The ‘Guernica’ Myth,” The Blog, The Weekly Standard, 16 April 2003,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/556paocc.asp? page=1.
2
David Walsh, “UN conceals Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ for Powell’s presentation,” World Socialist
Web Site, 8 February 2003, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/guer-f08.shtml.
Introduction Wells 2
situating it in the context of the Cold War and Rockefeller’s history of organizing pro-
American propaganda in Latin America. This line of interpretation could make much of
the fact that when the Guernica tapestry was woven in 1955, Rockefeller was a Special
Assistant to President Truman for Foreign Affairs and an adviser on countering Soviet
foreign policy, or the fact that the tapestry was exhibited at the Governor’s Mansion in
Albany before being loaned to the UN as a memorial to Rockefeller’s indispensable aid
in constructing the UN headquarters. If the journalists covering the UN’s censorship of
the Guernica tapestry could not readily acknowledge the existence of two Guernicas
produced in two such different political contexts, they are no different from the majority
of art historians. For the discipline of art history has prioritized Picasso’s painted
Guernica as the original, authentic work, and largely ignored or, at best, marginalized
Rockefeller’s woven Guernica as a distorted reproduction.
3

The Guernica tapestry was woven by a French artist, Jacqueline de la Baume-
Dürrbach, who made her living weaving tapestries after the works of celebrated
modernists. In a 1952 photograph, we can see de la Baume-Dürrbach and her sculptor
husband, René Dürrbach, working in her studio in the South of France (Fig. I.3). They are
bent over a low-warp tapestry loom, and behind them is the cartoon, the working drawing
or plan for the tapestry, based on a work by Fernand Léger titled Fleur du Mexique. The
working space depicted here is humble, speaking to the deprivations of postwar Europe,
but the work being woven on the loom is destined to decorate a glittering tower of
American corporate prosperity, for this Léger tapestry was commissioned for the new
Seagram Building in New York. This photograph thus points to the transatlantic culture

3
For example, Romy Golan illustrates the Guernica tapestry but barely discusses it, only
mentioning that its colors differ from the painting. Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of
Wall Painting, Europe 1927-1957 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 206.
Introduction Wells 3
of modern tapestry, highlighting the international circuits of production and reception, the
hierarchies of artistic labor, and the economic disparities that made modern tapestry
possible in the postwar period. Understanding that transatlantic culture of modern
tapestry will enable us to view a wider, richer context for postwar modernism, for this
photograph and the culture of modern tapestry it represents open onto larger questions of
historical revival, hand crafted reproductions, decorative art, and intermediality that
should inform our understanding of modernism.
This dissertation thus marshals the history of tapestry in the twentieth century as a
lens, through which to reconsider the history of modernism. It is important to recover the
world of modern tapestry that has largely vanished from art historical view, a world that
extended well beyond Léger’s Fleur du Mexique or Picasso’s Guernica. Dozens of
canonical modern artists and architects, prestigious dealers and curators, and significant
collectors participated in the postwar revival of tapestry as a medium for modern art,
including not only Léger, Picasso, and Rockefeller, but also artists as diverse as Joan
Miró, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella; architects Le Corbusier and Gordon
Bunshaft; dealers Sidney Janis and Denise René; the founding director of the Museum of
Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.; and the noted art critic Clement Greenberg. As
prominent as these modernists are, they are only a fraction of the figures who
encountered modern tapestry. One dealer estimated that in the forty years following
World War II there were over three thousand exhibitions of modern tapestries organized
internationally.
4
Why was modern tapestry so prominent in the postwar period? And if it
indeed was so very visible, why is tapestry not included in most histories of modernism?

4
Denise Majorel, “Quarante ans de tapisserie,” in La Tapisserie en France: La Tradition Vivante,
1945-1985 (Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, 1985), 31.
Introduction Wells 4
We can understand the importance of considering modern tapestry through the
historiographical precedent of cubism, a movement whose division into two wings,
gallery cubism versus salon cubism, has had important consequences for our
understanding of modern art. Critics from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alfred Barr to
Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have understood the gallery cubism of Picasso and
Georges Braque, so called because these artists exhibited exclusively at private
commercial galleries, as a cornerstone of modernist innovation through its systematic
interrogation of conventional pictorial signs.
5
Meanwhile salon cubists, so called because
they exhibited at the public salon exhibitions, were largely ignored, until new scholarship
undertaken by Daniel Robbins, Christopher Green, Mark Antliff, David Joselit, and
Nancy Troy brought salon cubists to wider attention.
6
Collectively, this scholarship
demonstrated that salon cubists were both more widely known in their own day and had
very different concerns from the gallery cubists; the cubism they presented to the public
was one invested in perception, movement, color, and simultaneity, even interior design.

5
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1920), trans. Henry Aronson (New York:
Wittenborn Schultz, 1949); Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1936); Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 23-40; Yve-Alain Bois,
“The semiology of cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. William S. Rubin and
Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 169-208; Krauss, “The Motivation
of the Sign,” in Picasso and Braque, 261-86.
6
Daniel Robbins, “Albert Gleizes: Reason and Faith in Modern Painting,” in Albert Gleizes,
1881-1953 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Mueum, 1964); Christopher Green, Léger and
the Avant-Garde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977); Robbins, “Jean
Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism,” in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, ed. Joann Moser (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985), 9-23; Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern
Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928 (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1987). Robbins, “Le Fauconnier and Cubism,” in Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946): A
Pioneer Cubist (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 1990); Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and
the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1991); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian
Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); David Joselit, Infinite Regress:
Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1914 (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1998).
Introduction Wells 5
While one could argue that the salon cubists were ultimately less influential than the
gallery cubists, knowledge of salon cubism is still crucial for understanding the context,
public reception, plurality, and contradictions of cubism as it was actually experienced
during its historical moment.
Examining modern tapestry performs a similar service for our understanding of
twentieth-century art because tapestry points us to a kind of “marketable modernism,” a
wider definition of modernism that illuminates its context, public reception, plurality, and
contractions as a lived historical experience. This marketable modernism existed in
blockbuster exhibitions, biennials, corporate headquarters, government buildings,
churches, and even airplanes, as well as commercial galleries and private homes. To take
this wider view does not necessarily imply that we are leaving the domain of art to
consider a broader category of visual culture. Rather, it is to see modern art as itself
constituting a visual culture, an extended network of objects and exhibition venues that
meant many different things to many people.
Most art historians already have a working definition of modernism that is
multivalent. Indeed, recent discussions of modernism have emphasized that there is no
consensus over its definition, time frame, or conceptual underpinnings.
7
The most
influential theorization of modernism is likely that of American art critic Clement
Greenberg, who understood modernism as a succession of avant-garde artists working
towards greater abstraction, self-criticality, and medium specificity. Greenberg’s account
of modernism, which I explore more fully in chapter 4, became particularly canonical—
and controversial—in the United States, but its influence extended further afield. James

7
See T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1999), 7; and, more recently, James Elkins, Master Narratives
and Their Discontents (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Introduction Wells 6
Elkins has recently argued that even in countries where Greenberg’s writings are
unknown, artists and art historians have absorbed an understanding of modernism as
particularly invested in avant-gardism, painting, and self-criticality.
8
Yet, for most art
historians, the working canon of modernism includes many artists and movements which
Greenberg dismissed and which have only received critical attention through the work of
postmodernist critics. Dada and Surrealism, for example, could hardly be left out of any
current survey of modern art. If an adequate definition or single conceptual paradigm can
unite the diverse artworks now included under the umbrella term, “modernism,” it has not
yet been theorized.
To the extent that tapestry, weaving, or textiles have been included in this
umbrella category of modernism they have been discussed as the province of such
women artists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay, or of movements with
exceptional commitments to the decorative or applied arts, such as the Nabis and the
Bauhaus.
9
Rarely has tapestry been considered as part of the high modernism that
followed the Second World War,
10
but tapestry pervaded the entire spectrum of
modernism and was practiced, for example, by Man Ray as well as Matisse, by Josef
Albers as well as Anni Albers. While I will not claim that tapestry should serve as a

8
Elkins, Master Narratives, 72-73.
9
Walburga Krupp, “Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber: The Quintessential Dada Couple,” in Dada
and Beyond, 1: Dada Discourses, ed. Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson, (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2011) 157-168; Clare Rendell, “Sonia Delaunay and the Expanding Definition of Art,” Women’s
Art Journal 4, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1983): 35-38; Claire Frèches-Thory and Ursula Perucchi-
Petri, Nabis 1888-1900 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993); Sigrid
Weltge-Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1998).
10
See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses:
The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Golan’s and
Wigley’s limited discussions of modern tapestry focus on Le Corbusier and do not point to the
wider, transatlantic visibility of modern tapestry.
Introduction Wells 7
unifying conceptual paradigm for these artists’ diverse modernisms, the medium does
point us towards a productively historical definition of modern art. If salon cubism
showed us that we should not only define cubism through theoretical readings that
exclude the majority of artists who were thought to be cubists during the movement’s
historical moment, then tapestry similarly demonstrates that our definitions of modern art
should include the diverse array of works that were understood as constituting modernism
by the people who lived through it.
Though this dissertation thus aims at a richer contextual account of modernism, it
does not offer a detailed survey of twentieth-century tapestry. Previous scholars who
have undertaken specialized histories of modern tapestry have treated their topic as
separate from the broader history of modern art.
11
My aim is different: to show how
integral tapestry was to modernism and how we must reconsider our received narratives
in order to account for modernism’s historic inclusion of tapestry. Tapestry and modern
art both reached unprecedented critical, economic, and institutional success during the
same historical moment, the twenty-five years following World War II. The coincident
rise of tapestry and modernism is a mark of the dialectic relationship between them,
particularly the close relationship between tapestry and modernist painting. The dialogue
between modernist painting and tapestry occurred both on a conceptual level, through
similarities in how they were described and understood, and on a structural level, through
similarities in how they were commissioned, circulated, marketed, and collected. Indeed,

11
For example, see Ann Lane Hedlund, Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry, foreword by Grace
Glueck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Arizona State
Museum, the University of Arizona, Tucson, 2010); and the papers collected in La tapisserie hier
et aujourd’hui: actes du colloque, École du Louvre et Mobilier national et Manufactures
nationales des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie, 18 et 19 juin 2007, 95-114 (Paris:
École du Louvre, 2011).
Introduction Wells 8
one could go further and say that tapestry, as both a medium and a concept, actually
enabled the successful marketing of modern art during the postwar period. By working
through the medium and concept of tapestry, modernists were able to emphasize the
novelty of modern art while situating it in a historical lineage, to reproduce works by
celebrated modern artists for multiple collectors, to advocate a decorative function for
modern art as part of modern life, and to articulate the flatness and textile qualities of
modernist painting. Examining modern tapestry illuminates how modernists justified and
disseminated their art, and how they created a marketable modernism through
exhibitions, reproduction, architecture, and criticism.
Although my dissertation focuses on the decades immediately following World
War II, it situates that period in relation to the late-nineteenth century. By taking this
longer historical view, I demonstrate that the American modernism of the postwar period
remained deeply enmeshed with nineteenth-century European discourses around the
decorative arts. Debates over truth to materials, architectural dressing, the status of easel
painting, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and historical revival were not limited to the nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries but continued to shape the production and reception of
modern art after the Second World War. By positioning postwar modernism as part of
these earlier discourses, my dissertation furthers a reconsideration of art historical
periodization that challenges the traditional understanding of World War II as a decisive
rupture. Indeed, chapter 1 examines how World War II came to occupy this false position
of art historical rupture in narratives of the tapestry revival.
Similarly, the transatlantic scope of my study draws attention to the ongoing
dialogues between France and the United States during the postwar period, in order to
Introduction Wells 9
help correct the still widely held view that New York became an art capital at the expense
of Paris. Postwar Americans remained committed to Paris as an ongoing source of
modern art, including tapestry, and while American artists, critics, and state officials
championed Abstract Expressionism as embodying American freedom of expression,
they also worked with French artists, critics, and state officials to promote modern
tapestry as the revival of a specifically French artistic tradition. The extended historical
and geographical scope of my project allows us to reconsider these broad organizing
narratives of modernism in ways that a more detailed case study might not. I have sought
to convey the full scope of tapestry’s significance by highlighting a set of larger issues
and discourses that link disparate instances of modern tapestry to one another and to the
marketable modernism of which they were a part. Yet as the dissertation moves through
an array of locations, historical moments, and artists, I have also tried to capture their
specificities through close looking at works of art, exhibitions, publications, critical texts,
and archival materials.
One might easily assume that gender was a central concern of this study because
tapestry was a decorative art that was presumably marginalized and thus feminized within
the discourses of modernism; however, it is exactly this notion that modernism ever
imposed such a uniform hierarchy between masculine art and feminine decoration that I
wish to challenge. While some twentieth-century tapestry artists, weavers, and dealers
were certainly women, they were relative newcomers to the field, for tapestry, just like
painting, had historically been far too prestigious to be considered appropriate women’s
work. Of course, the biological sex of those who practiced modern tapestry would be less
important to the issue of its gendering than the discourses that structured the medium.
Introduction Wells 10
But again, what I will show is that the debates surrounding modern tapestry did not
marginalize this practice as a feminized other but rather allowed for its incorporation at
the heart of modernism. As I will discuss in the last chapter, the assumption that tapestry
or textiles more generally were a feminized, marginalized practice is largely a product of
the feminist art movement of the 1970s, which appropriated textiles as “women’s art”
despite the prominence of male artists working with textiles at the time. Although my
extensive research did not reveal a clearly gendered understanding of tapestry during the
postwar period, it did point repeatedly to the issue of labor. Tapestry underscores how
manual labor imbued artworks with moral values that set them apart from the machine
made environments of modernity. Tapestry helps show us how modernists understood
artistic labor in relation to science and craft and viewed it as compromised under
capitalism. Most importantly, the production of tapestry reveals whose labor was
considered important, whose labor was visualized, and whose was acknowledged as
determining artistic authorship.
Tapestry has a very strict technical definition yet a very liberal cultural meaning.
Technically the term tapestry refers only to discontinuous weft-faced, plain weave
textiles hand woven on high-warp (vertical) or low-warp (horizontal) looms. This means
that the tapestry weaver does not shuttle the horizontal threads, known as the weft, across
the entire width of the work but only interweaves them in discrete areas to create a
discontinuous, non-repeating pattern. A tapestry is “weft-faced” because only these
horizontal threads appear on the surface of the work; none of the vertical threads, known
as the warp, show through. Moreover, a tapestry always has a flat, plain weave,
12
a

12
“Plain weave” is a specific technical term that refers to the simple over and under pattern of
warp and weft in the weaving of tapestry and other kinds of fabrics such as linen and taffeta.
Introduction Wells 11
relatively smooth surface in comparison to the plush, fuzzy textures of pile woven
carpets. The tapestry technique allows for unlimited compositional freedom and is thus
suited to large pictorial scenes, such as figures in a landscape, which has aided the long
history of comparisons between tapestry and painting. Yet the very pictorialism of
tapestry has also encouraged a more liberal understanding of the term to denote any
textile hung on the wall like a picture. Throughout this dissertation, I explore how
imprecise the definition of “tapestry” became in the postwar period, as artists and critics
began describing pile rugs, patchwork quilts, fiber-art sculptures, and even paintings as
tapestries. However, these expansive interpretations of tapestry still drew upon historical
understandings of the medium to connote the prestige, monumentality, and lineage of
tapestry as a distinctive artistic practice.
Due to its specific history, tapestry raises a unique set of questions for the study of
modernism that no other single medium could engage. European royalty and nobility had
patronized tapestry, a highly expensive and prestigious art form, since the Middle Ages,
but it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that princes began to establish
their own tapestry workshops and to direct their court painters to provide them with
tapestry designs.
13
Louis XIV established the longest surviving of these royal tapestry
workshops, the still extant Manufacture des Gobelins and Manufacture de Beauvais,
which produced tapestries after paintings by such artists as Charles Le Brun (the first
director of the Gobelins from 1663 to 1690), François Boucher, and Jacques-Louis
David. In addition to reproducing academic paintings, tapestry workshops such as the

13
Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993); Thomas B. Campbell,
Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2002).
Introduction Wells 12
Gobelins produced suites or series of tapestries to coordinate with the decorative schemes
of royal palaces and aristocratic houses, placing tapestry within a decorative tradition.
During the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the Manufacture de Beauvais
specialized in tapestry panels used to upholster furniture, further linking tapestry with
interior décor. Although today the Manufacture de Beauvais is devoted to weaving low-
warp tapestries by contemporary artists, it and France’s other state-run weaving
workshops, the Gobelins and the Manufacture de la Savonnerie, which specializes in pile
rugs, are grouped under the Mobilier Nationale, a state agency that furnishes official
buildings in France and maintains the national collection of tapestries and historic
furniture.
14
In France then, the country with Europe’s most famous and longstanding
tapestry workshops, tapestry has been a traditional, academic art supported by state
patronage that reproduced the paintings of celebrated artists and decorated official
buildings. Thus, for the diverse modernists who designed, commissioned, and debated
tapestry, to engage with this medium was to engage with issues of historical revival, art
reproduction, interior décor, and medium specificity. The first four chapters of my
dissertation explore each of these issues in turn, highlighting how modernism’s
involvement with the historical, reproductive, decorative art of tapestry forces a
reconsideration of narratives that have come to dominate the study of modern art.

14
Charissa Bremer-David, French Tapestry and Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los
Angeles: Getty Publications, 1997); Alberte Grynpas Bguyen and Marie-Hélène Bersani, Tapis,
tapisseries d’artistes contemporains: Manufactures nationales Gobelins, Beauvais, Savonnerie:
1960 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). The Gobelins specializes in the rarer high-warp
tapestry that is woven on a high-warp or vertical loom. The Manufacture de la Savonnerie
predates the Gobelins and Beauvais. It was established in the early-seventeenth century under
Louis XIII but developed from Henri IV’s efforts to weave pile rugs at court rather than spending
hard currency to buy them from the Middle East.
Introduction Wells 13
The first two chapters focus on the political and economic contexts that enabled
the rise of modern tapestry after the Second World War. By examining tapestry as an
example of historical revival and art reproduction, these chapters explore how
modernism’s alleged commitment to originality was structured by repetition. Chapter 1,
“The Logic of Revival,” examines how French tapestry promoters employed discourses
of revival to present modern tapestry as the renaissance of medieval tapestry, as a symbol
of France’s victory over Nazi Germany, and as evidence of France’s postwar
reconstruction. Despite the nationalist context of the French tapestry revival, however, I
question the facile conflation of revival with nostalgia and propose that a common logic
of revival underpinned both postwar tapestry and many of the art practices we recognize
as modernist or avant-garde. Moreover, this chapter builds on recent scholarly work that
reconsiders the postwar Franco-American relationship and draws our attention to
France’s agency in promoting its cultural importance to American audiences. My work
reveals how curators, dealers, and collectors in both France and the United States
supported the rise of tapestry and other forms of contemporary French art as evidence of
France’s return to cultural leadership after the Second World War. In chapter 2,
“Authorship in the Art Market,” I explore the transatlantic tapestry market more fully by
focusing on tapestry’s role as a reproductive medium that allowed for the proliferation of
works by established modern artists and contributed to the expanding postwar market for
modern art. This chapter shows how artists, dealers, collectors, and curators negotiated
market realities and tapestry’s specific mode of production to creatively reconsider
notions of authorship and originality. dd
Introduction Wells 14
The next two chapters explore how modernism remained engaged with
decorative-arts debates from the late-nineteenth century and how tapestry influenced
conceptual understandings of modern art. Chapter 3, “Art as Decoration and Tableau,”
considers how tapestry was positioned in relation to easel painting by examining how
both mediums were simultaneously understood as decorative, portable, and vertically
displayed works of “high” art. It traces a historical shift in which modernists who first
began designing rugs and other textiles as part of integrated interior design schemes later
turned to designing tapestries as portable, autonomous art objects. Yet it also
demonstrates that critics in the postwar period championed both tapestry and modernist
painting for embracing a renewed integration between art and architecture. By
reexamining postwar modernism’s relationship with the harmonious, decorative
environment, this chapter demonstrates that modern art was positioned similarly to
tapestry as providing decorative function for modern interiors. The fourth chapter,
“Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles,” delves into the heart of modernism by
reexamining the work of Clement Greenberg. This chapter links the discourse of medium
specificity expounded by Greenberg to earlier discourses of design reform that extolled
truth to materials and rigorous design. It identifies a vocabulary of textiles that permeated
the writing of Greenberg and other modern art critics and allowed them to theorize
modernist painting by comparing it with weaving. The chapter thus demonstrates that
tapestry was part of the context out of which modernist criticism developed, and it
proposes that modernism itself could be understood as a craft discourse.
In order to account for modern tapestry and its near erasure from the historical
record, this dissertation reveals the suppleness and complexity of modernists’ views on
Introduction Wells 15
historicism, originality, decoration, and medium specificity during their own historical
moment, and how these debates were oversimplified by later critical voices. The final
chapter focuses on the 1970s as a period when feminist artists, postmodernist critics, and
revisionist scholars who challenged Greenberg’s preeminence creatively reshaped
narratives of modernism in ways that oversimplified some of its complexities. These acts
of revision contributed to the near erasure of modern tapestry from the historical record,
just at the moment that market forces worked to curtail the economic viability of modern
tapestry and its continuing production. The modern tapestry revival came more or less to
a close at the end of the 1970s,
15
at the same time that the marketable modernism postwar
figures actually experienced was replaced by postmodernist visions of modernism’s
hegemony.
During the past decade, however, contemporary artists as diverse as William
Kentridge and Chuck Close have turned once again to the tapestry medium. The visibility
of tapestry at prestigious venues such as the Pace Gallery, the Whitney Biennial, and
documenta echoes the kind of presence that tapestry enjoyed during the postwar period,
yet only a few contemporary artists reference this earlier history of modern tapestry. One
of these is Goshka Macuga, a London based artist who included Rockefeller’s Guernica
tapestry in her 2009-2010 installation at the Whitechapel Gallery, Nature of the Beast
(Fig. I.4). Macuga wanted to refer to the Gallery’s 1939 exhibition of the original
Guernica painting that supported the Republican forces then fighting in Spain, as well as
to the more recent censorship of the tapestry reproduction at the UN. Her installation thus

15
However, it was during the 1970s that the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti began
commissioning Afghan embroiderers to execute tapestries of his design. These works have
received greater attention in the past decade, perhaps because a diverse array of contemporary
artists is also returning to the tapestry medium. See Mark Godfrey, “Boetti and Afghanistan,” in
Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, 155-175 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012).
Introduction Wells 16
included a sculpture of Colin Powell and displayed the Guernica tapestry in front of a
large blue curtain, alluding to the blue curtain that had been placed over the tapestry
during Powell’s press conference. Macuga explained in an interview that she hoped the
use of the tapestry as “a copy, which has its own history” would “shift the historical
reference of the Guernica bombing in 1937 to a new time frame,”
16
and she emphasized
the history of each Guernica by including archival materials relating to both the painting
and the tapestry as well as her to own exhibition, highlighting the distinct contexts in
which the Guernica image had operated. Most importantly, Macuga hoped that the
Nature of the Beast, like Whitechapel’s earlier exhibition of the Guernica painting, would
catalyze political activity. A conference table within the installation was meant to host
meetings of local non-profit or political groups and designated the work as a stage for
political discussion and the planning of future action.
However, the space was also used for VIP events. The Nature of the Beast
installation coincided with the reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery after an expansion
and remodelling, and Prince William ceremoniously opened the Gallery and gave a
speech in front of the Guernica tapestry then on view. This occasion became the subject
of Macuga’s next work, a new tapestry titled On Nature of the Beast (Fig. I.5) that the
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst [Museum of Contemporary Art] in Antwerp
commissioned for its exhibition, Textiles: Art and the Social Fabric. This second work
depicts Prince William standing at a podium in front of the Guernica tapestry, speaking
to what is presumably an elite group of guests below. One man in the foreground wears
the golden Chain of Office of a British mayor, perhaps indicating the Mayor of London.

16
Achim Borchardt-Hume and Goshka Macuga, ‘The Nature of the Beast,’ Art Journal 69, no. 1-
2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 66.
Introduction Wells 17
Most of the figures stand with their backs to the viewer, facing Prince William and the
Guernica tapestry behind him. Those in profile are smiling, as though basking in their
prestigious company. A woman on the left is recording the sight with her digital camera,
registering its importance and rarity. Macuga herself is also pictured on the left, the sole
figure who turns away from the stage as though to register her disgust with how the
Gallery has co-opted her work for its own public relations agenda.
17
In placing herself
within the scene, however, Macuga also makes clear that the artist is embedded within
and participates, even if reluctantly, with the art world’s economy of prestige.
On the Nature of the Beast reproduces Guernica in the background and thus
becomes a tapestry of a tapestry. This meta-referential circuit illuminates the role of
tapestry within the marketing of modernism through reproduction, exhibition, and
patronage. Yet On the Nature of the Beast also speaks to the social history of tapestry,
exploiting the medium’s aristocratic associations and historic prestige to reinforce and
comment upon the intersections of contemporary art with celebrity culture and state
patronage. Macuga’s thus work contends that the same forces of politics, patronage, and
capital that made possible the production of works like Rockefeller’s Guernica continue
to structure the creation and exposure of contemporary art.

17
Luis Jacob, “[Review of] Textiles: Art and the Social Fabric: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst
Antwerpen (MuHKA), Antwerp, Belgium,” C: International Contemporary Art 4 (Summer
2010): 47.
18
CHAPTER ONE
THE LOGIC OF REVIVAL

Why did modernists embrace tapestry so readily after the Second World War?
While there is no single answer to this question, we must first acknowledge that tapestry
was available as a medium for modern art largely because French artists, dealers, and
government officials were engaged in a concerted campaign to revive the nation’s
tapestry industry. These tapestry revivers promoted the medium as appropriate for avant-
garde art in ways that may seem paradoxical to us today. For, while revival is essentially
a repetition of the past, avant-garde artists are defined by their quest for originality and
their need to create art that is demonstrably new.
1
Art historians have examined instances
of revival among modern artists—particularly the rappel à l’ordre that followed the First
World War and the avant-garde’s subsequent interest in classicism and medievalism
during the interwar period
2
—and they have presented their scholarship as a much-needed
corrective to the idea that modernists ignored history in favor of the new. Yet, revival
scholars have largely failed to articulate how fundamentally the logic of revival is itself
structured by novelty and historical rupture.
3
Revival does not imply seamless continuity
with the past but rather historical discontinuity, as the present or immediate past is

1
For example, Christine Poggi argues in her study of Italian Futurism that all avant-gardes were
“futurist” in the sense that they took an adversarial attitude towards the present and past and
positioned themselves temporally as part of the future. Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The
Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), ix.
2
Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World
War, 1914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Romy Golan, Modernity and
Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995).
3
Elizabeth Guffey has linked revival to historical rupture by arguing that “retro” is a distinctly
postmodern, ironic form of revival that subverts modernism’s narratives of linear progress. While
I share Guffey’s interest in identifying the avant-garde potential of revival, I disagree that revival
can only be subversive or empowering in a subcultural or postmodern context. Elizabeth E.
Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 19
overturned in favor of a prior historical practice. Such a narrative of historical rupture
makes revival a valuable tool of the avant-garde. Looking closely at tapestry in the
postwar period allows us to see how revival incorporates the modernist desire for new
beginnings and provides a richer understanding of how modern artistic movements
construct their relationship to the past.
The tapestry revival illustrates with remarkable clarity that revival discourses are
highly constructed and designed to reconstruct the historical record. Because a revival
brings something back to life or strength, a revival always implies a period of separation,
decline, or death between the original object and its reiteration. To say that something has
been revived thus always implies that it needed to be revived because it had ceased to be
living or vibrant. As we will see in the case of the tapestry revival, such an implication of
previous decline or death can have important political implications. Indeed, much of this
chapter will be concerned with looking closely at the exhibitions, publications, images,
and discourses of the tapestry revival to show how they served hierarchies of power,
nationalist agendas, and international relations. But while revival has often been seen in
these conservative political terms, it should not be conflated with the much-critiqued
notion of nostalgia.
4
Scholars have too easily reduced revival to a reactionary longing for
the past induced by the crises of modernity, treating it as a fearful response to war or
industrialization that constructs an assuaging fiction of historical continuity.
5
Again,
however, I argue that revival creates not a fiction of continuity but rather a narrative of

4
Jean Starobinsky, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14, no. 54 (1966): 81-103; Renato
Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-
Memory (Spring 1989): 107-122.
5
Eric Hobsbawm, for example, influentially defined the concept of “invented tradition” as the
repetition of certain practices to suggest a largely fictitious continuity with the past. Eric
Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-2.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 20
rise, fall, and renaissance that lends itself to both “conservative” political agendas and
“progressive” or modernist inclinations towards historical rupture and novelty.
6
The goal
of this chapter is thus to understand how the tapestry revival functioned in relation to
modernist agendas as well as the crisis of World War II and the international politics of
the postwar period.
Tapestry promoters not only incorporated the war into their revivalist discourse,
they also directed their efforts almost immediately towards an international audience. The
postwar promotion of tapestry and other types of contemporary French art in the United
States is particularly significant because it counters a narrative that has dominated the
discipline of art history in which the capital of modern art shifted from Paris to New York
as a result of the war. Studies such as Serge Guilbaut’s landmark 1983 book, How New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,
7
have oversimplified the historical record by
neglecting how curators and dealers in both France and the US celebrated the rise of
tapestry and other forms of contemporary French art as evidence of France’s return to
cultural leadership after the Second World War. This chapter thus builds on the recent
work of historians who have reconsidered the postwar Franco-American relationship by

6
Scholars of revival are often curiously unable to view such rise-and-fall narratives as themselves
invented. For example, in his contribution to The Invention of Tradition, Prys Morgan describes
Welsh culture in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as exhibiting both “the decay or
demise of an ancient way of life” and “an unprecedented outburst of interest in things Welsh and
highly self-conscious activity to preserve and develop them” (43). Although the author
acknowledges, “decay and revival are curiously intermixed, because very often those who
bewailed the decay were the very ones who brought about the revival” (43), he does not seem to
realize that decay will only be understood as decay, rather than as improvement or merely as
change, by those calling for a revival. Morgan thus sees the “decay” of Welsh culture as
producing its revival rather than as being produced by that revival. Prys Morgan, “From a Death
to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period,” in The Invention of Tradition,
43-100.
7
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 21
drawing our attention to France’s own agency in promoting its cultural importance to
American audiences.
8
While I focus on this transatlantic context, there was a larger
global reach of the tapestry revival, which extended from France to such diverse locations
as São Paulo, Dakar, Chandigarh, and Kyoto. Through government sponsorship and
private collecting, as well as international touring exhibitions, biennials, and major
architectural projects, tapestry played a surprisingly large role in the articulation of
international modernism and the globalization of contemporary art in the decades
following World War II.

La Tapisserie Française du Moyen-âge à Nos Jours
Leaders of the tapestry revival narrated the history of tapestry since the Middle
Ages as a rise, fall, and renaissance and thus imposed a period of tapestry’s decline or
death that is necessary to the logic of revival. This narrative gained widespread exposure
through the landmark exhibition La tapisserie française du Moyen-Âge à nos jours
[French Tapestry from the Middle Ages to Our Time], co-curated by Pierre Verlet of the
Louvre and Jean Cassou of the Musée d’Art Moderne and held in the latter museum in
Paris during the summer of 1946 (Fig. 1.1). This exhibition brought together an
unprecedented number of tapestries from public and private collections in France, many

8
The promotion of French tapestry parallels the promotion of French tourism and French film
culture. Christopher Endy has shown how French and American agents marshaled tourism for the
Cold War by promoting tourism as a way to boost economic recovery in France and strengthen
loyalty between France and the US. Vanessa Schwartz has similarly drawn attention to how
France and America collaborated to create a transnational mass consumer culture by examining
film and its institutions and has demonstrated how film culture reinforced France’s status as a site
of universal culture and cosmopolitanism. See Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American
Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Vanessa R.
Schwartz, It's so French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 22
of which had been hidden from view during the war. It included such medieval
masterpieces as the monumental Apocalypse tapestries of Angers and the Lady and the
Unicorn tapestries housed at the Musée de Cluny, as well as a large number of modern
tapestries executed in the previous decade after designs by such contemporary French
artists as Raoul Dufy, Marcel Gromaire, Jean Lurçat, and Robert Wogensky. Although
the exhibition also included works from the intervening centuries, it emphasized the
superiority of the medieval and modern tapestries. According to the exhibition
organizers, these periods were the golden age and renaissance that bookended the period
of tapestry’s decline, when the medium had become too imitative of painting. For
example, Georges Salles, Director of the Museums of France, stressed in his preface to
the exhibition catalogue that the decline of tapestry was linked to the mimicry of
painting: “Taking back the art of the ancient weavers, some [modern] painters, forgetting
their paintbrushes, have returned to tapestry its specific virtues, which had progressively
atrophied into a too servile imitation of the painted model.”
9

In the wake of this landmark exhibition, which travelled internationally, numerous
other exhibitions, articles, survey books, and reviews popularized this rise, fall, and
renaissance narrative. They uniformly presented the Middle Ages as tapestry’s golden
age, when the medium played an important role in society and was understood on its own
artistic terms. They also agreed that only in the current, postwar moment was tapestry
undergoing a true renaissance. Some writers differed, however, on when exactly tapestry
had begun to decline. Many attributed tapestry’s deterioration to Raphael’s Acts of the
Apostles (1515), which Pope Leo X commissioned for the Sistine Chapel, because they

9
Georges Salles, preface to La Tapisserie Française du Moyen Age à Nos jours (Paris: Musée
national d’art moderne, 1946), 1 (my translation).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 23
had ushered in a period when tapestry was too illusionistic and too imitative of painting.
As early as 1913, the British tapestry historian George Leland Hunter argued: “The
Raphael cartoons did more harm to the art of tapestry-weaving than all other influences
combined. […] The greatness of the artist and of his achievements misled the world, and
caused critics to applaud in tapestry what should never have been put in tapestry at all.”
10

Similarly, in 1977 Michel Florisoone, an art historian and former Administrator of
France’s Mobilier National,
11
reiterated the view that tapestries of the mid-sixteenth
century “show complete and utter submission to the finished Italian paintings which were
used as cartoons.”
12
Other writers, particularly in France, wanted to validate the tapestries
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Manufacture des Gobelins had
been directed by such luminaries as Charles le Brun and François Boucher. Everyone
agreed, however, that the nineteenth century was the period of tapestry’s greatest decline.
In reviewing the 1946 exhibition, Francis Salet described the output from the nineteenth
century as “numerous unhappy examples of woven pictures which were framed and hung
on walls like paintings.”
13
In Salet’s account, as in all the rise-fall-renaissance narratives,
tapestry’s “fall” was equated with tapestry’s increasing similarity to painting.

10
George Leland Hunter, Tapestries: Their Origin, History, and Renaissance (New York: John
Lane Company; London: John Lane, Bodley Head; 1913), 82.
11
Florisoone was the Administrateur Général du Mobilier National from 1960 to 1963. The
Mobilier National is the state’s collection of furnishings and decorative arts that are both
preserved for their historical and aesthetic significance and used to furnish and decorate public
buildings. The Mobilier National is also an umbrella organization for France’s various state
workshops, and, since 1937 with the tenure of Guillaume Janneau, the Administrateur Général of
the Mobilier National has also been the director of the state’s tapestry workshops, the
Manufactures Nationales des Gobelins, de Savonnerie, and de Beauvais.
12
Michel Florisoone, “Classical Tapestry,” in The Book of Tapestry, Pierre Verlet, et. al. (New
York: Vendome Press, 1977), 68. This view continued into the 1990s in, for example, Francis
Paul Thomson, Tapestry: Mirror of History (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 91; and Barty
Phillips, Tapestry (London: Phaidon, 1994), 59.
13
Francis Salet, “The Exhibition of French Tapestry in Paris,” The Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs 88, no. 522 (September 1946): 224.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 24
Such narratives took part in the modernist discourse of medium specificity in that
they censured tapestry for being too derivative of another medium and for making
reference to that which was not tapestry. Tapestry revivers viewed the Middle Ages as
the last time when tapestry could unambiguously be considered an autonomous art that
did not imitate easel painting, and they felt that modern tapestry had to return the medium
to the distinctive techniques and truth to materials that had made it an independent art
form during the Middle Ages. Although the revival narrative thus held out the possibility
of tapestry as an autonomous medium, it nevertheless consistently related that medium to
painting, pointing to the difficulties in discussing these two mediums as truly separate
from one another.
By imposing a long period of tapestry’s “decline” from the early-nineteenth or
even early-sixteenth century to the mid twentieth century, these revival narratives
obscured two important aspects of tapestry’s history. First, they obfuscated how
prestigious and indeed necessary tapestries were for the courts of early-modern Europe
and how tapestries were produced in greater numbers and at greater expense during that
time, realities that counter the notion of decline. Second, these rise-fall-renaissance
narratives disavowed or ignored previous attempts to revive tapestry during the
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because they insisted that it was only in postwar
France that tapestry was undergoing a true renaissance. William Morris’s neo-medieval
tapestries woven in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the Art Nouveau
tapestries woven at the Sherrebek workshop in Germany and the modernist experiments
of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, the nineteenth-century workshops of the Braquenie
brothers in Belgium, even the efforts of French artists and dealers such as Aristide
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 25
Maillol and Marie Cuttoli to create modern tapestries and the reforms attempted by
France’s state-run tapestry workshops before the Second World War; all of these
episodes, if they were mentioned at all, became merely a part of tapestry’s long period of
decline or, at best, imperfect precursors to the postwar revival.
14
By linking postwar
France to tapestry’s renaissance and earlier periods everywhere else to tapestry’s decline,
these revival narratives constructed tapestry as a quintessentially French artistic practice
and made World War II central to the narrative of a tapestry renaissance.
The French were particularly eager to present this narrative of tapestry revival
abroad. Georges Salles quickly began negotiating with Francis Taylor at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York to have the exhibition La tapisserie française du Moyen-
Âge à nos jours travel there, but the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was also interested
in the show. René d’Harnoncourt, who was then MoMA’s Vice President of Foreign
Activities and the Director of a short-lived Department of Manual Industries, was in
Europe in 1946 to attend a UNESCO conference in London. He visited Paris and reported
back to Monroe Wheeler, Director of Exhibitions and Publications, that “the Tapisserie
Exhibition” was “the only thing that is really exciting.” Lamenting that MoMA could not
possibly display the entire show “without renting the 10 top floors of Radio City,”
d’Harnoncourt suggested “we could bid for a selection of the Modern Section. By
weeding out the second raters we could get a show that would really be a sensation, the

14
Dorothee Bieske, Scherrebek: Wandbehänge des Jugendstils (Heide: Boyens, 2002); Barbara
Caen, “La tenture des Serments et Métiers, d'après Willem Geets dans l'hôtel de ville de
Bruxelles,” in Portrait et Tapisserie, ed. Pascal-François Bertrand and François Bordes, Papers of
International Conference, Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs, Lyon, June 11-12, 2010
(forthcoming); Helen Proctor, The Holy Grail tapestries designed by Edward Burne-Jones,
William Morris, and J.H. Dearle for Morris & Co (Birmingham, UK: Birmingham Museum and
Art Gallery, 1997); Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving
Workshop (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 26
stuff is not only good looking but really designed for Weaving and Tapestries.”
D’Harnoncourt had thus already internalized the message of the show, that tapestries
should be “really designed for Weaving,” rather than imitations of painting, and that the
recent works by contemporary French artists largely achieved this aim. D’Harnoncourt
singled out works by Marc Saint-Saëns, Robert Wogensky, Dom Robert, and Raoul Dufy
as well as “6-10 Gromaires” and “6-10 Lurçats” as “especially exciting” and thus worthy
of being shown in MoMA’s galleries.
15
Wheeler also received a telegram from Carmel
Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, urging him to consider the exhibition: “Tapestry
exhibition here magnificent suggest you or whoever arranges such exhibitions might
enquire about it coming to America.”
16
Another American, the art dealer Lawrence
Jeppson, later wrote that he visited the Musée d’Art Moderne that summer in order to
view some Matisse cutouts, but that “in my four-hour feast, what struck me most vividly
in the entire museum was the exhilarating collection of hand-woven tapestries. I can
pinpoint my ravishment to one tapestry in particular: Thésée et le Minotaur, by Marc
Saint-Saëns, one of the most dramatic, violent tapestries of current times.”
17

The image these communications evoke is of cultured Americans eagerly
traveling to Paris just after the war to scout the artistic scene and finding that the first
major exhibition organized by France’s new Musée d’Art Moderne was of historic and
modern tapestries. These American scouts regarded the exhibition as a sign that French
artists were once again creating modern art of value and that France’s tradition of fine
craftsmanship had survived the war. In this sense the episode recalls the anecdote about

15
René d’Harnoncourt to Monroe Wheeler, 17 July 1946, Monroe Wheeler Papers, Museum of
Modern Art Archives, Queens, New York.
16
Telegram from Carmel Snow to Monroe Wheeler, 26 Aug 1946, Monroe Wheeler Papers.
17
Lawrence S. Jeppson, Murals of Wool (Washington, DC: Jeppson Galleries; New York: French
& Company, 1960), 3.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 27
Diana Vreeland, the famed fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, sending to a Parisian
couture atelier in 1945 for an organdie rose and finding it was so finely made that it
proved Parisian haute couture had survived.
18
These Americans sought to reassure
themselves that despite the devastation of the recent war, France could once again be a
center of art, fashion, and culture, and French officials were eager to provide such
reassurance. When the tapestry exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
1947 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948 as Masterpieces of French Tapestry:
Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, Lent by the Cathedrals, Museums, and Collectors of
France, through the French Government, Pierre Verlet unambiguously asserted France’s
centrality to the history of tapestry in the American catalogue: “If there is one particular
field in which France retains her ancient vitality, it is that of art. And if there is one
branch of art in which she has recaptured the wealth of invention, the creative exuberance
of past centuries, it is tapestry. For France, tapestry is in a real sense a national art.”
19

Americans largely agreed with Verlet’s claims, and the idea that, as France’s “national
art” tapestry was “recapturing” France’s artistic prowess was repeatedly taken up by
curators, critics, collectors, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, this message of French dominance in the history of tapestry had to be
amended when the exhibition traveled to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels because
Belgium was another historic center of tapestry production. Indeed, the permeability of
the boundary between France and Belgium until the defeat of Napoleon I in 1815

18
This story is often repeated in both the scholarly and popular press. See, for example, Eleanor
Dwight, Diana Vreeland (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 71.
19
Masterpieces of French Tapestry: Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, Lent by the Cathedrals,
Museums, and Collectors of France, through the French Government (Chicago: The Art Institute
of Chicago, 1948), 8.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 28
problematizes any attempt to separate the histories of French and Belgian tapestry.
20

Verlet thus wrote a new essay for the Belgian catalogue, asking readers, “Does not the
history of tapestry, in effect, consist entirely of exchanges between France and Belgium,
between Belgium and France?” Although Verlet still asserted that it was French painters
who, through their “effort and intelligence” were leading the current tapestry renaissance,
he invited Belgium to play a role in the movement and suggested that the two countries
could help each other in this as in much else.
Six centuries of existence do not go on without crisis. But to overcome them, is not that
the lot of the living? Mutual aid between neighboring peoples and kindred spirits, isn’t
that habit and common sense? This is what the exhibition in Brussels in its own way
illustrates. […] The history of tapestry, in France as in Belgium, was brought about
through reciprocal aid and frequently repeated cooperation.
21

The postwar significance of such a message is evident, promoting cooperation and aid
between two neighboring countries who are “kindred spirits” because they are both
rightful heirs to the European art of tapestry.
As Verlet’s allusion to crisis and cooperative alliances makes clear, the tapestry-
revival narrative had particular resonance in the wake of the Second World War. More
surprising, perhaps, is how eagerly the organizers and viewers of La Tapisserie française
du Moyen Age à nos jours drew comparisons between the Middle Ages and their own

20
Modern day Belgium was founded in 1830 when it seceded from the United Kingdom of the
Netherlands. During the height of medieval tapestry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
Belgium was part of the Burgundian Netherlands. Ruled by the House of Burgundy and the
Habsburgs, the Burgundian Netherlands also included much of modern day Luxembourg and the
Netherlands and parts of northern France. As a result of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648)
Belgium became part of the Southern Netherlands, also known as the Catholic or Royal
Netherlands, which included Luxembourg, some parts of the Netherlands and most of the Nord-
Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. The Southern Netherlands were controlled by Spain
until 1714 and then by Austria until 1794, when they were annexed to France. The United
Kingdom of the Netherlands, which reunified the Netherlands with Belgium, gained
independence from France in 1815 and ended Belgium’s long history of union with parts of
modern day France.
21
Pierre Verlet, introduction to La Tapisserie Française du Moyen Age à Nos Jours, 2
nd
ed.
(Brussels: Editions de la Connaissance, 1947), 7-8 (my translation).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 29
postwar moment. While the revival narrative reinforced the importance of modern
tapestry as the achievement of a highly anticipated renaissance after the medium’s long
period of decline, it also celebrated the Middle Ages as the golden age of tapestry, before
that period of decline began. It was these medieval tapestries that needed to be revived,
and modern tapestries needed to exhibit some similarity with their medieval precedents.
Verlet encouraged American viewers to “turn to our moderns and see what a salutary
lesson they have drawn” from the past, to see “with what perceptiveness they have
recaptured the flavor of the medieval tapestries.” He argued that by embracing medieval
precedent, modernists had taken “a radical step,” that broke with the neoclassicism of the
interwar period and thus “showed their revolutionary spirit.” For Verlet, then, the neo-
medievalism of the tapestry revival was not a conservative or reactionary nostalgia, but a
brave, avant-garde direction for modernism. Moreover, Verlet naturalized this move by
arguing that it “corresponded to a recognition of certain needs common to the Middle
Ages and our own times.” He elaborated that these commonalities were both aesthetic
and functional. Cubism and surrealism, for example, manifested “the poetic sense, the
spirit of fantasy, so dear to the Middle Ages,” while on functional grounds, “it was the
Middle Ages, with its great, unrelieved stone walls, which had brought tapestry into
being as a virtual necessity. The case is somewhat the same today. We tire of naked,
light-colored walls; and tapestry is at hand to reanimate them, to give them back a
personality and a language of their own.”
22
Verlet thus made comparisons between the
role of tapestry during the Middle Ages and modern times that drew on an already
established correspondence between the medieval and the modern.

22
Ibid., 8-9.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 30
Medieval Modernism
In the wake of Verlet’s and Cassou’s exhibition, numerous other writers drew
comparisons between the function of tapestries during the Middle Ages and modern
times. The ensuing literature maintained that while the early purposes of tapestry were to
insulate the cavernous spaces of medieval castles and churches by warming their cold
stone walls with a layer of wool, to enliven these monochromatic stone rooms with color,
and to add to the grandeur of these spaces with their dramatic scale, modern tapestry
could continue to perform similar roles by humanizing modern architecture. Such figures
as Le Corbusier also stressed the portability of tapestry during the medieval era, when
noblemen took tapestries with them as they traveled from court to court, and thus
tapestry’s suitability for the mobility of modern times. Implicitly or explicitly, these
arguments for the continued functional role of tapestry drew analogies between medieval
and modern life. One commercial gallery’s exhibition catalogue argued that
“Architecture created the need for hand-woven tapestries in the 15
th
and 16
th
centuries
through the great castles, chateaux, palaces and public buildings designed and
constructed then […],” and “Modern Architecture has created an equally urgent demand
for woven murals.”
23
Mildred Constantine, a curator of design at MoMA, made an
explicit comparison between great feudal lords of old and modern captains of industry in
her introduction to another gallery’s exhibition: “Here are tapestries which warriors
would have hung on their ceremonial tents, which a great industrialist will hang on the
walls of his home or office.”
24

23
Modern French and Modern American Aubusson Tapestries; Modern Sculpture (Los Angeles:
Dalzell Galleries, n.d.), n.p.n. [6].
24
Mildred Constantine, An Exhibition of Contemporary French Tapestries (New York: Charles
E. Slatkin Galleries, 1965), 7.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 31
In making such a comparison, Constantine echoed her colleague Alfred H. Barr
Jr.’s interest in medieval art as a model for modernism. Barr’s ideas about medieval art’s
relationship to modernism were influenced by the Bauhaus, whose founders understood
medieval art as intermedial and fully integrated with medieval life and thus privileged
medieval art as a model for modernism. The name of the Bauhaus was taken from the
Bauhütte, the sheds that were built on the working sites of medieval cathedrals to house
artisans and their workshops. Walter Gropius concluded the Bauhaus’s founding
manifesto with an allusion to the medieval cathedral as a model for future art: “Let us
together, then, will, conceive, and create the new building of the future, which will
encompass architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise
eventually toward heaven, from the hands of a million craftsmen, as the crystal symbol of
a coming new faith.”
25
For the cover of the manifesto Lyonel Feiniger created a woodcut,
Cathedral for the Future, which depicts a church radiating light as though it is a beacon
of progress (Fig. 1.2). Barr followed the Bauhaus’s lead by organizing MoMA into
multiple, medium-based departments, just as the Bauhaus had done, in order to highlight
modernism’s reach across media and throughout daily life. Of interest to both institutions
was how medieval art modeled the stylistic unity of the arts and the integration of art with
life in ways that modern art should emulate.
MoMA’s 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture: The International Style is an
important example of how the medieval precedent resonated with contemporary practice.
Barr and the exhibition’s curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, chose
the label “international style” to allude to the International Gothic style of the fourteenth

25
As quoted in Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the
Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 153.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 32
and fifteenth centuries.
26
This label worked to legitimate the modern architecture that
Barr, Hitchcock, and Johnson favored by highlighting its existence in multiple European
countries as well as the US and comparing its prevalence to the historical spread of the
International Gothic style across Europe. Moreover, just as the International Gothic style
unified architecture, sculpture, painting, and other forms of art, Barr and his curators
viewed International Style modernism as arising from the collaborations of architects,
sculptors, painters, and designers through such venues as the Bauhaus and the De Stijl
movement. By labeling modern architecture as “international style,” MoMA thus pointed
to modernism’s stylistic coherence both across media and across national boundaries.
This desire for modernism to be a coherent style that could spread both internationally
and intermedially continued in the postwar period.”
27

Thus, tapestry revivers were not alone in drawing connections between modern
art and medieval precedents. They echoed figures at the Bauhaus and MoMA in seeing
medieval art as modeling the desired functionality, stylistic coherence, and international
reach of modernism. But tapestry revivers also made explicit formal comparisons
between medieval and modern works.
28
While no one felt that modern tapestries could or
should reproduce the appearance of medieval weavings, numerous artists and critics

26
Alfred H. Barr, foreword to Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1932); as discussed by Kantor, 293.
27
Clement Greenberg, for example, called for such stylistic coherence in his 1949 essay “Our
Period Style” (see chapter 4). Clement Greenberg, “Our Period Style” (1949), in The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 322-326.
28
Again, they were not alone in doing so. For example, Meyer Schapiro drew comparisons
between the aesthetics of modernism and Romanesque art, wanting to recuperate both as
legitimate artistic practices despite their marginalized status. Romy Golan has also argued for the
prevalence of medievalizing aesthetics during the interwar period in France. See Michael
Camille, “‘How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern in
Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1, Meyer Schapiro (1994): 65-75; Golan, Modernity
and Nostalgia.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 33
argued that modern tapestries were reasserting the medium’s essential characteristics in
ways not done since the Middle Ages. What made modern tapestries similar to medieval
ones was how they eschewed illusionistic imagery in favor of abstraction or highly
stylized symbols, how they employed dramatic juxtapositions of pure colors rather than
modulated gradations of hues or the semblance of light and shade, and how they were
woven more coarsely—using thicker threads and a lower number of stitches per square
inch—to create a more highly textured material object. Those who celebrated tapestry’s
revival argued that the medium had to be true to its own conditions and materials and,
thus that it should, in effect, embrace a modernist standard of media purity.
In 1959, the American Craftsmen Council organized an exhibition of modern
French tapestry that subsequently circulated nationally under the auspices of the
Smithsonian Institution. In the exhibition catalogue, the Council continued the emphasis
on medium specificity by claiming that tapestry “follows rules all its own” and is never
“the simple enlargement of a picture.”
29
In France, Guillaume Janneau, the former
Administrator of France’s Mobilier National and state tapestry workshops, similarly
stressed the fundamental operations of weaving, the intercrossing of the horizontal weft
and the vertical warp, as being essential elements of tapestry’s “artistic quality,” for “the
appearance of the completed product should be expressive of the method used in
fashioning it.”
30

Tapestry revivers were not only modernist in emphasizing the particular
materiality of tapestry; they also viewed modernist abstraction as uniquely suited to the

29
American Craftsmen’s Council, Contemporary French Tapestries (New York: The Museum of
Contemporary Crafts, 1959), 4.
30
Guillaume Janneau, “Tapestry Technique,” in French Tapestry, ed. André Lejard (London,
Paul Elek, 1946), 9.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 34
medium. For Janneau, “The features proper to the art [of tapestry] are strangely enough in
harmony with the most modern aesthetic conceptions,” and he argued that the weaver
knows more than the painter about “how to give the sensation of relief, of solidity, by
colour only,” or about how to create a picture out of “an assemblage of coloured
patches.”
31
Janneau called this coincidence between tapestry’s supposedly inherent,
medium-specific characteristics and modernist abstraction “strange,” but it was also very
convenient, for it allowed tapestry revivers to argue that modernism was uniquely suited
to tapestry and vice versa. The American Craftsman’s Council explained that tapestry’s
lack of distinction between line and color made it the best vehicle for the concerns of
contemporary artists:
In tapestry, more than in easel painting, the current notion of form-color is rendered clear.
In fact, here the base is not distinguishable from the colored material. The dyed wool
yarn is the form and the color at the same time. It is the rare privilege of this technique to
be able, at this point, to simplify its means. Color becomes form in the warp and weft that
creates a subject. Without the colors of the wool, the form would be absent.
32

By arguing for tapestry’s suitability for modernist abstraction, the medium’s supporters
hailed tapestry as a crucially important expression of contemporary artistic sensibility.
While the idea of medium specificity encouraged tapestry revivers to be true to its
materials and to embrace its intrinsic properties, it became surprisingly unclear as to how
exactly this woven medium and the painted medium differed. As one commercial gallery
catalogue argued, tapestry is “confined to the wall,” and depends upon “scale, pattern,
and color relationships to make its effect.” It should use “relatively few colors,” and is an
inherently flat medium, “limited to the dimension provided only by the thickness and

31
Ibid., 10, 13.
32
American Craftsmen’s Council, Contemporary French Tapestries, 5.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 35
depth of the weave itself, all other being illusionary.”
33
But such a description comes so
close to Clement Greenberg’s own definition of modernist painting as “color placed on a
two-dimensional surface”
34
that tapestry’s vaunted autonomy from painting would seem
to be problematically reduced. Tapestry revivers rejected centuries of tapestry as too
imitative of painting, yet they celebrated modern tapestry’s convergence with the
abstraction, flatness, and pure color of modernist painting. They justified this
convergence by classifying these qualities of modernist painting as essential
characteristics of the tapestry medium and hallmarks of the golden age of medieval
tapestry.
The tapestry revival thus corroborates how revivals reanimate or heighten interest
in past works by evaluating them according to new, contemporary standards of artistic
value. Indeed, the postwar period showed renewed interest in this golden age of medieval
tapestry, which became newly visible in both temporary, circulating exhibitions such as
La Tapisserie française du Moyen-Age à nos jours and in more permanent installations.
France certainly had a longstanding interest, dating to at least the late-eighteenth century,
in its medieval monuments and works of art. Tapestry became particularly visible during
the fin-de-siècle period as part of a general revival of medieval culture that had both
popular and scholarly manifestations.
35
This was an era in which woven and wallpaper
reproductions of medieval tapestries were available at department stores at the same time
that actual medieval tapestries were visible in museums. While medieval tapestries first

33
Constantine, An Exhibition of Contemporary French Tapestries, 4.
34
Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1949), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2,
Arrogant purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 315-6.
35
Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-
siècle France (London: Ashgate, 2003).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 36
came to public attention as French national treasures during the nineteenth-century, the
period during and immediately after World War II saw a renewed interest in their
restoration and display, giving rise to interventions that allowed medieval tapestries to be
viewed, both literally and conceptually, in new ways.
For example, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry cycle (Fig. 1.3), which had been
exhibited at the Musée de Cluny in Paris since 1883, was removed from view during the
Second World War and underwent an extensive restoration by the Atelier Brégère.
36
A
commission convened periodically throughout the three-year project to judge the work in
progress and authorize further interventions. When it met in July 1942, commission
member Jean Verrier objected that the restoration was too aggressive and that too much
of the surface area was being rewoven, destroying the tapestries’ original material and
character. On reconvening in November of the same year, however, the commission
agreed that the dramatic changes in the tapestries were not due to aggressive reweaving
but merely to the thorough cleaning of the works. When the Lady and the Unicorn
tapestries were included in La Tapisserie française du Moyen-Age à nos jours and
subsequently reinstalled at the Musée de Cluny, they were brighter and more colorful
than they had ever appeared to public audiences before, and this understanding of
medieval tapestry as brightly colored informed contemporary understandings of
tapestry’s essential, yet conveniently modernist, characteristics.
An even earlier masterpiece of French tapestry, the Apocalypse of Angers, also
enjoyed increased visibility (Fig. 1.4). It was restored during the nineteenth century and

36
The restoration had been planned since 1937 but took place from 1941 to 1944. Once
individual panels were completed they were sent to the Chateau du Chambord, outside Orléans,
for safekeeping. See Fabienne Joubert, La Tapisserie médiévale au Musée de Cluny (Paris:
Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987), 71-75, 85-86.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 37
had been on view at the cathedral in Angers since 1870, and it inspired such artists as
Fernand Léger and Jean Lurçat during the interwar period.
37
In 1950 however, Bernard
Vitry, the Chief Architect of France’s historical monuments, began renovating the nearby
Chateau d’Angers, the historical seat of the House of Anjou whose first duke, Louis I,
had commissioned the Apocalypse tapestry around 1373. Vitry designed a new gallery
that would be large enough to exhibit the entire tapestry cycle, six monumental panels
that each measure 20 by 78 feet. Once the Apocalypse of Angers was installed in Vitry’s
galleries, visitors could see the panels in better lighting conditions and at much closer
range, hung so that they nearly touched the floor rather than being placed high up on the
walls of the Angers cathedral. Scholarship on the tapestry cycle also shifted when the
work was relocated. Before 1950, the most widely published and authoritative account
was Andé Lejard’s Les Tapisseries de l’Apocalypse de la cathédral d’Angers (1942),
which included texts from the Book of Revelations and emphasized the religious content
of the tapestries.
38
In a marked shift from this approach, the 1955 book L’Apocalypse
d’Angers, co-authored by artist Jean Lurçat and historian Jacques Levron, emphasized the
formal qualities, poeticism, and historical significance of the work.
39
Relocating the

37
Léger saw the Apocalypse tapestries when they were on display at the Musée des Gobelins in
Paris in 1928, and wrote of his admiration for them to Léonce Rosenberg, “Je suis un affreux
traditionaliste. C’est scandaleux.” As quoted in Christian Derouet, “Fernand Léger, une
correspondence d’affaire, Fernand Léger et Léonce Rosenbreg, 1917-1937,” Cahiers du Musée
National d’Art Moderne, no. 370 (1996): 19-IV. Lurçat saw the Apocalypse tapestries in Angers
in 1937, an event that became enshrined in the artist’s biography. “Chronologie de Jean Lurçat,”
envelope 3, carton 3, series G2, Centre Internationale de la Tapisserie Anciènne et Moderne
(CITAM Papers), Archives de la Ville de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
38
André Lejard, Les Tapisseries de l’Apocalypse de la Cathédrale d’Angers, accompangnées du
texte de l’Apocalypse de Saint Jean dans la traduction de Le Maistre de Sacy (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1942).
39
Jean Lurçat and Jacques Levron, L’Apocalypse d’Angers (Angers: Au Masque d’Or, 1955).
Lurçat had already written Le Travail dans la Tapisserie du Moyen âge (Geneva: P. Callier,
1947) and Le Bestiaire de la Tapisserie du Moyen âge (Geneva: P. Callier, 1947), as well as
Designing Tapestry: 53 examples both antique and modern, chosen by the author (London:
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 38
Apocalypse tapestry from a religious to a secular setting, particularly one that enabled
close looking at the panels in modern galleries yet placed them within a larger historical
site, encouraged precisely the kind of reception that tapestry revivers championed.
Viewers of the Apocalypse d’Angers could now understand the tapestry as a work of art
that, while no longer instrumentalized for the religious functions of the cathedral, had still
played an important role in the medieval castle. But they could also evaluate the tapestry
as they would any other work of art in a modern gallery, focusing on the medieval
tapestry’s formal qualities and perhaps even recognizing similarities with the boldly
colored and abstracted art of their contemporary moment. As with most conservation and
curatorial projects, the rehanging of the Apocalypse tapestries enabled new scholarly and
aesthetic arguments about the works to emerge.
It is no accident that Lurçat co-authored the earliest postwar book on the
Apocalypse d’Angers, for he was an artist who repeatedly presented himself as uniquely
attuned to the aesthetics of medieval tapestry and the tapestry medium more generally.
Lurçat argued, and critics agreed, that he was largely responsible for restoring tapestry’s
autonomy from painting. One exhibition catalogue praised how Lurçat’s commitments to
tapestry’s unique materiality “led the artist toward large, simple and robust pictures and
raised him to the deserted domains where he rejoined his illustrious ancestors of the
Middle Ages.”
40
Lurçat was a painter and designer who had been loosely associated with
Surrealism but became one of the most active champions of the tapestry revival after
World War II. In 1939 the French Ministry of Education, which oversaw France’s art
schools and the Manufactures Nationales, commissioned Lurçat, Marcel Gromaire, and

Rockliff, 1950). He was a prolific writer and would go on to contribute to or author numerous
other publications on tapestry.
40
Collection of Contemporary French Tapestries, n.p.n. [5].
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 39
Pierre Dubreuil to travel to Aubusson, a historic center of tapestry production located
deep in the Creuse region of France, to work with the local workshops in order to create
modern tapestries. In 1947 Lurçat helped form the Association des Peintres-Cartonniers
de Tapisserie (APCT) with Denise Majorel, a dealer who specialized in modern French
tapestry, and many of the artists who had shown works in the exhibition La Tapisserie
Française du Moyen Age à Nos Jours, including Jean Picart Le Doux, Marc Saint-Saëns,
Robert Wogensky, and Jacques Lagrange. The APCT promoted these and other artists as
“painter-cartoonists,” who not only painted models for modern tapestries but also drew
their own cartoons (a task that was generally left to the weavers or specialized cartoonists
employed by the weaving workshops) and thus demonstrated their commitment to
embracing the specific processes of the tapestry medium. Some of the APCT’s works
look very self-consciously to medieval precedents, particularly in the case of Dom
Robert, a painter and designer who took orders as a Benedictine monk in 1937 and who
began designing tapestries after meeting Lurçat in 1941. Dom Robert went so far as to
incorporate medieval-looking motifs such as milles fleurs backgrounds (Fig. 1.5), but it
was Lurçat who was particularly hailed for “recognizing the art of tapestry as completely
distinct from that of painting,” and with thus reaffirming tapestry’s independence by
returning it to its “great medieval tradition.”
41
The reception of Lurçat epitomizes how
medium specificity, the rejection of painterly illusionism, and the embrace of medieval
precedents became conflated through the discourses of the tapestry revival.
Part of what singled Lurçat out as a true tapestry reformer was the artist’s use of
what he called the carton numéroté or “numbered cartoon.” Rather than painting a

41
William S. Lieberman, “Modern French Tapestries,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin,
New Series, vol. 6, no. 5 (January 1948): 143.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 40
colorful sketch in oil or gouache, Lurçat drew a highly schematic black and white
diagram that used a numbered key to indicate the intended colors (Fig. 1.6). Lurçat
argued that the carton numéroté demonstrated his awareness of the essential differences
between painting and tapestry and signaled that he was creating specifically for the
tapestry medium. However, the carton numéroté also allowed the artist to provide a very
precise blueprint for the weavers who executed his designs. Resembling the paint-by-
numbers kits that were invented shortly afterwards,
42
the carton numéroté presented
weavers with a similarly simplified template and pre-determined color selection and thus
eliminated the weavers’ traditional role as skilled interpreters who had to decide how to
best translate an artist’s painted model into a tapestry. Guillaume Janneau was one of the
few commentators who criticized Lurçat for being too dogmatic and controlling with the
weavers who executed his designs:
However simplified may be the pattern set before the worker, it is as precise, and
therefore as exigent, as might be any other painting. The will of the artists is as constantly
imposed upon the translator. The latter is not for a moment left to his own initiative in
solving the problem of reproduction, and it is, as ever, the hand of the painter which
guides that of the weaver. […] The discrepancy between that conception and that of the
Middle Ages, to which these reformers nevertheless appeal, remains irreducible.
43

For Janneau, what allowed tapestry to be a superior art form in the Middle Ages was that
it was made by independent and spontaneously creative artisan-weavers, and he chastised
Lurçat and his fellow reformers for claiming to revive medieval tapestry without
resuscitating the weavers’ artistic autonomy. His argument implies that as long as the
artist producing the cartoon and the weaver producing the tapestry are two separate

42
Lurçat developed the carton numéroté during the war while he was in Aubusson working with
local tapestry workshops. Paint-by-number kits were invented in the US in 1950 by Dan Robbins,
a commercial artist, and Max S. Klein, an engineer and owner of the Palmer Paint Co. in Detroit.
See William L. Bird, Jr., Paint by Number: The How-to Craze that Swept the Nation (Princeton:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2001).
43
Janneau, “The Revival of Tapestry in France,” in French Tapestry, 104.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 41
people, tapestry will continue to be a practice that imitates painting and that fails to
capture the glory of its medieval past.

The (In)Visibility of Weavers
Janneau’s comments indicate how weavers could figure largely in discussions of
the tapestry medium and its reform. Exhibitions and books that presented tapestry to the
public consistently included explanations of the weaving process and images of weavers
at work. Some exhibitions even included actual weavers in the galleries to demonstrate
the process.
44
These weavers remained relatively anonymous in comparison to the
named, often well-known artists who designed tapestries. Paradoxically, however, despite
weavers’ lower status in the artistic hierarchy, it was their labor that was repeatedly
dwelled upon and visualized. Considering these visualizations of weaving in depth yields
two important insights. First, the division of labor between the artist’s design and the
weaver’s execution furthered the construction of the tapestry revival as a revival of
medieval tapestry. Although the formal similarities between medieval and modern
tapestries were often tenuous, and although such critics as Janneau insisted that the
Middle Ages had been a period when weavers enjoyed more autonomy within the
creative process, twentieth-century tapestries could still represent the revival of medieval
practice precisely because the labor used to create them seemed to be unchanged since
the Middle Ages. The obsessive picturing of weaving in the postwar period demonstrates
that what was being revived was less the style of tapestry of a specific time period than

44
For example, the Tabard Atelier in Aubusson offered to send a weaver and loom to the
Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich as part of a tapestry exhibition organized by Jean Lurçat. Tabard
to Kunstegewerbemuseum, 25 Feb 1947, folder 30 J 292, Atelier Tabard Papers, Archives
Departementales de la Creuse, Guéret, France.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 42
the entire medium of tapestry and the physical, craft skills that weavers used to create it.
Scholars of revival rarely consider the function of the body in constructing revival
narratives,
45
but in the case of the modern tapestry revival it is clear that the bodies of
weavers played a crucial role. Twentieth-century weavers were visualized as embodying
the weavers and the craft tradition of the past and thus mitigated the distance between
past and present.
Second, careful looking at representations of weavers reveals how they help
construct the unequal power relations on which the tapestry revival relied. These images
both visualize weavers’ labor and distance them from the viewer through a variety of
means, including fragmenting weavers’ bodies, using a hierarchy of scale that dwarfs
weavers in comparison to the tapestries they make, and depicting weavers in primitive
clothing and surroundings that emphasizes the timelessness and even backwardness of
their craft.
46
A prime example of such strategies is the 1946 issue of the small circulation
art journal Le Point devoted to Aubusson et la renaissance de la tapisserie [Aubusson and
the Tapestry Renaissance].
47
Pierre Betz founded Le Point in 1936 in Colmar but fled the

45
In “Effigy and Narrative: Looking Into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum,” Mark Sandberg
examines how the folk museums that emerged in Scandinavia between 1870 and 1905 soon
eliminated representations of people from their displays in order to allow the visitor to imagine
him or herself in the absent folk person’s place. Sandberg’s is one of the few studies to consider
the role of the body in representations of the past, but his conclusions do not apply to the postwar
tapestry revival. In the later context, viewers are not encouraged to identify with the weavers on
display but to admire their primitive craft from a safe distance. Mark B. Sandberg, “Effigy and
Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum,” in Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life, eds. Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 320-361.
46
In this sense they continue an artistic interest in weavers as representative of a rural, artisinal,
primitive world that dates to the nineteenth century. See Carol Zemel, “The ‘Spook’ in the
Machine: Van Gogh’s Pictures of Weavers in Brabant,” The Art Bulletin 67, no. 1 (March 1985):
123-137. Saloni Mathur, “The Indian Village in Victorian Space: The Department Store and the
Cult of the Craftsman,” in India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, 27-51
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
47
Le Point: revue artistique et litteraire 32, Aubusson et la renaissance de la tapisserie (1946).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 43
Alsace-Lorraine area in 1939 for the Lot region of central France. There he met Lurçat as
a fellow refugee, and the two became active in the Resistance. Betz undoubtedly heard
much from the artist about the tapestry revival, and when the war ended he commissioned
the pioneering photojournalist Robert Doisneau, who often produced work for Le Point,
to document Aubusson’s weavers. Doisneau’s series of evocative black and white
photographs takes us into these workshops and seemingly back in time. The first image in
Aubusson et la renaissance de la tapisserie shows the town itself from a birds-eye
perspective that emphasizes the medieval structure of the locale: narrow winding streets,
sharply peaked roofs, and, at the center of the image, an old stone bridge spanning the
river (Fig. 1.7). Smoke billows from countless chimneys and wreaths the image in a hazy
mist, contributing to the romantic impression of a quaint yet bustling community. Further
on in the journal, a double spread of photographs takes us into these archaic buildings
(Fig. 1.8). On the right, we are put in the position of a voyeur, peering into the tall
window of a workshop, where we can just make out two figures working at a low-warp
loom. The image on the left places us inside the workshop, yet our voyeurism continues
as we seem to be creeping up on the weavers while they bend over the loom. The
workshop appears as a garret, tucked under a peaked roof, where crumbling plaster walls
are punctured by small windows. In both images the workers labor at night. Cords strewn
dizzily from the ceiling support small electric lights placed in front of each weaver, so
that in the image on the left the weavers block our view of the lanterns and seem to be
mysteriously lit from behind. These lamps not only contribute to the dramatic lighting of
the photographs, they also reinforce the sense of endless toiling hours required to
fabricate monumental tapestries by hand.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 44
Additional photographs provide a closer look at this hand labor. Indeed, images of
weaving frequently focus in on the weaver’s hands, as in Doisneau’s image of weaving
on a low-warp loom (Fig. 1.9). The weaver is ostensibly passing a bobbin of thread
through the warp strings, weaving in the colored weft, but the real purpose of the
photograph seems to be to display the weaver’s hands, showing each vein and wrinkle in
carefully lit detail. This visual trope continued throughout the period of the tapestry
revival. For example, in 1969 Denise Majorel’s gallery La Demeure published an
exhibition catalogue Naissance d’une Tapisserie [Birth of a Tapestry] that consisted of
evocative black and white photographs of weavers at work, including a close up of a
weaver’s hands passing a bobbin under the warp (Fig. 1.10). Both this image and
Doisneau’s photograph enact a metonymic fetishization, as a particular, privileged part of
the body symbolizes yet also replaces the weaver as a whole. The weaver is reduced to
his or her hand, which signifies the craft of weaving sufficiently enough that a more
complete portrait of the weaver is unnecessary, and, it seems, undesirable.
This reduction and fragmentation of the weaver’s body was a dominant trope in
images of the tapestry revival. Another photograph from Aubusson et la renaissance de la
tapisserie cuts off the weavers’ heads to focus on their hands and legs, showing how
these limbs work in tandem (Fig. 1.11). As the caption explains, the weavers are using
their feet to press back and forth on the treadle bars, separating the white threads of the
warp to create small spaces, or sheds, between which the weavers pass the colored weft
strings with their hands. By showing three figures in a row, the image suggests the
ongoing rhythm of the weavers’ work. Their feet are positioned slightly differently as
though to illustrate the sequence of their repetitive movements. By centering on those
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 45
feet, the photograph also encourages us to linger on the clogs they wear, shoes that are
associated with Europe’s rural working class.
48

Another type of fragmentation that recurs in images of weaving depicts the
weaver screened behind the vertical warp threads of a high-warp loom. These images
show us the front of the tapestry and emphasize that the weaver works from behind it.
Our view of the weaver is partially obscured, but we become aware of the fact that the
weaver’s view of his or her finished product is obscured completely. This tension
between the visible and the invisible is dramatized in a photograph from Madeleine
Jarry’s 1969 book World Tapestry, from its origins to the present.
49
At the bottom of the
frame, the finished tapestry is being built up slowly (Fig. 1.12). The warp threads stretch
upwards, screening a weaver from our view. Yet this weaver has paused in her work to
part the warp threads and stare out at the camera. We become locked into her gaze,
staring at the eye of the weaver that is framed so dramatically behind the warp. This
almost theatrical composition makes the weaver appear trapped, as though her act of
peering through the warp threads is an act of resistance, a cry for help. Ultimately,
however, the image serves to reinforce the fragmentation and fetishization of the weaver.
It focuses attention on the details of her body in such a way that she becomes obscured,
even imprisoned by the monumentality of the tapestry, pointing to the unequal power
relations that marginalized weavers in comparison to the tapestries they produced.
The process of weaving was also visualized through recycled illustrations from
Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des

48
Alexandra Schneider discusses the use of clogs to primitivize rural inhabitants in “Homemade
Travelogues,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2006), 157-173
49
Madeleine Jarry, World Tapestry, from its Origins to the Present (New York: Putnam, 1969).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 46
métiers (1751-1772), which reappear in numerous books about tapestry published after
the Second World War. Although in these images the “weavers” resemble well-dressed
gentlemen rather than primitive rural workers, they are still often represented as
fragmented, disembodied hands that perform the labor of weaving as if by magic (Fig.
1.13). In publications such as French Tapestry (1946), these eighteenth-century
illustrations are shown side-by-side with photographs of contemporary weavers to
underscore the equivalence between the two (Fig. 1.14). Such juxtapositions imply that
the Encyclopédie’s images are just as accurate illustrations of the weaving process as
contemporary photographs, precisely because that process has remained unchanged since
at least the eighteenth century. The Encyclopédie was innovative in revealing the
practices of artisans at a time when their work was shrouded in proprietary secrecy by
guilds. But while the Encyclopédie’s numerous illustrations were part of an
Enlightenment project to visually expose the contemporary world to a well-educated
elite, these images lose much of their vaunted legibility when they are reused in
publications two centuries later. The aim of French Tapestry and other tapestry
publications from the postwar period is ostensibly similar to that of the Encyclopédie, to
clearly explicate the weaving process through visual and verbal means. Yet, ultimately,
these works seem less directed at explaining weaving than at archaizing it, in order to
construct modern tapestry as the revival of an art form that is decidedly from the past and
was perhaps even at risk of becoming lost. Images of weaving in postwar publications
thus valorize the weavers’ labor as worthy of revival and rescue but also shroud that labor
in the mysteriousness of the primitive and the antique.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 47
In this way, images of rural French weavers functioned similarly to orientalist
images of weavers in India and North Africa, and, indeed, the production of modern
tapestries drew on labor from these areas. The French dealer Marie Cuttoli began her
business in modernist textiles in Algeria during the 1920s, and only later focused on
creating modern tapestries at the workshops in Aubusson. Towards the end of the tapestry
revival, from the late 1960s into the early 1980s, the American company Modern Master
Tapestries Inc. relied on workshops in northern India to hand-weave pile carpets based on
designs by celebrated American and European artists. In outsourcing weaving to these
locations, Westerners often drew on nostalgic visions of weaving as a cottage industry
performed in the home by all members of the family, a mode of production that had
largely vanished in industrialized Europe and that had never applied to European
tapestry. For example, in 1955 when Le Corbusier designed monumental tapestries for
the capitol complex in Chandigarh, he planned them as separate elements that could be
woven in India and then sewn together (Fig. 1.15). In this scheme, the production of the
tapestries would be a means of economic and social rehabilitation. Le Corbusier even
suggested that the weaving could be done in prisons. Ideally, he hoped a single village
would realize each tapestry, with the separate segments woven in individual households.
Here Le Corbusier assumed, perhaps inspired by Gandhi’s advocacy of khadi or
handspun cloth, that India’s villages housed a widespread population of artisans who
would be able to weave the tapestries according to his precise instructions. Yet Le
Corbusier’s romantic visions of non-industrial Indian weavers went unfulfilled. In the
end, the tapestries were woven by the East India Carpet Corporation in Srinagar, the
capital of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir. The weaving was still done by hand
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 48
but was executed on large looms “by an Indian technique,” probably a kilim weave that is
technically almost identical to European tapestry weaving, and took only five months to
complete.
50

Le Corbusier’s monumental tapestries at Chandigarh, which many scholars regard
as the pinnacle of the artist’s tapestry practice, speak to the complicated context of
decolonization in which the postwar tapestry revival flourished. The similarity in
technique between European tapestry weaving and kilim weaving, which is practiced
from the Balkans to central Asia, enabled Western tapestry producers to outsource
weaving to cheaper labor in northern India. On the one hand, Le Corbusier held
Orientalist stereotypes about native weavers in Indian villages.
51
Moreover, he
opportunistically used the Chandigarh project to achieve his own ambition to produce
truly monumental tapestries that cover over 650 square meters, but were, by his own
admission, not well liked by many of the Indian users of the capitol complex.
52
On the

50
Christopher Rand, “Our Far-Flung Correspondents: City on a Tilting Plain,” The New Yorker
April 30, 1955, 58. Kilims are flat woven carpets, often used a prayer rugs, that are produced
from the Balkans to Central Asia. Kilims are almost identical technically to European tapestries
in that they are both flat, discontinuous weft-faced weavings. This means they have no pile or
nap, the weft threads do not continue across the entire width of the carpet but can be doubled
back and tied off depending on the design being woven, and the weft threads completely cover
the warp threads.
51
Vikramaditya Prakash has argued in his postcolonial reading of Chandigarh that Le Corbusier
believed in a “rural-cosmic image of India” and “couched it in familiar orientalist tropes of
eternity and stasis.” Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for
Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 80.
52
According to the Oeuvres complète, a multivolume compendium of the projects completed by
Le Corbusier and his firm, the tapestries “provoked the delighted acquiescence of Mr. Nehru and
the Governor of Punjab as well as the Chief Judge. But they also aroused doubts in the minds of
some judges who declared that they were an outrage to the dignity of justice and caused two or
three of them to be removed. The day of reinstatement shall come—have patience!” Le Corbusier
and Atelier rue de Sèvres 35, Oeuvre complète, 1952-1957, third ed. (Zurich: W. Boesiger aux
Editions Girsberger, 1957), 56. In a 1955 article from The New Yorker, Christopher Rand outlines
some of the early debates about the appropriateness of Chandigarh for its Indian setting and
quotes an unnamed judge as complaining about the tapestries to P.N. Thapar, a senior
administrator for the project, “For God’s sake, burn them, or do something!” Rand, “Our Far-
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 49
other hand, Le Corbusier’s desire to have these works woven in the newly independent
India indicates that he wanted the tapestries’ production to be an equal partnership
between East and West, and it suggests that he viewed tapestry as a traditional craft that
was part of a larger global heritage as well as an international modernism.
Yet however equitable the production of these tapestries may have been, their
manufacture has still been visualized to Western audiences in ways that point to a similar
understanding of weavers as primitive whether they work in rural France or in northern
India. The weavers who made the Chandigarh tapestries were first pictured in an article
that appeared in 1960 in the European architectural journal Zodiac, and the two relevant
photographs from this article have since been repeatedly reprinted by art historians
discussing the Chandigarh tapestries in English language publications (Fig. 1.16). The
first image shows a 64-square-meter tapestry laid out over the corrugated metal roof of a
long building. At the top of the tapestry, six workers sit on the ridgepole while a seventh
stands up in the center. His head has been cropped in order to fit the entire tapestry into
the photographic frame, leaving no question as to which object was considered more
important by the photographer. The workers are given greater priority in the second
image, in which four men stand at the center of the photograph framed by the large
vertical looms on either side. They are in a crude structure where the dirt floor is littered
with fabric and debris and the windows are partially boarded up. Three of the men wear
Indian clothes: turbans, kurtas, pajamas, and slip-on shoes. The fourth man, in the back,
appears to be wearing Western business clothes: a blazer, collared shirt, and tailored

Flung Correspondents,” 42. In the first monograph on Chandigarh, Norma Evenson chalks up
these objections over the tapestries to the Indians’ unfamiliarity with modernist abstraction: “it
was perhaps inevitable that the designs, large in scale and composed of unfamiliar abstract
elements would arouse opposition from some of the judges.” Norma Evenson, Chandigarh
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 77.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 50
pants. He has clipboard in hand and may be a supervisor. In fact, only two of the men
actually appear to engage with the looms; the one on the far right may be checking the
tapestry against color samples or instructions that he holds in his hands. Neither of these
photographs depicts Indians in the act of weaving, and they do not function to inform the
viewer on how the weaver does his work. Instead, Indian weavers are included in these
images to heighten the exoticism and monumentality of the Chandigarh tapestries. In
each photograph the figures are dwarfed by a giant tapestry or by the large loom on
which it was made. Their primitive surroundings and diminutive stature serve to estrange
these workers even as they are deliberately being made visible to a Western audience.
The tapestry revival emphasized the timeless, primitive quality of weaving in both
France and the developing world in order to celebrate it as a craft in need of revival and
rescue. However, at the Bauhaus, which treated craft less as a relic from the past than as a
living practice that should be fully integrated with a modern artistic career, there was a
very different approach to the visualization of the weaving workshop and the women who
worked there. In a circa 1928 newspaper article on the Bauhaus in Dessau, female
students of the weaving workshop were photographed working at and leaning on the
looms (Fig. 1.17). The women’s clothing and bobbed hair mark them as modern. Many of
them wear knee-length skirts and two women at the center of the image are sitting with
one of their legs raised and bent over the loom, displaying their knees and calves to the
viewer. On the left, at least two of the women are wearing pants. Everyone in the image
is looking closely at the looms and the weavers at work, their engagement suggesting the
kind of active, hands-on learning that the Bauhaus championed. The modernity of these
young women forms an anachronistic contrast with the antiquated machinery of the
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 51
looms made from timber posts and beams. However, a subsequent image of the weaving
workshop at Dessau presents the space as a modern factory (Fig. 1.18). A concrete
structure with tall ceilings leaves plenty of room in the center for large looms. Light
streams in from the large plate glass windows on the left, and metal dome lamps hang in
a regular row from the ceiling. A female figure in the same modern uniform of bobbed
hair and knee-length skirt writes something on a clipboard, her action suggesting the
work of a supervisor overseeing the factory floor. A 1928 photograph of Bauhaus student
Otti Berger similarly represents her as akin to an industrial worker (Fig. 19). She wears a
sleeveless shirt and coverall pants and has clambered on top of the loom to fix her
equipment; the photograph suggests she might just as easily have climbed the armature of
a skyscraper to weld a steel beam.
These images recast wooden handlooms, a technology that had barely changed in
more than a century, as the machinery of modern industry. One photograph that focuses
in on the loom makes this clear (Fig. 1.20). Here, because there are no weavers, modern
or otherwise, to operate the loom, it seems to function automatically. The diagonal view
of the loom lends dynamism to the image, so that the wooden heddles almost appear to be
moving up and down under their own power. Moreover, the rectangular ends of these
heddles echo the rectangular grid of the patterned fabric being woven. The formal
similarities between the two construct Bauhaus textiles as a kind of machine art that
expresses the technology by which it was made. That technology, the loom, is cast here
as an automatic machine that can produce modern design.
While we could understand these Bauhaus images of weaving as the modernist,
progressive alternative to the primitivizing images of weavers in France and India, it is
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 52
important to note that both types of depictions trade on the anonymity of weavers. The
names of the figures in the Bauhaus photographs, now kept at the Bauhaus Archiv in
Berlin, were for the most part not recorded; the identification of Otti Berger is a rare
exception. The last image of a seemingly automatic loom even displaces the weaver
entirely, refusing to visually credit the weaver’s work by including the body of the
weaver in the image. We could read these absences as part of the gender dynamics of the
Bauhaus’s weaving workshop, which have been discussed by other scholars at length.
53

Female students at the Bauhaus were funneled into the weaving workshop, which was
marginalized by both the Bauhaus leadership and early scholars despite being one of the
most innovative and certainly the most financially successful of the school’s divisions.
While the anonymity of the Bauhaus weavers in these photographs may speak to their
marginalization as women within the school’s male-dominated environment, the same
gender dynamics do not carry over to France, where tapestry weaving was a mixed-
gender occupation, or to Northern India, where it was dominated by men.
54

53
Weltge-Wortmann, Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1993); Weltge-Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles; Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the
Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919-1932
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001); T’ai Smith, Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gender
and Engendering of a Medium, 1919-1937 (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2006).
54
In both France and Central Asia, tapestry or kilim weaving were male occupations, which
reflected the higher status of these crafts compared to such other textile arts as embroidery, which
were practiced by women. In nineteenth-century France, women began to be employed in
tapestry related techniques. Firms in Aubusson hired women to hand weave pile rugs, expanding
their labor pool to help feed a growing market for this commodity. At the same time the
Manufactures Nationales began employing women in specialized tapestry conservation
workshops, which utilized sewing as much as weaving. However, it was not until the economic
crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War that women in France began to weave side by side
with men. As the tapestry revival expanded during the postwar period, many of the new recruits
to tapestry weaving were women. Jules Guiffrey, Les manufacturs nationales de tapisseries: Les
Gobelins et Beauvais (Paris: H. Laurens, 1907); Robert Guinot, La Tapisserie d’Aubusson et de
Felletin (Saint-Paul: Lucien Souny, 2009); Christopher G. Bennett, et. al. Order and Disorder:
Alighiero Boetti by Afghan Women (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2012).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 53
While there are important differences between images of Bauhaus, French, and
Indian weavers, all of these photographs consistently work to marginalize weavers by
representing them as anonymous, fragmented, de-monumentalized, or absent in relation
to the tapestries they produce. At the same time, all these images visualize the labor of
weaving in a way rarely done for other art forms.
55
The publications and exhibitions of
the postwar tapestry revival routinely included images of weaving in a way that
conditioned viewers to register these monumental tapestries as being made entirely by
hand and to value them accordingly. As we shall see in following chapters, the certainty
that modern tapestries were hand woven added to their appeal, allowing them to function
as handcrafted alternatives to mechanical reproduction and as handmade antidotes to the
modern buildings constructed with industrial materials in which they hung. But although
tapestries in the postwar period were valued for being handmade, the labor that created
them was represented as a timeless, even primitive craft. Images of weavers played a
fundamental role in such constructions and made weavers simultaneously central and
marginal, increasing both their visibility and, ironically, their invisibility.

Collaboration, Resistance, and Reconstruction

We have seen how the tapestry revival was touted as the recovery of a specifically
French artistic tradition, so that tapestry helped reassert France’s traditional sense of

55
While the postwar period also saw an increased interest in visualizing the labor of painting,
most notably in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock at work that were
commissioned for the ARTnews series on how various artists “Paint a Picture,” such images
remained exceptional and did not routinely accompany exhibitions or publications on painting in
the same way that images of weavers accompanied those on tapestry. Robert Goodnough,
“Pollock Paints a Picture,” ARTnews 50, no. 3 (May 1951): 38-41.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 54
superiority and leadership in the arts after the Second World War.
56
The war lent new
urgency to the question of tapestry’s identity as French, because during the war the
Germans took an active interest in the tapestry medium. Nazi officials systematically
appropriated or looted historic tapestries from annexed and occupied countries, such as
Austria and France. At the same time, they commissioned new tapestries from state-
approved artists that were woven in France as well as in Germany, where the government
founded new workshops to help satisfy its demand for tapestries.
57

The Manufacture des Gobelins executed at least four tapestries for German
officials (Fig. 1.21), and its director, Guillaume Janneau, was suspended from his post
just after the liberation of Paris, and subsequently forced to retire, as a result of his
collaboration with the German occupation. An undated memorandum that Janneau wrote
to the Commission d’Epuration des Beaux-Arts [Commission to Purge the Fine Arts]
demonstrates the degree to which the French viewed Germany’s tapestry interests as a
threat to their personal safety, artistic traditions, and national patrimony. Janneau narrates
how Werner Peiner, an artist who designed numerous tapestries for the Nazi government,
and Sepp Angerer of Hermann Göring’s staff visited the Gobelins in early 1941 and
revealed that Germany was planning to create a network of tapestry workshops
throughout Europe to serve and be directed by the Third Reich. Germany would not only
co-opt the public and private workshops in France, it would also build a new central

56
For discussions of France’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century claims for leadership in
the arts in contradistinction to Germany and other foreign powers, see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de
Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989); Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative
Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
57
Anja Prölß-Kammerer, Die Tapisserie in Nationalsozialismus: Propoganda, Repräsentation
und Produktion; Facetten eines Kunsthandwerks im “Dritten Reich” (Hildesheim, Zürich, New
York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 55
workshop, modeled on the Manufacture des Gobelins, within Germany. French weavers
who had been captured as prisoners of war were sentenced to work on German tapestry
looms, and Germany tried to recruit or deport those weavers still in France to work in
Germany as well. Given Germany’s efforts to monopolize tapestry production, Janneau
argued in his memorandum that it was imperative for him to preserve France’s weavers
and weaving institutions within France, and that executing German commissions forced
the Germans to keep French workshops open and well-staffed. “All of my actions,”
Janneau claimed, “were founded on the higher interest of defending a great French craft.”
He asserted that his policy successfully maintained the Gobelins and other French
workshops throughout the war and largely prevented the deportation of French weavers
to Germany. He also emphasized that the Gobelins executed their German commissions
very slowly—putting only one weaver on each tapestry and then quickly moving more
weavers to that loom whenever Germans came to inspect their progress—and charged the
Germans exorbitant prices for the work. According to Janneau, Germany’s desire to have
works executed at France’s prestigious state workshops even led to the return of French
prisoners of war to work at the Manufacture des Gobelins and the Manufacture de Sèvres,
which makes ceramics.
58
Janneau concluded the memorandum by stating that he was
“proud to have left the national patrimony intact.”
59

58
Historians of Germany’s foreign workers during World War II have not corroborated this
claim. However, such a practice would have been consistent with Germany’s policy of deploying
French POWs and civilian workers into skilled labor, in contradistinction to laborers from the
East which were confined to unskilled work, and with the institution of “Speer plants” in France,
factories that manufactured consumer goods for the German market and thus protected French
workers from being conscripted to work in Germany for the war industry. Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s
Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, trans. William
Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 145, 275.
59
Guilluame Janneau, “Bref Memoire,” 10 (my translation); folder 1, Guilluame Janneau Papers,
531AP, Archives nationales de France, Paris.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 56
Janneau thus defended what some saw as acts of collaboration as acts of
resistance against the Nazi’s ultimate goal, that is, as an effort to “combat Germany’s
pretensions to absorb our workshops.”
60
Others helped reassert the patriotism of tapestry
by similarly emphasizing the links of French tapestry artists to the Resistance. Both Jean
Lurçat and Jean Cassou, who curated numerous postwar tapestry exhibitions, were
members of the Resistance, and Lurçat created many tapestries that included Resistance
and pro-French symbolism. For example, a centerpiece of La Tapisserie Française du
moyen âge à nos jours was a Lurçat tapestry titled Liberté that incorporated a poem of the
same title by Paul Éluard and that, as noted in the catalogue, was woven clandestinely in
Aubusson in 1943 (Fig. 1.22).
61
In fact, the tapestry revival fostered an image of
Aubusson as a hotbed of the Resistance, where artist refugees fleeing the occupied north
congregated in secret, turning to the authentic French art of tapestry to express their pro-
French sentiments and taking up arms in the Maquis, the Resistance movement’s guerilla
groups, established nearby.
This image helped market modern French tapestry as a patriotic art form, even to
non-French audiences. Lawrence Jeppson, a dealer based in Washington, DC, partnered
with the French & Co. gallery in New York and the French tapestry dealer Denise
Majorel to sell modern French tapestries in the US. His 1960 book Murals of Wool
narrated the tapestry revival through the lens of German occupation, French resistance,
and Allied liberation, claiming: “The emergence of contemporary French tapestries as a
major force in our art world is deeply mêléd with that occupation. Although the
beginnings—then virtually unnoticed—precede the conflict, the real force exploded

60
Ibid., 3.
61
La Tapisserie Française du Moyen Age à Nos jours. (Paris: Éditions du Musées Nationaux),
109.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 57
publicly almost as Allied troops liberated Paris.” Jeppson began this story in 1939, when
French state officials commissioned Lurçat, Gromaire, and Dubreuil to design modern
tapestries for Aubusson’s workshops during “the same month [that] Germany invaded
Poland and France declared war.” He continued: “With the fall of France, Aubusson’s
unique arterial street choked with refugees. Everybody talked of tapestry, particularly the
artists.” Lurçat emerges as the star of the tapestry revival, in part because his Resistance
credentials were particularly strong. “Two days after the invasion, Lurçat went
underground with the Maquis. For eight months he headed a committee of Liberation for
the Department of Lot. The S.S. burned his studio in Lanzac, with it his design for
l’Homme aux Coqs, which he had produced for the National Museum of Modern Art” in
Paris.
62
In Jeppson’s narrative, the Nazis’ investment in tapestry and France’s production
of tapestries for Germany are completely expunged. Tapestry emerges not only as
quintessentially French but also as a kind of galvanizing tool that helped France and its
allies, including the US, win the war.
In depicting Aubusson as a pro-French stronghold against the German occupation,
Jeppson emphaszied Aubsson’s differences from the Manufactures Nationales in and
around Paris. Not only was Aubusson located in Vichy France, and was within the Free
Zone until 1942, it was also home to family businesses that produced tapestries for the
private market—including Jeppson’s own American clients—whereas the Manufactures
Nationales only creates works for the French state. Jeppson denigrated this official output
and celebrated Aubusson’s capitalist freedom from the government. Whereas “the control
of subject matter and technique by the state” had “planted the seeds of [tapestry’s]
decline,” Aubusson’s private, market-driven innovations had made it the seat of France’s

62
Jeppson, Murals of Wool, 11-15.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 58
modern tapestry revival.
63
Yet this American paean to the capitalist free market, written
during the Cold War, obscured the situation in Aubusson during World War II and
particularly overstated its independence from the Manufactures Nationales. During the
war, the state requisitioned Aubusson’s housing, its local castles, and the former city hall
to shelter the Manufactures Nationales’ administrators and staff, looms and materials, and
above all art objects and furnishings owned by the state.
If France’s state tapestry apparatus made its way to Aubusson, so too did the
Nazis. The town enjoyed relative prosperity during the war as a result of numerous
German commissions. For example, Sepp Angerer, the member of Hermann Göring’s
staff who had visited Janneau at the Manufacture des Gobelins in 1941, toured Aubusson
in April 1943 and passed along commissions from both Göring and Joachim von
Rippentrop, Germany’s Foreign Minister. Aubusson’s private workshops thus
collaborated with Germany just as much as France’s public workshops did, even as the
town’s inhabitants continued to suffer from bombings, famine, and persecution by Nazi
and Vichy officials.
64
These complex wartime realities were completely overshadowed
by the postwar vision of Aubusson as a site of refuge and resistance, and by the postwar
insistence on tapestry’s essential French identity, which disavowed that Germany had
ever taken an interest in the art.
Jeppson’s American account of the French tapestry revival also obscured how
active the French government was in fostering Aubusson’s signature industry. The town’s

63
Ibid., 7.
64
Guinot, La Tapisserie d’Aubusson et de Felletin, 92-93. According to Guinot, 57 residents of
Aubusson were deported, only two of whom returned, and others had been taken as prisoners of
war. For example, François Tabard, the director of the Tabard workshop who would go on to
execute tapestries by many well-known modernists, spent five years of the war imprisoned in
Austria.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 59
economy had begun to decline in the aftermath of World War I and particularly after the
financial crash of 1929. The Manufactures Nationales began outsourcing public
commissions to private workshops in Aubusson in an effort to keep them operating and
used these commissions to encourage more modern tapestry designs, as when Janneau
sent Lurçat, Gromaire, and Dubreuil to Aubusson in 1939. Moreover, the French
government promoted reform of the Aubusson tapestry industry through the local École
Nationale d’Art Décoratif d’Aubusson (ÉNAD Aubusson). Antoine-Marius Martin, who
directed the school from 1917 to 1930, and his pupil Élie Maingonnat, director from 1930
to 1958, trained students to be designers as well as weavers through the study of drawing,
color, and composition. Students created cartoons that they wove themselves and were
encouraged to create more modern designs with simpler compositions, fewer colors,
more direct color juxtapositions, and larger scale. In 1946, the government went a step
further and set up a new tapestry school in Aubusson dedicated to the realization of
modern tapestries. It gave apprentices a three-year stipend to study weaving, drawing and
design, interior decoration, and art history, and recruited instructors who worked in
modern styles such as Michel Tourlière, Raymond Picaud, Pierre Baudouin, and Robert
Wogensky.
65
Although it quickly merged with ÉNAD Aubusson in 1950, this short-lived
institution speaks to the French government’s commitment to training a new generation
of Aubusson weavers and tapestry designers in modern aesthetics.
Why did the French government take so much trouble to preserve not only its
own, state-operated Manufactures Nationales but also the private workshops in
Aubusson? Although officials were clearly motivated by a desire to retain France’s
traditional superiority in the decorative arts and handcrafted luxury goods, it is equally

65
See Guinot, La Tapisserie d’Aubusson et de Felletin, chapters 8 and 9.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 60
clear that they did not feel it would be sufficient to preserve these craft skills at the public
institutions in and near Paris. Fostering Aubusson’s workshops encouraged the
production of tapestries for the private market, furthering the spread of French tapestry to
private collectors, businesses, and institutions both in France and abroad. Yet the visual
representations of Aubusson’s weavers during this period suggest another dynamic at
work, in which France’s urban elites valued Aubusson as a rural enclave, remote from
Paris, whose inhabitants epitomized and preserved a bygone France. In subsidizing
Aubusson tapestry production, the French government extended an industry that had
dominated the town since the fifteenth century and furthered its own arguments about the
value of France’s rural economy.
As Shanny Peer has shown in her study of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des
Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne [International Exhibition of Arts and
Technologies in Modern Life] in Paris, the French government embraced agriculture and
artisanal crafts from rural regions in order to forge a specifically French form of
modernization. The Exposition’s organizers suggested that, by conserving and adapting
traditional rural occupations, the French economy could modernize without succumbing
to the dangers of American-style industrialization, mechanization, and standardization.
Although the French government thus valorized regional farmers and craftspeople as
constitutive of France’s economy and national identity, Peer shows that these inhabitants
of rural France had very little agency over the display of their own practices and
lifestyles. Instead, the vision of rural life presented at the 1937 Exposition was one
authorized by experts and officials in Paris who enforced metropolitan standards of
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 61
aesthetic value.
66
In this sense, it anticipated the dynamic of the postwar tapestry revival
in which artists, dealers, and curators based mainly in Paris celebrated Aubusson weavers
but controlled their representation. These Parisian authorities dwelled on the manual
labor of rural weavers to praise small-scale handicraft production, to insist on the
essential French quality of such manufacturing, and to present it as a worthy, even
essential, component of France’s postwar reconstruction.
Peer focuses on the 1937 Exposition as a moment when the Popular Front took up
regional crafts and folklore as a form of collective popular culture and demonstrates that
this valorization of traditional, rural life could be instrumentalized for both conservative
and progressive politics. Following the Popular Front, the Vichy government celebrated
tapestry and rural occupations more generally as incarnations of France’s patrimony and
national grandeur, and Maréchal Pétain made a grand visit to Aubusson in 1941. After the
war, however, this Vichy taint did not prevent former Resistance members from taking
up tapestry as an essentially French art. Such tapestry proponents as Cassou linked
tapestry to their Communist politics by extolling the medium as an art of the people that
was collaboratively produced and collectively experienced. Cassou described tapestry
weavers as “workers,” “laborers,” and “producers” to cast tapestry as the authentic
products of France’s working class.
67
To the extent that postwar tapestry revivers wanted
to recast the medium as popular rather than elite, we should understand their efforts as
building on the Popular Front’s earlier endeavors to characterize such traditional crafts as
authentic popular culture. While the French economy did change dramatically during the

66
Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris
World’s Fair (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 2-3, 9.
67
As quoted in Romy Golan, “L’Eternal Décoratif: French Art in the 1950s,” Yale French Studies
98, The French Fifties (2000): 114.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 62
war, becoming more centralized in larger industrialized firms as a result of the Vichy
regime’s drive to rationalize and meet German production demands,
68
the French
government’s interest in the nation’s tradition of decentralized manual production clearly
did not disappear. Understanding the postwar tapestry revival in relation to the political
and economic context of the interwar period thus elucidates how the tapestry revival
could perform two of its main tasks: helping to reconstruct the French economy through
its small-scale, handicraft production and purging France’s national art establishment of
its collaborations with the Nazi and Vichy governments through an emphasis on
tapestry’s essential French identity and association with popular craft.

The American Market for Parisian Modernism
Jeppson’s American account of Aubusson’s role in the Second World War and the
tapestry revival was published in 1960 and should be understood as part of a broader
American interest in modern French art after World War II. When American visitors
arrived in Paris in 1946 and eagerly reported back on the exhibition La Tapisserie
Française du Moyen-âge à Nos Jours, they showed that cultural leaders in the US hoped
Paris would remain a center for modern art. This American interest in Parisian
modernism extended to the second École de Paris, a loosely assembled group of
international abstract painters working in Paris after the war that included such figures as
Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, and Maria Helena Vieira da
Silva. Although French critics debated the definition and value of the postwar École de

68
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, rev. ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 63
Paris,
69
Americans continued to buy and exhibit the work of this school. Many scholars
acknowledge the important role that the United States played as a market for European
modernism, particularly after World War II when the economic disparity between Europe
and America was great. For example, in her 1967 sociological study of the French art
market, Raymonde Moulin recorded that “the clientele of the leading contemporary-
progressive galleries is between 80 and 95 percent foreign,” with most of these foreign
buyers coming from the US and, to a lesser extent, Switzerland and Belgium.
70
Yet few
have articulated the clear implication that if Americans were enthusiastically purchasing
“contemporary-progressive” art from Paris, they must have valued the art produced and
sold in Paris during the postwar period. It was not only established painters from the first
École de Paris such as Matisse and Picasso who found a ready market in the US. Newer,
postwar Parisian artists continued to have cachet in America precisely because they
represented the art scene of a city that Americans continued to view as an art capital.
Scholars have generally failed to examine the postwar American market for
contemporary Parisian art, preferring instead to rehearse Guilbaut’s argument in How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art that New York superseded Paris as the center of
the avant-garde after World War II.
71
This firmly inscribed narrative relies heavily on the
writings of a single art critic, Clement Greenberg, who repeatedly found Parisian art
wanting in comparison to the “New York School” that he was championing at home. But,
no matter how influential Greenberg’s writings were, his point of view should not be

69
Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944-1964
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 7.
70
Raymonde Moulin, The French Art Market: A Sociological View, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 157-158.
71
For example, this narrative was rehearsed by Eric de Chassy in “Paris-New York: Rivalry and
Denial,” in Sarah Wilson, et. al. Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968 (London: Royal Academy
of Arts, 2002), 344-351.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 64
taken as entirely representative of Americans’ attitudes towards Parisian modernism, if
only because the very fact that Greenberg so often critiqued contemporary Parisian art
demonstrates how visible this art was in New York. For example, Greenberg’s review of
the 1947 exhibition Painting in France, 1939-1946 at the Whitney Museum of American
Art famously called it “shocking” because “its general level is, if anything, below that of
the past four or five Whitney annual exhibitions of American painting”; however,
Greenberg’s judgment should not obscure how the exhibition itself presumed Paris’s
ongoing importance as the center for modern art.
72
Not only did the Whitney Museum’s
staff assume that recent painting from Paris would be worth showing, they also felt it was
appropriate, despite the Whitney’s mission to showcase American art, to bring this long-
awaited Parisian art to the American public and to take advantage of the greater access
that the end of the war had made possible between Paris and New York.
A survey of exhibitions during the postwar period demonstrates that museums
were able to organize significant showings of the second École de Paris borrowed largely
from American collectors. This indicates a robust market for purchasing and exhibiting
contemporary Parisian art in the US. Although the Whitney’s early showing of the second
École de Paris was comprised of French loans and was organized by the Musée National
d’Art Moderne,
73
a dozen years later, when the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
organized School of Paris 1959: The Internationals, it could rely on American collectors,

72
Greenberg, “Review of the Exhibition ‘Painting in France, 1939-1946’” (1947), in The
Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, 128-129.
73
The French government continued to promote contemporary French painting in the US, most
notably with the organization of Painting in France, 1900-1967, which showed at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington and other museums across the country. Painting in France, 1900-
1967 (Washington, DC: H.K Press, 1968); Herman Lebovics, “Improving American Minds,” in
Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1999), 164-166.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 65
both public and private, for nearly all of the show’s eighty-seven works by Appel,
Hartung, André Lanskoy, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gérard Schneider, Soulages, Vieira da
Silva, and Zao Wou-Ki. In his foreword to the catalogue, the museum director H.H.
Arnason insisted, “Paris is still the great rallying place for artists from every part of the
world.” Although Arnason critiqued the French for ignoring New York’s great strides in
modern art, he was equally critical of Americans who claimed that the abstract art
coming out of Paris was a mere reflection of Abstract Expressionism: “All the evidence
would indicate that for at least ten post-war years (1945-1955) the great new abstract
movements, in France led by artists such as those shown here, and in the United States by
such men as Pollock, Hofmann, De Kooning, Kline, and Rothko, were essentially
parallel, neither influenced in great degree by the other.”
74
The exhibition’s curator,
Martin L. Friedman, described how “immediately after the liberation of France, Paris
once again attracted the artists who had left because of the war, as well as a great many
very young painters from all over the world” and how “the accumulated energy and
exuberance of the new French art was a revelation to the world.”
75

We could read this enthusiastic defense of Paris as an effort on the part of
Midwestern art professionals to decenter New York and pay greater attention to what was
going on artistically throughout both Europe and the entire United States. But Friedman
construed his exhibition as a “progress report” on a Parisian avant-garde that had first
been introduced to American audiences by important New York institutions, namely, the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with Younger European Painters (1953-54) and
MoMA with The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors (1955). The latter

74
H.H. Arnason, foreword to School of Paris 1959: The Internationals by Martin L. Friedman
(Minneapolis: The Walker Art Center, 1959), 8-9.
75
Friedman, School of Paris 1959, 12.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 66
show traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum, and
the San Francisco Museum of Art, and, despite its title, the exhibition was dominated by
Paris-based artists—Dubuffet, Etienne Hajdu, Alfred Manessier, Germaine Richier,
Soulages, Appel, and Vieira da Silva—most of whose work came from American
collections. Other artists in the exhibition were based in England, West Germany, and
Italy, all Western European capitalist democracies, and in the catalogue Andrew Carnduff
Ritchie suggested a causal link between these countries’ political and artistic
advancement. Claiming that “not every European country has produced distinguished
new artists,” he articulated the reasons for this disparity as “sociological, geographical,
[and] economic.”
76
Celebrating the École de Paris was thus clearly part of a postwar
project to strengthen cultural and political ties between America and Western Europe.
Earlier revisionist scholars such as Guilbault have illuminated one side of this dynamic
by focusing on how the US government organized international exhibitions to promote
modern American art abroad, but we should also be attentive to how American
institutions promoted French and other Western European art at home in support of the
same goal, the fostering of cultural exchange and admiration between the US and its
capitalist European allies.
The École de Paris painters who were collected and exhibited so well in the
United States were among the French artists who took part in the tapestry revival. While
the peintres-cartonniers of the APCT dedicated themselves to designing tapestries, École
de Paris artists did so less often, but even this occasional practice did not go unnoticed by
Americans. The MoMA catalogue for The New Decade, for example, noted in its artists’

76
Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, foreword to The New Decade: European Painters and Sculptors,
(New York: Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Los
Angeles County Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Art, 1955), 11.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 67
biographies that both Manessier and Vieira da Silva had received tapestry commissions.
However, what the American reception of the postwar École de Paris more broadly
demonstrates is how committed Americans remained, despite Greenberg’s criticism, to
Paris as a worthy source of contemporary art. This ongoing commitment is important in
helping to explain why so many Americans invested in modern French tapestry and why
American artists would go on to participate in the tapestry revival. As we will see in
chapter 3, modern architects in the US were among the most prominent supporters of
French tapestry, and they often acted as dealers by commissioning modern tapestries for
their clients. Many of those clients were corporations who included tapestries by both
American and European artists in their corporate art collections and interior décor
schemes. The following chapter will explore further this American market for modern
French tapestry, detailing how such American collectors as Nelson R. Rockefeller bought
these works on the advice of prominent art world insiders like Alfred Barr. This
expanding market for modern tapestry, along with the Americans’ financial and curatorial
interest in the postwar École de Paris, demonstrates that, whether the medium was
tapestry or painting, modern art was still something that, for many Americans, came from
Paris.

The International Tapestry Biennial
As important as the American market was, France attracted a much larger
audience for its tapestry revival, as demonstrated by the Biennale Internationale de la
Tapisserie [International Tapestry Biennial]. Held in Lausanne, Switzerland, beginning in
1962, the tapestry biennial became a vehicle for assessing France’s influence on a
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 68
burgeoning international tapestry movement. The international spread of modern tapestry
both reinforced and challenged France’s cultural leadership, as foreign tapestry artists
both emulated and departed from French models. This international competition
heightened tapestry’s visibility in the popular press and made tapestry symbolic of larger
geopolitical conflicts.
While the Biennale included works by both European and non-European artists, it
was particularly important as a forum in which the works of both Eastern and Western
European artists could be seen together. Despite serving this role, however, the tapestry
biennial has not been examined in relation to the politicization of art during the Cold
War. Nor has it been included in studies of biennial history, despite its significance as
one of the earliest specialized biennials that was established in the first phase of biennial
proliferation during the 1950s and 1960s.
77
The tapestry biennial was organized by the
Centre de la Tapisserie Ancienne et Moderne (CITAM), which was founded in Lausanne
but dominated by French art professionals. Jean Lurçat was CITAM’s president and its
board included Cassou; Germain Bazin of the Louvre; Michel Faré from the Musée des
Arts Décoratifs in Paris; Michel Florisoone, then the Administrateur Général of the
Mobilier Nationale; and Raymond Cogniat, France’s Inspecteur Principal des Beaux Arts.
The other board members came from both German- and French-speaking Switzerland,
Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The inclusion of Adolphe

77
The Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie was inspired by the Venice Biennale but also by
the more recent founding of the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1951 and the Biennale de Paris in
1959, and possibly by the establishment of Documenta in 1955 in Kassel, Germany. In a more
similar vein to the tapestry biennial, The Courtray Design Biennale Interieur is a biennial
specializing in interior design that was founded in 1968 in Belgium. After this period there is a
gap in the establishment of new biennials until the founding of the Havana Biennale in 1984,
which is seen as ushering in a new era of Third World biennials. See Elena Filipovic, Marieke
van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader (Ostfildern and Bergen: Hatje Cantz
Verlag and Bergen Kunsthalle, 2010).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 69
Hoffmeister from Prague speaks to CITAM’s early commitment to reach out to Eastern
Europe, and the addition of Umbro Apollonio, who directed the Archive of
Contemporary Arts for the Venice Biennale, demonstrates their aspiration to use the
Venice Biennale as the model for a dedicated tapestry biennial. CITAM and the tapestry
biennial seem to have wound up in Lausanne primarily for financial reasons, as city
officials were willing to bankroll the exhibition in order to heighten Lausanne’s cultural
prestige and attract visitors, but holding the Biennale in French-speaking Switzerland also
reinforced the display of France’s cultural influence abroad.
The first Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie was dominated by French artists
and by French conceptions of what defined a tapestry and how it should be produced.
France was represented mostly by APCT artists (Maurice André, Louis-Marie Jullien,
Lurçat, Mathieu Matégot, Jean Picart Le Doux, Mario Prassinos, Marc Saint-Saëns,
Michel Tourlière, and Robert Wogensky) but also sent works by the better-known
Matisse and Le Corbusier, demonstrating the presence of tapestry in the oeuvres of
France’s most prominent artists and architects. In selecting works from other countries,
the Biennale organizers solicited tapestries from workshops that had been founded on the
French model, such as the Gobelin-Manufakturs in Nuremberg and Munich and the
Kawashima Textile Mills in Japan, and some of the non-French artists had their works
executed at Aubusson workshops. France thus demonstrated its prestige and leadership in
the art of tapestry despite not hosting the Biennale on French soil.
Both Le Corbusier and Lurçat wrote essays for the first Biennale catalogue that
emphasized tapestry’s role as a woolen mural, as a flat, pictorial object that had an
essential relationship with the wall. In order to further emphasize tapestry’s architectural
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 70
potential, the organizers invited the noted modern architect Richard Neutra to contribute
the third catalogue essay. Yet the tapestry biennial also became a venue for “new
tapestry” that left the medium’s traditional location on the wall to spill onto the floor or
hang suspended from the ceiling in the middle of a room. This sculptural, three-
dimensional understanding of weaving, what we now call fiber art, shared formal
characteristics with the post-minimalist works of such artists as Robert Morris and Eva
Hesse.
78
Although these artists did not exhibit at the Biennale International de la
Tapisserie, the exhibition offered early international showings to such celebrated fiber
artists as Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz. Many of these fiber artists came
from Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, and the presence of their non-traditional
“tapestry” at the Lausanne Biennale led to dramatic coverage in the Western European
press. The distinction between traditional mural tapestry and avant-garde sculptural
tapestry was quickly mapped onto a geopolitical distinction between Eastern and Western
Europe. In response to the first Biennale, André Kuenzi titled his article for the Gazette
de Lausanne with the declaration that “The Tapestry of Tomorrow is Born in Poland.” He
asserted that Polish artists were more open and experimental, more audacious than other
artists, and “the most resolutely ‘modern’.” Kuenzi continued, “today there are more
works of interest being created in Poland than even in Paris,” and he argued that it was
above all in the arts of weaving that Poland was “the most revolutionary,” with the result
that “Paris and Aubusson are justifiably worried.”
79

78
Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
79
André Kuenzi, “La Tapisserie de Demain et Née en Pologne,” Gazette de Lausanne (20-21
April 1963): 19 (my translation).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 71
During the second Biennale (Figs. 1.23-1.24), Raymond Cogniat wrote for Figaro
about the consternation of the French, “who were incontestably at the beginning of the
current tapestry revival” yet had to watch “in surprise and disillusionment” as their
leadership role was usurped by Eastern Europe. Cogniat suggested that France had
become too committed to “a spirit of scrupulous rigor” and to medium specificity—what
he described as “an intransigent technique that only accepts for tapestry what cannot be
done by other means”—to remain at the forefront of tapestry innovation. As a member of
CITAM’s board, Cogniat defended the Biennale’s inclusion of different weaving
techniques as a way to prevent France “from imposing itself excessively on this
international competition” and to remain open to all of tapestry’s possibilities. His article
strikes a delicate balance between celebrating the innovations in tapestry occurring
elsewhere and crediting France with initiating the larger concept of tapestry as a modern,
avant-garde art form. He concludes that one should pay all necessary homage to the
crucial role that France played in the tapestry revival while still recognizing the extension
of that revival to other countries and the active part such foreigners were continuing to
play.
80

While the French had long seen themselves as holding on to their traditional
excellence in the realm of hand produced luxury crafts in the face of foreign competition,
this competition usually came in the form of American, German, or English
industrialization. The “new tapestry” from Eastern Europe, by contrast, challenged
France’s preeminence on entirely artistic grounds, suggesting that the state-sponsored art
academies of the Communist bloc were actually better incubators of contemporary

80
Raymond Cogniat, “Tapisserie: Tradition et Modernisme aux Prises,” Figaro, 29 July 1965
(my translation).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 72
experimentation than the West’s individual artists’ studios and commercial galleries.
Moreover, fiber art seemed even more handcrafted than France’s meticulously hand
woven tapestries because fiber artists usually wove their own works, supposedly creating
them intuitively and spontaneously on the loom rather than designing them beforehand
with a model or cartoon. Many fiber artists in Eastern Europe and the US learned to
weave at art schools indebted to the Bauhaus model of art education that emphasized
material-based design and the use of hand weaving to create experimental prototypes for
industry.
81
This model never gained purchase in France, where, no matter how much
artistic training weavers received, they were still expected to work as artisans who
executed the designs of other artists.
The differences between these approaches are exemplified by the attempted
collaboration between Abakanowicz, a Polish fiber artist who showed at the first
Lausanne biennial and went on to win the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965,
and the Tabard weaving workshop in Aubusson. The workshop’s director, François
Tabard, met Abakonowicz just after the first tapestry biennial at the artist’s 1962
exhibition at Denise Majorel’s Paris gallery, La Demeure, and he subsequently wrote to
Abakonowicz “in response to [her] desire to see one of [her] cartoons executed in France

81
The influence of Anni Albers and other Bauhaus weavers on American fiber art was well
acknowledged during the late 1960s and 1970s. Ruth Kaufmann, The New American Tapestry
(New York: Reinhold Book Corporation, 1968). Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenore Larsen,
Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1973). Irene
Waller, Textile Sculptures (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1977). Auther, String,
Felt, Thread. Polish art schools such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz and the Academy of
Fine Arts in Warsaw incorporated weaving and other design work into their curriculum. The
Lodz Academy was founded in 1945 on the Bauhaus model and was dedicated to weaving as well
as textile and fashion design from 1950 to 1971. See “Wladyslaw Strzeminski Academy of Fine
Arts in Lodz” and “Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,” Culture.pl,
http://www.culture.pl/web/english/
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 73
in our traditional technique.”
82
Tabard agreed to accept one of the artist’s other works as
recompense, but the commission took longer and was more expensive than he first
envisioned. When Abakonowicz saw the finished work, she wrote Tabard: “Such faithful
weaving of my maquette seems strange to me and is completely opposed to my current
line of work. However, it allows me to better understand French tapestry. I regret that my
tapestry gave you so many difficulties. No doubt my cartoon indicated too little for the
weavers.”
83
This exchange demonstrates that the differences between French and Eastern
European weaving were both procedural and stylistic. Yet however real those differences
were, they were still exasperated by a Cold War climate that emphasized dissimilarities
between Eastern and Western Europe. What the reception of “new tapestry” at the
Biennale demonstrates is how a political need to see Eastern and Western Europe in
oppositional terms helped cast Eastern fiber art as a potential threat to the tradition of
French tapestry, even as the French struggled to understand these avant-garde works as
the offspring of their own tapestry revival.

Revival and Repetition
The preceding discussion of the tapestry biennial shows us how this venue, like
the Salon exhibitions of an earlier period, fostered the grouping of artists into different
camps or movements that battled one another for prominence. There was also a historical
dimension to this competition, for holding the Biennale under the auspices of CITAM, a
center committed to tapestries both old [ancienne] and new [moderne], made the entire
tapestry biennial part of a revivalist project. As the Biennale proceeded, participants

82
François Tabard (FT) to Magdalena Abakanowicz (MA), 17 December 1962, folder 30 J 276/1,
Atelier Tabard Papers.
83
MA to FT, 2 September 1963, folder 30 J 276/1, Atelier Tabard Papers.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 74
continued to question whether sculptural fiber art should be defined as tapestry and thus
included in an artistic tradition dating to the Middle Ages. But, in its early years, the
Biennale effectively linked avant-garde experimentation with a lineage of historical
tapestry. The logic of revival naturalizes this relationship between past and present and
allows artists of any medium to achieve seemingly contradictory aims. The value of
revival is that it enables artists to emphasize the novelty or newly animated quality of that
which is revived while still establishing their practices’ descent from art of the past.
Such an historical lineage is important because it provides a discursive
framework—an established tradition, movement, or style—through which new art can be
understood and legitimated as art in the first place. As Nancy Troy has shown in Couture
Culture, modern artists were not unlike fashion designers in their need to be recognized
as agents of a distinctive style or aesthetic tendency. She proposes that a “logic of
fashion,” which is marked by simultaneous drives towards originality and reproduction,
elucidates how modern artists negotiate their position vis-à-vis their contemporaries. The
modernist must create an original style or movement, but this original will not become
recognized as important unless it is copied by others. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, for
example, promoted his Gallery Cubists by denouncing Salon Cubism as mere pastiches
of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, yet he still relied on the general recognition and
attention Salon Cubism had garnered in the public arena to valorize the importance of his
own artists as Salon Cubism’s prototype.
84
While Troy focuses on how artists forge these
distinguishing categories in relation to their contemporaries, we should also be attentive
to how artists distinguish their practices in relation to those of the past. In addition to the

84
Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002).
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 75
logic of fashion, the logic of revival clarifies how artists legitimate their work through
repetition. If the logic of fashion encourages artists to present their work as an original
repeated by others in the present moment, the logic of revival prompts artists to present
their own work as itself a superior repetition of past originals.
85

In order to fully understand how the logic of revival operates, we must be
attentive to the complexity of the verbal and visual means through which revival
discourses are constructed. It was often not enough—indeed in the case of the tapestry
revival it was not desirable—for revivalist works merely to look like works from the past.
Mythic historical narratives, arguments in favor of medium specificity, claims for
functional similarities between medieval and modern tapestries, and primitivizing images
of weavers all had to be marshaled to make the claim that modern tapestries revived a
medieval practice. Although these means suggested affinities between medieval and
modern times, they also emphasized what was novel about modernism, including its
rejection of the immediate past, its turn away from illusionism, and its distinctly “cold”
architecture. Instead of seeing the tapestry revival as yet another nostalgic promise for an
easy return to the past, we should recognize how it articulated the distinctiveness of
modern tapestry and its contribution to contemporary art.

85
Michael Fried has argued in response to T.J. Clark that modernists did not want to negate the
past but to repeat its level of quality: “the deepest impulse or master convention of what I earlier
called ‘mainstream’ modernism has never been to overthrow or supersede or otherwise break
with the premodernist past but rather to attempt to equal its highest achievements, under new and
difficult conditions.” Fried’s account of “How Modernism Works” can be seen as revivalist in
that it acknowledged how artists respond to both their immediate context and a far view of
history; modernists negated or departed from the work of their immediate predecessors and
contemporaries but claimed an equality or affinity with the work of a prior past. Michael Fried,
“How Modernism Works,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Franscina, 2
nd

ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 92.
Chapter 1 The Logic of Revival Wells 76
We should also be attentive to the complexity of the political context in which the
tapestry revival flourished. Tapestry revivers mapped their rise-fall-renaissance narratives
onto the events of World War II, safely relegating any attempts to create contemporary
tapestries before and during the war, particularly the French tapestries produced for Nazi
Germany, into a single period of decline and using the tapestry revival as a symbol of
France’s postwar recovery. While the French insisted that tapestry was a national art,
they also constructed a sense of shared tapestry heritage with countries as different as
Belgium and India. Tapestry revivers promoted modern tapestry to a diverse international
audience as a means to further international cooperation and emphasize France’s cultural
leadership. Although decades of art historical scholarship has emphasized rivalries
between Paris and New York, the threat to modern tapestry as a distinctly French
achievement did not come from the US but from Communist Europe. The Western
European press constructed Eastern European tapestry as so avant-garde that it could
overturn France’s preeminence in the growing and increasingly international domain of
modern tapestry.
77
CHAPTER TWO
AUTHORSHIP IN THE ART MARKET

In 1938, just one year after completing his landmark work Guernica, Pablo
Picasso created a tapestry model for the Parisian dealer and collector Marie Cuttoli (Fig.
2.1). Nearly three meters tall and four and half meters wide, this model, titled Les
Femmes à leur toilette, shares many formal characteristics with Guernica: large scale,
imagery of attenuated limbs and floating heads, irregular patches of brickwork and solid
color, and the use of collage to juxtapose disparate materials within an extremely shallow
perspectival space.
1
Both works were made into tapestries after the Second World War.
Guernica, as discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, was woven as a tapestry for
Nelson Rockefeller in 1955. Les Femmes à leur toilette was never executed in tapestry
for Cuttoli but was woven in two versions by the Manufacture des Gobelins beginning in
1966.
2
Despite the similar moments of inception, shared formal characteristics, and
subsequent translations into tapestry of these two works, many art historians would see an
enormous difference between them. Placing great significance on the original intentions
of the artist, they would distinguish between such works as Femmes à leur toilette that
Picasso designed for tapestry and works like Guernica that Picasso only later agreed to
have copied in tapestry. Yet tapestry’s system of production problematizes any such
distinction. Tapestry producers have historically understood both types of works as

1
Collage and gouache, 299 x 448 cm. Paris, Musée Picasso.
2
In 1966, the Manufacture des Gobelins employed Pierre Baudouin to translate the model into a
cartoon (he photographically enlarged and numbered it) and wove a copy, executed 1967-1970,
for Picasso. In 1976 the Gobelins wove two subsequent copies, one in the original colors of the
model, and another in black and white. Both are in the collection of the Mobilier National. See
Manufactures Nationales: Gobelins, Beauvais, Savonnerie, de 1960 à nos jours (Angers: Musée
Jean-Lurçat de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 2010), 86-87; Decorum: Tapies et Tapisseries
d’Artistes (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris and Skira Flammarion, 2013), 19, 22-
23.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 78
equally authored by the artist and have given just as much weight to artists’ later
decisions, or even the decisions of artists’ heirs and collectors. Within the system of
tapestry production, the artist is less a sole originator of unique objects than an
authoritative, yet often absent, participant in the proliferation of multiples. The task of
this chapter is to understand this compromised form of authorship and its remarkable
attraction in the postwar period, an attraction that was felt both by artists and by their
weavers, dealers, and collectors.
Tapestry’s mode of production makes it an inherently multiple art form for two
reasons. First, tapestries are created by multiple authors, produced through a division of
labor between the artist-designer and one or more weavers, and, as with other
commissioned work, the interventions of dealers, collectors, or other patrons. Second,
tapestries are created in numerous copies, for they are conventionally woven in editions.
For example, the Guernica tapestry was woven in an edition of three and Les Femmes à
leur toilette was woven twice.
3
Like all forms of art that are reproduced in limited
editions, tapestry’s multiplicity must be understood in relation to the art market. The
concept of the limited edition arose in the nineteenth century to satisfy a growing market
of collectors who desired “original” works,
4
and tapestry has historically operated as
another form of original reproduction or authentic copy.
5
The unprecedented success of

3
See previous note for Les Femmes à leur toilette. The second copy of Guernica was woven in
1976 for the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar and the third copy was woven in 1983 for an unnamed
client. See Ledger of Tapestries Woven, Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach Papers (JBD Papers),
Célérier-Dürrbach Family Archive, Dijon, France.
4
Rosalind Krauss, “Sincerely Yours,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 177.
5
Louis Marchesano and Christian Michel, Printing the Grand Manner: Charles le Brun and
Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010).
Jonathan Kline, “Raphael/Not-Raphael: The Curious Case of Loreto’s Acts of the Apostles
Tapestries and the Similar Sets in Zaragoza and Bryn Athyn”; Lorraine Karafel, “Border Zones:
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 79
modern tapestry in the decades after World War II was part and parcel of a rapidly
expanding market for modern art, a market that both encouraged the production of
tapestry and was fueled by it. It exemplifies how modernism’s alleged commitment to
originality was mitigated by the need to multiply for the market and how modernism’s
embrace of reproduction enabled its dissemination.
This contradictory attitude towards originality was productive for the marketing
of modern art, just as narratives of historical revival were. Revival complicates the
construction of originality yet offers important benefits for the avant-garde, allowing
artists to create a historical precedent and thus a critical context for their work in a way
that still emphasizes its novelty. Similarly, reproductive tapestry allows for the
proliferation of works by recognized artists yet secures the artist’s authorship of the
reproduction. While both revival and art reproduction are forms of repetition that
challenge the notion of modernist originality, both also facilitate the marketing of
modernism by furthering the promotion and dissemination of modern art.
This postwar market for modern art was much more transatlantic than has
generally been acknowledged. French tapestry makers and dealers not only pursued the
American market for their works, they also encouraged American artists to make
tapestries of their own, leading to the emergence of specialized modern tapestry
producers in the US. Within this transatlantic tapestry market a French tradition of
tapestry as inherently multiple—based on longstanding conventions of shared authorship
and repeated weavings—often clashed with American expectations of originality as the

Reproduction and Change in Raphael’s Designs for Tapestries”; and Susan M. Wager, “‘Painting,
with silk and with gold’: Boucher’s Intermediality” (all papers presented at the College Art
Association, New York, 15 February 2013).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 80
basis for artistic value.
6
Rather than conceiving the extension of modern tapestry as a
unidirectional movement from France to the US, however, it may be more accurate to
view the postwar tapestry market as one of multidirectional flows. In this truly
transatlantic market, definitions of authorship and originality continually transformed as
they re-circulated through the tapestries, letters, and money that crisscrossed an ocean.
By focusing on the different kinds of agents—collectors, weavers, curators, dealers, and
artists and their heirs—who engaged with tapestry as a reproductive medium, we can
understand the varied ways in which tapestry appealed to mid-century modernsits in its
multiplicity.

A Collector’s Copies
Between 1955 and 1975 Nelson A. Rockefeller acquired eighteen tapestries that
reproduced paintings by Pablo Picasso.
7
Most of these paintings were in public
collections, and a number of them, including Guernica and Demoiselles d’Avignon, were
truly canonical works. One could therefore understand this collection of tapestries as the
acquisition of costly yet relatively inexpensive substitutes for works that were
unavailable to Rockefeller in their original form. Contemporary accounts of Rockefeller’s

6
A clear example is that US Customs would not allow tapestries to enter the country duty free as
works of art until the Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie (discussed in chapter 1)
successfully lobbied the US Congress to categorize limited edition hand woven tapestries as
original works of art in the Tariff Act of 1959. Denise Majorel to P.H. Jaccard, Director of the
Centre International de la Tapisserie Ancienne et Moderne (CITAM), 9 Nov 1961, binder 5, box
1, Series G2, CITAM Papers, Centre Internationale de la Tapisserie Ancienne et Moderne,
Archives de la Ville de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
7
In order of acquisition they are: Guernica, 1955; Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1962; The Studio,
1964; Girl on the Beach, 1962; Three Musicians, 1966; Three Dancers, 1967; Night Fishing at
Antibes, 1967; The Acrobat, 1968; Harlequin, 1968; Figure 1927, 1968; Interior with Girl
Drawing, 1968-69; L’Aubade, 1969; Les Demoiselles des Bords de la Seine, 1969; Pitcher with
Bowl of Fruit, 1970; La Joie de Vivre, 1970-71; Poisson et Cafetière, 1971; Girls with a Toy
Boat, 1973; Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Teller), 1974-75.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 81
Picasso tapestries in the press emphasized their relatively low prices and marveled at the
fact that even someone as wealthy as Rockefeller would consider the famous artist’s
paintings to be too expensive.
8
Moreover Rockefeller himself repeatedly explained his
acquisition of Picasso tapestries as a remedy for the fact that “there were at least two
dozen of his greatest paintings in museums or other private collections that I particularly
admired.”
9
In Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation, each of these tapestries allowed
Rockefeller to get hold of a Picasso “at very close range, by way of its likeness, its
reproduction” and to substitute a tapestry for a painting that is unavailable in its
“presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
10

But this acquisitive impulse alone does not explain why Rockefeller had Picasso’s works
reproduced in tapestry, a medium both visibly different from the original paintings and
more costly and time consuming than the forms of mechanical reproduction that
Benjamin theorized. Indeed, Rockefeller often chose which Picasso paintings he wanted
to have as tapestries by flipping through books on the artist and looking at the images,
treating such monographs as Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art and Homage à Pablo
Picasso like catalogs from which he could order.
11
He acquired tapestries of works that
were already available to him as reproductions and even ordered tapestry reproductions

8
“Offbeat Washington: Picassos Too High for Gov. Rockefeller,” Washington Star, 15 October
1972; Rita Reif, “If You Can’t Afford the Painting, How About a Tapestry of It?” New York
Times, 19 August 1967: FS14.
9
Nelson A. Rockefeller, introduction to The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection: Masterpieces of
Modern Art by William S. Lieberman, et. al. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1981) 17.
10
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Bruce, 1968) 223, 220.
11
For example, a memorandum from Rockefeller’s assistant, Louise A. Boyer (LAB), to his
curator, Carol K. Uht (CKU), states that he “has indicated an interest in having the following
paintings by Picasso reproduced as tapestries” and lists three works from Picasso: Fifty Years of
His Art and five works from Hommage à Pablo Picasso, complete with each painting’s title, date,
owner, and the page or plate number of its reproduction. LAB to CKU, 27 Feb 1967, folder 226,
box 27, Art Series, Record Group 4 Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers (NAR Papers), Rockefeller
Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 82
of three paintings that were already in his own private collection.
12
For these reasons,
Rockefeller’s collection of Picasso tapestries cannot be reduced to the desire to acquire a
substitute for the work of art in the quickest and cheapest way possible, as Rockefeller
and journalists of the period indicated.
The high cost of tapestry production, a result of the hours of manual labor
involved, and tapestry’s aristocratic associations problematize any understanding of these
works as democratizing reproductions that destroy the prestige of the original work of art.
And yet, Rockefeller’s tapestries can only be understood through a logic of reproduction
and replacement. Rockefeller certainly did not shy away from producing or collecting art
reproductions, but in the case of the Picasso tapestries, he ultimately seems to have been
less concerned with verisimilitude or creating an exact replica of Picasso’s paintings than
with reproducing the general category “work of art by Picasso.” Tapestry allowed
Rockefeller to produce more Picassos for his collection despite the fact that Picasso’s
personal involvement in the tapestries’ production was minimal. Since Rockefeller had
one of the largest modern tapestry collections in the United States, examining his
motivations for acquiring these works will help us understand why a market demand for
modern tapestry developed after the Second World War and how other collectors may
have similarly valued tapestry for its capacity to reproduce the work of canonical
modernists.
Nelson Rockefeller was the second son of John D. Rockefeller and an heir to his
father’s massive oil fortune. Nelson Rockefeller pursued a political career, serving as
Governor of New York State from 1959 to 1973 and Vice President of the United States

12
Pitcher with Bowl of Fruit, Interior with Girl Drawing, and Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny
Tellier).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 83
under Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977. He also held a number of positions at the Museum
of Modern Art (MoMA), which his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had helped found
in 1929.
13
Indeed, Nelson Rockefeller’s political and museum activities overlapped, most
notably through his work in Latin America.
14
Rockefeller took after both his parents in
amassing an extensive art collection, which, when he became Vice President, was valued
at $33.5 million and said to comprise approximately 16,000 objects.
15
To manage this
substantial collection, Rockefeller had a full-time curator, Carol K. Uht, and a number of
advisers who benefitted from their connections with the wealthy collector. The figures
most active in facilitating Rockefeller’s acquisition of Picasso tapestries were Alfred H.
Barr, Jr., by this time an advisory director at MoMA, and Pétronella van Doesburg.
Known as Nelly van Doesburg, she was the widow of the Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van
Doesburg and well connected in modern art circles in Europe as well as New York.
Especially after the Second World War, she worked as an informal art dealer and acted as
an agent for collectors to help them find and acquire particular works of art.
16
In this
regard she had already worked with Barr and Wallace K. Harrison, Rockefeller’s
principal architect. Harrison and his wife Ellen became friends with van Doesburg and
also occasionally facilitated Rockefeller’s tapestry acquisitions.

13
Nelson Rockefeller was a trustee of MoMA from 1932 until his death in 1979, also serving
once as Treasurer (1935-1939) and twice as President (1939-1941 and 1946-1953).
14
Rockefeller directed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (a division of the
Executive Office of President Franklin D. Roosevelt) from 1940 to 1944, where he hired René
d’Harnoncourt to serve as acting director of the Art Section in 1943. Rockefeller subsequently
encouraged MoMA to hire d’Harnoncourt, who became the museum’s director in 1949, and
recommended his family’s favored architect, Wallace K. Harrison, to take over the Office for
Inter-American Affairs (now part of the State Department) in 1945. Harrison held that post for
one year.
15
“Business: Capitalizing on a Collection,” Time (Nov 13, 1978):
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,946174-1,00.html
16
Wies van Moorsel, Nelly van Doesburg, 1899-1975 (Nijmegen: SUN, 2000), 258-260.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 84
From the very beginning of Rockefeller’s collection, these advisers and art-world
professionals disagreed about the extent to which the tapestries should be considered
accurate copies of Picasso’s paintings. Rockefeller initiated the collection in 1955 when
he commissioned Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach, who had a small tapestry workshop
in the South of France called the Atelier Cavalaire, to weave the Guernica tapestry (Fig.
I.X).
17
Although Picasso approved of the final result, it looked quite different from the
original painting, in large part because it was done in sepia tones of light brown, tan, and
cream, in contrast to the painting, which was in shades of gray. Barr wrote to van
Doesburg on February 10, 1956:
We have seen the big tapestry of Guernica but some of us are concerned about the color.
Did Picasso actually decide upon the colors used, and if not, did he approve them? That
is, was he satisfied after he saw the final tapestry? We need to know these details because
we are sure that if we exhibit the tapestry there will be a great many questions from
people, some of whom will prefer the black and white color of the original.
18

Three days later, van Doesburg replied: “Dear Alfred, Picasso finds the tapestry a
‘Masterpiece!’ He finds the tapestry nearer to the colors of the ‘original,’ because the
colors in the original are more or less gone! Before the tapestry left the Museum
d’Antibes where it was showed to the public for several weeks, Picasso wanted to be
photographed in front of it.”
19
The implication that the tapestry was somehow superior to
the painting, which Picasso had entrusted to MoMA’s custody since 1939, was disturbing
to Barr, and a week later he wrote back, “it is simply not true that the colors of the
tapestry are in any way nearer the original.” He acknowledged that the painting “is

17
Although Rockefeller consistently recounted that he bought this tapestry in a New York
gallery, the commission agreement is held in the Rockefeller Archives. See “Memorandum of
Agreement,” April 1955, folder 236, box 28, NAR Papers.
18
Alfred H. Barr (AHB) to Nelly van Doesburg (NVD), 10 Feb 1956, folder 239, box 28, NAR
Papers.
19
NVD to AHB, 13 Feb 1956, folder 239, box 28, NAR Papers. “Masterpiece” is written in red
ink for emphasis.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 85
somewhat dirtier and slightly worn about the edges” but insisted “it has not changed color
in any serious way. It was originally and remains predominantly black, white, and
gray.”
20

Although Barr had reservations about the tapestry, he recognized its monetary and
art historical value as a work of art by Picasso that could be loaned to other institutions as
a substitute for the Guernica painting.
21
The painting had traveled frequently for
exhibitions since its creation in 1937, and in 1958 Picasso agreed with Barr that it was in
too fragile a state to be loaned any further. With the painting immobilized on the third
floor of MoMA, its tapestry reproduction became a portable surrogate. In 1960, when Uht
reported to Barr that the tapestry would be on loan frequently in the coming year and that
Rockefeller was wondering about its insurance value, Barr recommended raising the
value substantially from $17,550, its initial cost five years earlier, to $30,000.
22
Two
years later the tapestry was the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Musée National d’Art
Occidental in Tokyo devoted to Picasso’s Guernica.
23
While MoMA lent numerous
preparatory sketches, they declined to lend the painting even to an exhibition dedicated to
the work. Rockefeller’s tapestry filled that gap, representing Picasso’s finished work even
though its color scheme differed significantly from the painting itself.
In 1962, when Rockefeller acquired his next tapestry reproduction of a Picasso
painting, Barr was even more adamant about its inaccuracy in relation to the original.

20
AHB to NVD, 20 Feb 1956, folder 239, box 28, NAR Papers.
21
Similarly Barr sanctioned a reproduction of Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie ca. 1946,
presumably so that it could be loaned as a substitute for the original painting. See Nancy J. Troy,
“Mondrian and Money: Victory Boogie Woogie,” chapter 1 in The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
22
Betsy Jones (BJ) to AHB, 16 Sept 1960, folder 9, box A, series 18.1, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers
(AHB Papers), Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
23
Picasso: Guernica (Tokyo: Musée national d’art occidental, 1962).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 86
Rockefeller had not commissioned this second tapestry, a reproduction of Demoiselles
d’Avignon also woven by de la Baume-Dürrbach (Fig. 2.2), but rather bought it from van
Doesburg through the mediation of Ellen Harrison. He was excited to acquire a tapestry
of this work and sent Harrison a note of thanks: “I couldn’t be more pleased to have the
chance to get this one—and if you know of any others that might be made of some of his
other great paintings I’d be very interested.”
24
Barr was not so enthusiastic, and when he
saw the tapestry he wrote to Rockefeller unambiguously: “I have no idea what kind of
color reproduction is used but a number of the areas in the tapestry are quite wrong both
in color and in detail—I don’t mean just inexact but really distortion or falsification of
the original intention.” Yet Barr did not reject outright the enterprise of translating
Picasso’s paintings into tapestry. In the very same letter, he recommended that
Rockefeller consider reproducing a different Picasso from the museum’s collection:
I am inclined to think that paintings like the Guernica, designed with flat planes rather
than with modeled or modulated areas, come off better in this kind of tapestry. […] I
think that the Museum’s Harlequin of 1915 would come off much better than the
Demoiselles d’Avignon, especially if the tapestry maker did not attempt the impossible
task of representing the brush strokes and details of modeling.
25

Although Barr supported the Picasso tapestry project, he clearly felt that perfectly
representing a painting in tapestry was an “impossible task.”
By the following year, Rockefeller had decided to commission another tapestry
and had five Picasso paintings in mind as possibilities for the model. Two of these
paintings were in MoMA’s collection, and, following their interpretation of copyright

24
Nelson A. Rockefeller (NAR) to Ellen Harrison (EH), 12 July 1962, folder 227, box 27, NAR
Papers.
25
AHB to NAR, 21 Nov 1962, folder 227, box 27, NAR Papers. Although Barr does not explain
what he means by “this kind of tapestry,” he may be referring to the flat weave of high- and low-
warp tapestry (de la Baume-Dürrbach worked on a low-warp loom) in contrast to the pile weave
of plush carpets and rugs. See chapter 3 for a discussion of how ambiguous this technical
distinction became in the US after World War II.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 87
law, Rockefeller and his staff assumed that they would need MoMA’s permission to
“copy” either of these paintings as tapestries. Rockefeller’s curator, Carol Uht, wrote him
a memo explaining that MoMA was willing to give its permission if the following
conditions were met: they would require Picasso’s permission in writing, the Board of
Trustees would have to approve the undertaking, and Barr would personally choose the
transparency or color reproduction from which the tapestry would be made. Uht
reminded Rockefeller: “As you know, he feels that the Demoiselles came out poorly due
to using a bad reproduction.”
26
Barr’s scruples put him in the odd position of trying to
perfect a task he had earlier called “impossible.” As Barr supervised the taking of
photographs and personally checked samples of colored wool against paintings in
MoMA’s galleries, he tried to facilitate the creation of tapestry reproductions that would
be as accurate as possible while knowing full well that there would always be
considerable visible differences between a tapestry and a painting.
Part of what makes Barr’s actions extraordinary is that they reveal how much
labor went into the creation of reproductions, both photographs and the tapestries that
were based on them. The idea that photography offered an instant, perfectly accurate
reproduction through the ease of automatic processes is confounded by the sheer volume
of correspondence regarding the color transparencies that Barr and Uht sent to de la
Baume-Dürrbach. The process of reproducing Night Fishing at Antibes (woven 1967)
demonstrates how photography and tapestry could each be subject to accusations of
inaccuracy and manual corrections (Fig. 2.3). Barr had tried to dissuade Rockefeller from
having a tapestry made of this painting because he felt the modulations in tone and the

26
CKU to NAR, 13 Feb 1963, folder 232, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 88
complexity of the brushwork would be hard to reproduce in weaving.
27
Uht then took up
these concerns in an emphatic message to van Doesburg: “The vigor of the brushwork, as
much as any other single characteristic is foremost in this work. This may, indeed involve
especially difficult weaving. However, the tapestry shall be so large (and the painting is
so large) that the richness of the brushwork must be simulated or the tapestry will be only
a ghost of the original conception.”
28
Uht made elaborate diagrams to accompany the
color transparencies of the painting to emphasize the distinct colors and brushstrokes
comprising its modulated areas (Figs. 2.5-2.8) “This week I have spent four or five hours
each day on the work and have still only completed about two-fifths of the area!” she
wrote to van Doesburg, reiterating that this painting “has quantities of subtle blendings
and tricky brushwork. All of this I am carefully marking and I believe it will be obvious
to Mrs. de la Baume what I have done. The painting is so huge, and the tapestry too will
be so enormous, that it is imperative to catch all of these subtleties or the entire character
of the work will be altered beyond belief.”
29

The complexity of Uht’s diagrams, only some of which I illustrate here, confound
any “obvious” legibility, but they do indicate clearly how much revision even the most
careful color reproductions could require. One diagram titled “Special Notes” makes
specific references to the inaccuracy of the photographs (Fig. 2.5). The upper right
notation reads “large black and white photos show a difference in tone here. THIS DOES
NOT EXIST in the painting.” While the lower right notation reads “areas darkened above
are shown in large photographs. There are re-touching or damages which should be
IGNORED.” One diagram titled “Special Enlargements” shows which elements of the

27
CKU to NAR, 13 Feb 1963, folder 232, box 27, NAR Papers.
28
CKU to NVD, 20 Sept 1966, folder 230, box 27, NAR Papers (emphasis original).
29
CKU to NVD, 17 Aug 1966, folder 230, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 89
composition Uht delineated in more detail in yet more drawings (Fig. 2.6). Other
diagrams use numerous alphanumerical codes such as Y324 and W3, which likely refer
to specific colors of yarn that Uht thought would be most appropriate for each section
(Fig. 2.7). Another diagram titled “Special Notes” has a notation in the lower right corner
that reads “IN HERE SOME REAL VIRBANT TURQUOISE (NO WOOLS QUITE
RIGHT)” (Fig. 2.8). This suggests that Uht used a system similar to Jean Lurçat’s,
discussed in chapter 1, which turned the tapestry cartoon into a kind of paint-by-numbers
diagram that reduced the weaver’s traditional role as an interpreter of painters’ models.
Just as Barr recognized that photographs would vary, and that he could only
approve certain photographs as accurate reproductions of Picasso’s painting, Uht
recognized that even these approved photographs alone would not be enough to ensure
that de la Baume-Dürrbach would weave an accurate copy. Because Uht and Barr
evidently perceived photographic reproduction to be insufficient and were willing to
expend considerable effort to improve the accuracy of the Picasso tapestries that were
based on them, we should not assume that tapestry was understood as an inherently less
accurate or inferior form of reproduction. Moreover, Rockefeller himself apparently did
not evaluate the tapestries in terms of their verisimilitude. As Uht acknowledged to van
Doesburg two years later, “the Night Fishing, Antibes, which caused us all such a lot of
trouble, is probably [Rockefeller’s] favorite tapestry!”
30

And yet Rockefeller was disturbed and disappointed when, in 1971, he discovered
that the tapestries he had been commissioning for the past sixteen years were not
singular, unique works but in each case were woven in an edition of three. Rockefeller
assumed that the price he had paid for a single tapestry had actually covered the cost of

30
CKU to NVD, 6 Mar 1968, folder 229, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 90
all three, and that de la Baume-Dürrbach and Picasso were selling off the other two at
extra profit.
31
Since three of the tapestries were after paintings that Rockefeller himself
owned, he also felt that he had not been properly compensated for having his paintings
copied. “In my own case,” he wrote to van Doesburg, “I have not charged for the rights to
make second and third copies of Interior with Girl Drawing and Pitcher and Bowl of
Fruit.”
32
In response, van Doesburg explained that Rockefeller was not entitled to charge
any copyright fees in France: “About the reproduction-rights, here in France there is only
an obligation to pay these rights to the artist, in our case to Picasso, and not to the owner
of the painting.”
33
She explained further that the practice of weaving tapestries in editions
was well established and enabled the distribution of preparatory costs, including making
the cartoon and experimenting with different colored yarns, across all the finished works.
“Generally the other tapestry-weavers make more copies than three,” she wrote. “This I
know from Aubusson, from Arp and from Sonia Delaunay there are 6 ‘exemplaires’ from
each and I remember that at the time Marie Cuttoli made even more.”
34
The exchange
demonstrates how central weaving in multiple was to the tradition of tapestry and why
weavers relied on producing a limited edition of exemplaires, copies or “examples” of
any given tapestry.
Reproduction was thus built into weavers’ business models in ways their clients
did not always understand. Rockefeller’s expectation of singularity is significant in
betraying his own association of art with originality and his lack of familiarity with the

31
Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of
Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
2007), 214.
32
NAR to NVD, 15 April 1971, folder 236, box 27, NAR Papers.
33
NVD to NAR, 26 May 1971, folder 236, box 27, NAR Papers.
34
NVD to NAR, postmarked 26 May 1971, folder 236, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 91
conventions of tapestry production. However, Rockefeller’s actions hardly suggest a
prejudice against reproduction per se, especially since his Picasso tapestries were only
one facet of his activities in art reproduction. Rather, Rockefeller’s consternation at
discovering, after the fact, that additional copies of the Picasso tapestries were being
produced indicates that Rockefeller had no problem with art reproductions so long as he
controlled their creation. Picasso, de la Baume-Dürrbach, and van Doesburg exceeded
Rockefeller’s authority as the patron, as an established art collector and the commissioner
of these tapestries, to pursue a larger tapestry business that Rockefeller could not fully
control.
Indeed, van Doesburg and de la Baume-Dürrbach repeatedly attributed control of
the tapestry project to Picasso rather than Rockefeller. Perhaps recognizing that Picasso
was the only higher authority that a patron as important as Rockefeller would accept, van
Doesburg and de la Baume-Dürrbach characterized these non-unique tapestries as
originating from Picasso himself and claimed that Picasso was fully in charge of the
creative process. When Rockefeller first began commissioning tapestries in earnest in
1963, Uht sent a list of possible models to van Doesburg and reported the results back to
Rockefeller: “Madame van Doesburg has gotten together with Picasso on the subject of
tapestries. He has chosen, from the list we sent, the Museum of Modern Art’s painting
The Studio to authorize for tapestry making. (We had asked for prices of all the list but
Mr. Picasso has seemed to settle the whole thing!)”
35
This initial authorization from
Picasso was considered crucial to all the relevant parties before they would proceed to
create a tapestry reproduction. Just as Barr insisted on receiving some assurance of
Picasso’s approval for tapestry projects on behalf of MoMA, the director of the Tate

35
CKU to NAR, 15 May 1963, folder 232, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 92
Gallery gave his permission for Three Dancers to be translated into tapestry only “after
he had a paper signed by Picasso. Which is not easy to obtain.”
36
Van Doesburg and de la
Baume-Dürrbach maintained the fiction that Picasso was actively involved in the tapestry
projects even though his only clear oversight role was in approving the finished results.
In 1963, for example, van Doesburg led Rockefeller’s staff to believe that Picasso had
personally selected the wool samples she had provided, when in fact the ordering of wool
seems to have been left entirely to de la Baume-Dürrbach.
37
Yet obtaining Picasso’s final
approval for each tapestry was just as essential for establishing his authorship and
securing the value of these commissions as gaining the artist’s initial permission to
reproduce a specific work, and waiting for such approval could significantly delay
delivery of the tapestry to Rockefeller: “Finally the tapestry ‘Les Danseuses’ arrived
yesterday safely here. It took such a long time, because Picasso was not able to see it
earlier […]. Please excuse us, but the weavers do not like to press Picasso, what I
understand quite well.”
38
In this and other letters and memoranda, Picasso appears as a
respected and even feared figure, whom van Doesburg and de la Baume-Dürrbach did not
like to “press” and certainly would never contradict.
In some ways this bending to Picasso’s will was merely a convenience. Invoking
Picasso’s name became a more economical means of resolving arguments, as it saved
time and energy to assert that Picasso had decided how some aspect of the work should

36
Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach (JBD) to CKU, 24 Sept 1966, folder 232, box 27, NAR
Papers.
37
NVD to LAB, 19 Sept 1963, box A, folder 9, Series 18.1, AHB Papers. Although it is
impossible to prove that Picasso did not actively participate in selecting yarns, there is no
evidence that he did so in de la Baume-Dürrbach’s papers. Her daughter, Glorvina Célérier, also
recollects that Picasso never involved himself with such details, in conversation with the author,
April 2012.
38
NVD to CKU, 10 April 1967, folder 232, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 93
be done. The author “Picasso” functioned here as the ultimate or originating authority,
naturalizing his stature as the great artist. Yet reinforcing this myth of the original artist
was economically motivated in another sense, for the tapestries only had monetary value
in so far as they could be considered artworks by Picasso.
39
Recognizing this,
Rockefeller wrote to de la Baume-Dürrbach in 1970:
As you know, I have enjoyed so much the Picasso tapestries you have woven for me over
the years. The other day when I was showing them to my friend, Mr. Wallace K.
Harrison, he mentioned that the value of these works, besides their inherent beauty, rests
in large part of that fact that Picasso himself has approved, altered, and corrected the
cartoon and has sanctioned the final weaving when it came from the looms.
40

Rockefeller then asked de la Baume-Dürrbach to have Picasso sign an accompanying
photograph of each tapestry, or, more specifically, sign the back of the photograph, which
stated in Spanish: “The tapestry shown on the reverse was woven by the Atelier J. de la
Baume-Dürrbach after a cartoon corrected and approved by me. On completion of the
weaving I also looked at the finished tapestry and approved its release for sale.”
41
These
authenticating photographs secured the financial value of the tapestries by asserting the
actions of “correcting,” “approving,” and “looking” as sufficient to comprise an artist’s
authorship. Although the language may still overstate Picasso’s involvement—there is no
evidence that he ever “corrected” any of de la Baume-Dürrbach’s cartoons, for
example—it is guarded in comparison to Rockefeller’s fantasy that he and Picasso had
been engaged in a personal collaboration to produce the tapestries, as when Rockefeller

39
I use the term “myth” not in the conventional sense of a widely held false belief, but in Roland
Barthes’s sense of de-politicized speech, in which myth makes historical constructs appear
natural. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), especially 142-145. Rosalind Krauss draws on Barthes to critique art historians’
preoccupations with originality and authorship in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), see especially “Introduction,” 1-6.
40
NAR to JBD, 21 Oct 1970, folder 226, box 27, NAR Papers (emphasis mine).
41
“Text of Statement on Back of Photographs for Picasso to Sign,” folder 226, box 27, NAR
Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 94
looked back fondly on this period as “the two decades I was working with Picasso.”
42
In
fact, the two never met and never even corresponded directly.
Rockefeller was not alone in emphasizing or trying to suggest Picasso’s personal
involvement as a way to increase the value of, and public interest in, such tapestries. For
example, Harold Diamond, a New York art dealer, corresponded with Nelly van
Doesburg in 1968 to discuss the sale of a Picasso tapestry to one of Diamond’s clients.
“The tapestry was bought for a public building,” Diamond wrote, “and the builders want
to get as much publicity as they can out of the tapestry. So would you please get the
weavers to give a little history of how the tapestry was made and so on. The most
important thing is to emphasize that it was done under Picasso’s supervision, how much
he loved it, and so on, also how long it took to make and anything else to puff it up.”
43

Diamond frankly discussed, and even seemed willing to fabricate, Picasso’s personal
involvement with and love for tapestry as part of a public relations narrative that would
add to the value of his client’s acquisition.
What these fantasies of Picasso’s involvement with tapestry suggest is that this
was a medium in which the idea of the artist’s authorship was more potent than its
actuality. Because tapestry had long been a medium in which authorship was not
attributed to the people who wove the work but to those who designed it, tapestry lent
itself to an increasing dematerialization of authorship during the 1960s and 1970s, in
which the artist could become more and more removed from his or her work’s physical
production. With the role of the artist limited to allowing an image to be used as a
tapestry model and then approving the finished work, reproductive tapestry approaches

42
Rockefeller, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection: Masterpieces of Modern Art 18.
43
Harold Diamond to NVD, 2 Oct 1968, inv. Nr. 101, Nelly van Doesburg Papers (NVD Papers),
Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, Netherlands.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 95
the condition of conceptual art. Indeed, we might consider the authenticating photographs
that Picasso signed for Rockefeller as akin to the certificates of authenticity used by such
artists as Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, in the sense that Picasso staked his claim to
authoring works that he had designed but not made by hand. While in Picasso’s case the
photographs, and by extension the tapestries they represented, reproduced a prior,
original painting that did not exist in the oeuvres of Flavin or LeWitt, Picasso’s paintings
functioned similarly to the concept in conceptual art, becoming a prototype or primary
idea that was materialized and marketed through secondary documentation. It is
important to remember, however, that characterizing Picasso’s conceptual role as
defining the authorship of these tapestries was motivated largely by market forces, for it
allowed weavers, dealers, and collectors alike to raise the value of these objects as works
of art by a recognized modernist master.
44

However, the reception of these tapestries demonstrates that, as reproductions,
they were valued not only as works of art authored or authorized by Picasso but also as
works of art collected by Nelson A. Rockefeller. Even before Rockefeller became Vice
President, when he was still Governor of New York, de la Baume-Dürrbach asked for his
autograph on behalf of her yarn dyer.
45
Rockefeller was clearly well known on both sides
of the Atlantic, and he was famous for his art collection as well as for his political career.

44
Understanding this dematerialization of Picasso’s authorship as market driven reinforces recent
scholarship that has repositioned the conceptual art of the late 1960s and early 1970s as
thoroughly engaged with the art market. Alexander Alberro, for example, examines how the
dealer Seth Siegelaub developed marketing strategies to document and publicize conceptual art.
Alberro also discusses Siegelaub’s promotion of certificates of authenticity with his stable of
conceptual artists and argues that Flavin’s and Andre’s use of such certificates helped secure their
works’ status as art in the face of the artists’ deskilling and use of generally accessible materials.
Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 23.
45
JBD to CKU, 17 Nov 1967, folder 230, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 96
In the summer of 1969, there were three exhibitions of Rockefeller’s art collection in
New York: Art of Oceania, Africa and the Americas from the Museum of Primitive Art at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection of Mexican Folk
Art at the Museum of Primitive Art, and Twentieth-Century Art from the Nelson Aldrich
Rockefeller Collection at MoMA. In reviewing the exhibitions for the New York Times
Magazine, James R. Mellow noted that Rockefeller’s reproductive Picasso tapestries
were not included in MoMA’s show but singled them out as exemplary of how
Rockefeller’s collection was “erratically personal in its choices.”
46
In contradistinction to
MoMA, other museums deliberately chose to exhibit the Picasso tapestries as
representative of Rockefeller’s collection and his characteristically varied collecting
habits. In 1968 the James Prendergast Free Library in Jamestown, New York, organized
an Exhibition of Picasso Tapestries from the Personal Collection of Governor Nelson A.
Rockefeller, and in 1971, Lehman College in the Bronx showed Picasso tapestries from
the collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller.
47
In both cases the exhibitions began as requests
to show any selection of works from Rockefeller’s famous art collection yet ended up
presenting the Picasso tapestries as a discrete unit.
48
These curators may have chosen the
Picasso tapestries to represent Rockefeller the collector precisely because they appeared
so idiosyncratic, as objects that only his unique vision could have brought forth. Here we
see not only how provenance could distinguish reproductions from one another—that
these are the Picasso tapestries collected by Rockefeller as opposed to those Picasso

46
James R. Mellow, “Rocky As a Collector,” The New York Times Magazine, 18 May 1969: 34,
40, 56.
47
See folder 229, box 27 and folder 240, box 28; NAR Papers. Picasso: Picasso Tapestries from
the Collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Herbert H. Lehman College, 1971).
48
The correspondence shows that Uht presented both curators with a larger selection of works
and that they each chose to focus on the Picasso tapestries. See folder 229, box 27 and folder 240,
box 28; NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 97
tapestries owned by someone else—but also how provenance seemed to justify the very
act of reproducing art. The fact that these tapestries were reproductions of famous Picasso
paintings apparently required explanation, and curators and critics repeatedly chose to
explain and justify them as Rockefeller’s personal choice.
Rockefeller certainly did not shy away from promoting himself as an art collector.
Shortly before his death, he founded Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., a mail-order
catalog business that sold copies of more than a hundred works in his collection, ranging
from $65 imitations of eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain salt dishes to a 41.5 inch tall
model of August Rodin’s Age of Bronze for $7,500.
49
Rockefeller reproduced paintings,
including several by Picasso that he had already reproduced for himself in tapestry (Fig.
2.9), with the Cibachrome photographic process, because he felt it created images of
higher quality than did lithography. His mailing list for the catalog was culled mostly
from that of the Neiman-Marcus department store,
50
which suggests that Rockefeller was
pursuing an affluent but still middle-class market. Certainly he was well aware that what
he was selling was not only a high quality reproduction of a beautiful object, but also the
Rockefeller name itself. “He readily concedes that more than a few of his customers may
be moved to buy a Rocky copy not because they know anything about the particular work
but because they are reassured by ‘the prestige value, the Good Housekeeping Seal of the
Approval’ of the man who has the original.”
51
In some ways Rockefeller seems to have
been hoping to replicate for others the experience he had himself in commissioning the
Picasso tapestries. The process of looking through monographs to order tapestries, which
were sure to be modern masterpieces because they were designed by Picasso, was

49
The Nelson Rockefeller Collection catalog, item no. 5 (1978), NAR Papers.
50
“Business: Capitalizing on a Collection.”
51
Ibid.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 98
mirrored in the process of looking through the catalog for Nelson Rockefeller Collection,
Inc. to order reproductions of objects that were sure to be good art because Rockefeller
had already bought them. While Rockefeller valued the Picasso tapestries because of the
author function of “Picasso,” no matter how accurately or inaccurately they reproduced
specific Picasso paintings, he also recognized how provenance, or what we might call the
“collector function,” would establish the value of reproductions for the customers of
Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc.
52

The Weaver as Translator

Rockefeller’s activities in art reproduction, including the tapestries he
commissioned and his establishment of Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., confirm that,
not surprisingly, reproductions were more valuable if they were authorized by a
prestigious artist or collector. For Rockefeller, tapestries could differ from the paintings
on which they were based as long as he could attribute those differences to the
intervention or authorship of Picasso. Yet in practice, it was tapestry weavers who
departed from the artist’s model. Rockefeller deemphasized Jacqueline de la Baume-
Dürrbach’s role in producing the Picasso tapestries when he sent her authenticating

52
Scholars have studied the role of provenance in establishing the value of original works of art
rather than reproductions. Indeed, Sophie Raux has shown that over the course of the eighteenth-
century in France, a work’s previous ownership by a well-respected collector helped establish the
work’s originality and authenticity. Elizabeth Pergram examines how dealers who supplied
American collectors during the Gilded Age conflated the quality of a painting with the prestige of
the European aristocratic family that had owned it by referring to the work’s “pedigree” and
argues that these aristocratic associations helped dealers market portraits despite their lower status
in the hierarchy of genres. Building on this latter insight, we can speculate that in the case of
Nelson Rockefeller Collection Inc., the prestige of Nelson Rockefeller’s ownership mitigated the
presumed lower status of reproductions. See Sophie Raux, “From Mariette to Joullain:
Provenance and Value in Eighteenth-Century French Auction Catalogs” 86-103, and Elizabeth A.
Pergam, “Provenance as Pedigree: The Marketing of British Portraits in Gilded Age America”
104-122, in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 99
photographs for Picasso’s signature, in essence asking the weaver to position a different
artist as the works’ primary author. Perhaps in recognition of this, de la Baume-Dürrbach
recommended that “to be correct” the text should not read “woven by the Atelier J. de la
Baume-Dürrbach” but rather that the tapestries “were weaved without sewing […] by J.
de la Baume-Dürrbach on her loom in her atelier. . . .” De la Baume-Dürrbach claimed
that this would clarify the technical process by which the tapestries were made—they
would now be “weaved without sewing” on a loom rather than simply “woven”—and
that when she “insist[s] on these points, it is because Picasso himself gives great
importance to the technique.”
53
However, this change in text also emphasized de la
Baume-Dürrbach’s personal involvement in the tapestries’ manufacture. They were no
longer made in the workshop of J. de la Baume-Dürrbach but by J. de la Baume-Dürrbach
in her workshop. The former suggests that any number of anonymous weavers might
have had a hand in creating these tapestries, while the latter insists that a single master
craftsperson is responsible for their fabrication. This was only one of the ways in which
de la Baume-Dürrbach asserted her autonomy and thus her significance in determining
the finished appearance of the Picasso tapestries.
The weaver succeeded in getting Picasso to sign these authenticating photographs,
but when she sent them back to Rockefeller she reminded the Governor that Picasso had
already “signed” the tapestries by having his signature woven into each one together with
the monogram for the Atelier Cavalaire (Fig. 2.10).
54
This dual signature was a
longstanding tapestry convention and reinforced a sense of shared authorship, which de la
Baume-Dürrbach promoted by making changes to the tapestries’ authenticating language.

53
JBD to NAR, 18 Nov 1970, folder 226, box 27, NAR Papers.
54
NAR from JBD, 8 Dec 1970, folder 228, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 100
Tapestry weavers justified the presence of two authors by drawing on the model of
translation. According to this model, the tapestry translates the painting into a new formal
language or medium.
55
The translation corresponds to the author’s original but is the
product of a new writer’s expertise, namely familiarity with a second language and the
skill of translation itself.
The notion of translation was already well established in the nineteenth century as
a metaphor for reproductive engraving.
56
The paradigm of reproductive engraving as
translation defined the excellence of the reproduction according to how well it restricted
itself to the original and the difficulty of its technique. While the engraver and the painter
were judged by different criteria, it does not follow that there was a clear hierarchical
distinction between the original and the copy. On the contrary, Stephen Bann has
revealed the ambiguities of the original in nineteenth-century France by showing how
painters claimed authorship over painted replicas and répétitions (replicas made in the
same size of the original that were signed by the master artist), but also how painters
anticipated the reproduction of their work and welcomed reproductive engraving as a way
to translate their work for posterity, thus treating their paintings as models or prototypes
for reproduction.
57
Bann argues that he is recapturing complexities of reproduction that
ended with modernism, but the Picasso/de la Baume-Dürrbach tapestries demonstrate that

55
Tapestry promoters also frequently compared weavers’ work to that of musicians performing or
executing a piece based on the conductor’s notation, but this metaphor was more frequently used
by artists who wanted to emphasize their control as “conductors” over tapestry production even
though they did not weave their own works. See, for example, Mario Prassinos, “Le Carton de
Tapisserie [The Tapestry Cartoon]”, Graphis 151, no. 26 (1970-1971): 427-435.
56
Ségolène Le Men, “Printmaking as metaphor for translation: Philippe Burty and the Gazette des
Beaux-Arts in the Second Empire,” in Art Cirticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century
France, ed. Michael R. Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 88-108.
57
Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-
Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15-41; 150.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 101
these ambiguities continued into the modernist period. Although Picasso presumably did
not anticipate reproducing his works in tapestry when he first painted Guernica or
Demoiselles d’Avignon, he welcomed the opportunity to have his works reproduced in
this way and acknowledged his authorship of these tapestries even as he shared that
authorship with de la Baume-Dürrbach.
De la Baume-Dürrbach’s position as an artistic translator was well established in
the French sphere of tapestry production. She was somewhat unusual in having such a
small “workshop,” in which she executed nearly all of the work herself,
58
and for being
located away from the traditional centers of tapestry production. She and her husband
René Dürrbach, a sculptor who also designed stained glass windows and the occasional
tapestry, lived and worked in a villa in Cavalaire that belonged to their friend, the Cubist
painter Albert Gleizes. Gleizes had invited the Dürrbachs to move from Paris to his house
in the South of France when the couple married in 1949. At this time, de la Baume-
Dürrbach had just completed a tapestry weaving apprenticeship in Paris after studying
sculpture for three years at the Académie Julian.
59
Her ability to retrain in tapestry
weaving and establish a successful weaving enterprise in Cavalaire speaks to how the
postwar revival of French tapestry expanded the industry by bringing new weavers,
artists, and dealers into the trade and extending production beyond the confines of Paris
and Aubusson.
Although de la Baume-Dürrbach wove works of her own design, often with wool
left over from other commissions, she was best known for weaving tapestries after

58
Her daughter Célérier confirms that the only other helpers would have been members of the
immediate family or an occasional apprentice, in conversation with the author, April 2012.
59
“Éléments biographiques,” in René Dürrbach, Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach,
Conversations (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence: Musée Estrine, 2008), 36.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 102
designs by Cubist artists: Gleizes, Jacques Villon, Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay,
Auguste Herbin, and, of course, Picasso. De la Baume-Dürrbach participated in many
group exhibitions and had numerous one-person shows of her reproductive tapestries,
including at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1955 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris in 1959. These exhibitions celebrated her work as a translator or interpreter of great
modernists, focusing on both her skill of execution and her sensitivity to the original
model. They presented de la Baume-Dürrbach as a named artist with unique talents but
nevertheless only exhibited the work she had made after or in imitation of that of other
artists. In this sense de la Baume-Dürrbach was comparable to Pierre Baudouin, a painter
and cartoonist who helped translate the models of well-known artists, most notably Le
Corbusier, into tapestry cartoons and oversaw their execution, or to Yvette Cauquil-
Prince, another independent weaver best known for her collaborations with Marc
Chagall. These figures were recognized in France for their artistry, but for the art of
translating the works of greater geniuses into new forms. André de Persine, who wrote
the catalogue essay for an exhibition of Tapisseries d’interpretation libre [Freely
Interpreted Tapestries] at the Galerie d’Aubusson in Paris in 1961, summarized this
attitude when he described the “art of interpretation” as taking on “such an important role
that the created works acquire their own life, independent from the models that have
inspired them.”
60

In her correspondence with Rockefeller’s curator, Carol Uht, de la Baume-
Dürrbach repeatedly insisted that the tapestry should be a translation of Picasso’s painting
rather than a copy. For example, when Uht repeatedly and painstakingly diagrammed

60
André de Persine, “Préface,” Tapisseries d’interpretation libre (Paris: Galerie d’Aubusson,
1961), 2 (my translation).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 103
Night Fishing at Antibes in an effort to improve the accuracy of its tapestry reproduction,
de la Baume-Dürrbach rejected the model of reproduction entirely. She wrote, “If the
accords of color are to be respected when translating the painting material into the wool
material, as well as the subtle modulations, we cannot copy the ‘tricky brushwork.’ This
error is banished since the renovation of French tapestry, and this is Picasso’s firm will.
Of course you know that we work with his entire approval.”
61
Here, de la Baume-
Dürrbach called on two separate authorities to reinforce her position: the author Picasso,
who, the weaver implied, did not want the tapestry to excessively imitate his painting;
and the modern tapestry revival, whose rhetoric argued for the clear separation of tapestry
and painting and rejected centuries of tapestry production as having too slavishly copied
paintings on canvas. In comparing the two versions of Night Fishing at Antibes, one can
see how the tapestry translates the painting into something quite different (Fig. 2.4). The
blended modulations in the green river at the bottom of the painting become distinct
blocks of color that resemble patchwork. In the tapestry, colors at the top of the image
have become brighter, the glow of the yellows, oranges, and reds burning with greater
intensity, and Picasso’s Cubist-derived geometric shapes have become even crisper and
blockier. De la Baume-Dürrbach’s technique of “weaving without sewing” mortises the
different colored sections together so that each shape has a jagged outline that interlocks
with the jagged outline of the neighboring shape. While the painting still retains a sense
of depth, particularly through the recession of the landscape behind the figure of the
fisherman, the tapestry collapses space even more dramatically into a single plane. De la
Baume-Dürrbach has mapped Picasso’s composition onto the fine grid of the tapestry’s
weave.

61
JBD to CKU, 24 Sept 1966, folder 232, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 104
De la Baume-Dürrbach also insisted that the tapestries should have a more
monumental scale than the paintings on which they were based. This frustrated Uht
because the tapestries were priced by the square meter, and she felt that de la Baume-
Dürrbach was simply interested in raising the cost of the tapestries. As she wrote to
Rockefeller: “Picasso always increases the sizes, trying to help the weavers, but of course
you do not have to approve these.”
62
Uht repeatedly tried to get Rockefeller to insist on a
smaller tapestry and similarly tried to discount the idea that only a larger work would
satisfy Picasso’s artistic wishes. But de la Baume-Dürrbach reiterated that “the sizes of
all the tapestries woven or to be woven are determined by Picasso,” and claimed she had
tried to no avail to change Picasso’s mind: “Since Governor Rockefeller expressed his
wish to have smaller tapestries, we recall it to Picasso […] He says that a tapestry has to
be quite bigger than the picture, not a reduction.”
63
Here again, de la Baume-Dürrbach
insisted that a painting and a tapestry should be essentially different rather than similar.
Uht acknowledged this but tried to remain firm: “He [Rockefeller] understands
completely the concept of a tapestry being different from a painting but, nevertheless,
does not want to buy such a large version of this.”
64
Above all, Uht was frustrated that
Rockefeller’s wishes counted for nothing when de la Baume-Dürrbach could simply
claim that “Picasso” was calling the shots: “I have avoided screaming,” Uht wrote to
Rockefeller’s assistant “that NAR should, after all, have some say in what he is going to
pay for etc., […] you know I feel strongly that they are taking NAR for every cent they

62
CKU to NAR, 4 June 1970, folder 229, box 27, NAR Papers.
63
JBD to CKU, 8 Aug 1970, fold 228, box 27, NAR Papers.
64
CKU to JBD, 22 Sept 1970, folder 228, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 105
can squeeze out. There is no generosity of feeling even after all those tapestries he’s had
already. Such greed!”
65

While Uht considered de la Baume-Dürrbach a greedy and perhaps sloppy
reproducer of Picassos, today we might be more inclined to view a weaver’s subtly
altered recreations of another artist’s work as a form of appropriation, a new expression
with ironic or subversive possibilities. Yet the careers of de la Baume-Dürrbach,
Baudouin, and other tapestry makers were predicated on willing collaboration with and
personal approval from the artists whose work they reproduced. If de la Baume-Dürrbach
relied on Picasso and other Cubists for designs that would get her tapestries exhibited and
sold, Picasso willingly allowed de la Baume-Dürrbach to reproduce and re-circulate his
work. Being a friend and colleague of Picasso’s provided de la Baume-Dürrbach with a
livelihood but also with a high degree of independence and autonomy. As the sole
executor of these tapestries who commanded her own workshop as well as Picasso’s trust
and respect, de la Baume-Dürrbach was not answerable to a master weaver, workshop
owner, artist, or, as her correspondence with Rockefeller repeatedly makes clear, to a
buyer. She wove these tapestries in whatever way she saw fit and relied on Picasso to
legitimate her work by approving the final result. And evidence suggests that Picasso
never asked de la Baume-Dürrbach to make changes,
66
even when, according to Alfred
Barr, she strayed significantly from the artist’s model. For example, Picasso particularly
admired the Demoiselles d’Avignon tapestry that Barr found so objectionable. Picasso

65
CKU to LAB, n.d., c. 20 Aug 1970, folder 236, box 28, NAR Papers.
66
According to her daughter Célérier, Picasso always approved of de la Baume-Dürrbach’s work,
and this is born out by the archives in the sense that there is no record of de la Baume-Dürrbach
re-making a tapestry to satisfy Picasso. In conversation with the author, April 2012.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 106
bought one of the exemplaires for himself and hung it in the studio of La Californie, his
villa in the South of France (Fig. 2.11).
Weavers at larger workshops likewise asserted their role as talented translators of
the artist’s model, even to the extent of refusing work that was not sufficiently
complicated to exercise their skills. François Tabard directed the Atelier Tabard, a
century-old tapestry workshop in Aubusson, France, and collaborated with Denise René,
the Parisian art dealer, to produce tapestries by abstract artists, including Jean Arp, Sonia
Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Victor Vasarely, and
Josef Albers. The thirteen Albers tapestries, woven at the Atelier Tabard between 1967
and 1974, were based on the artist’s paintings of nested squares in different color
combinations, known collectively as Homage to the Square.
67
Albers began
corresponding directly with Tabard to finalize the details of the tapestry designs and
particularly their colors. He often wrote two or three rounds of letters asking for “delicate
and precise changes” such as a “central Gray” that “must be lighter and more yellower so
that it becomes more similar with the in-between Gray,” or a “more warm (that is
reddish) orange instead of brown.”
68
It was minute color changes such as these that
differentiated the compositions of Albers’s extensive Homage to the Square series, a
series that should, I am suggesting, include Albers’s tapestries as well as his paintings

67
Bleu, gris, anthracite, 180 x 180 cm; Deux ocres, jaune, orange, 180 x 180 cm; Deux certs, un
bleu, 180 x 180 cm, Full, 175 x 175 cm; Jaune, crevette, orange, 180 x 180 cm, Quatre carrés
bleu, gris, ocre, jaune, 172 x 172 cm; Quatre carrés jaune, orange, 172 x 172 cm; Quatre carrés,
quatre couleurs, 180 x 180 cm; Quatre carrés orange, 178 x 178 cm; Trois carrés bleu, gris,
anthracite, 180 x 180 cm; Trois carrés, trois jaunes, 180 x 180 cm; and Un carré bleu, deux
carrés gris, dimensions not recorded. See Hélène Say, L’Atelier de Tapisserie Tabard à
Aubusson: Répertoire numérique détaillé des archives écrites (Gueret: Archives Departementales
and Conseil General de la Creuse; Aubusson: Musée departementales de la Tapisserie, 1996), 55.
68
JA to FT, 23 July, 1967, 10 April 1967, folder 30 J 276/1, Atelier Tabard Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 107
and prints. But while René and Albers were both pleased with these works, Tabard’s
weavers found the series overly repetitive. Tabard explained their dissatisfaction to René:
We should tell you on that subject that for psychological reasons we would prefer that
from now on you stop commissioning these Albers tapestries of superimposed squares.
Our personnel feel that this type of work is too mechanical and totally devoid of interest,
and we have had great difficulty in getting them to execute the last two exemplaires that
you commissioned. We would be obliged if you would not take any new engagements for
these models [on our behalf].
69

Despite being engaged in the profession of reproducing artists’ models as tapestries,
Tabard’s weavers clearly had their own standards and were unwilling to squander their
skills on designs that they considered simplistic or more suited to machine weaving.
These laborers had enough leverage to resist work they found uninteresting and pressure
their employer into turning down future similar commissions, demonstrating that the
success and continuation of any tapestry project required not only the approval of the
artist but also, and perhaps even more definitively, the approval of the weavers.
70

Curators and the “Original”

Understanding tapestry as a work of translation with at least two authors, the artist
and the weaver, muddles any distinction between reproductive tapestries like Guernica,
in which the model is an already extant painting, and “original” tapestries in which the

69
My translation from the original French: “Nous devons vous dire à ce sujet que pour des
raisons d’ordre pyschologique nous préférions que vous stoppiez désormais les commandes de
ces tapisseries d’Albers à carrés superposés. Notre personnel juge en effect ce genre de travail
trop mécanique et totalement dépourvu d’intéret et nous avons eu de grosses difficultés à faire
executer les deux derniers exemplaires que vous nous aviez commandés. Aussi nous vous serions
obliges de ne pas prendre de nouveaux engagements sur ces modèles.” François Tabard (FT) to
Denise René (DR), 2 May 1974, folder 30 J 296/3, Atelier Tabard Papers, Archives
Departementales de la Creuse, Guéret, France.
70
Tapestry weavers, like most French workers, were organized into unions. In 1952, about 94%
of the 220-230 tapestry workers in Aubusson went on strike to protest their low wages. The
unions also worked to attract young people to the trade. See Robert Guinot, chapter 10 in La
Tapisserie d’Aubusson et de Felletin (Saint-Paul: Lucien Souny, 2009).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 108
artist creates a new design specifically for the tapestry medium. In both cases production
is split between the artist and the weavers who translate the artist’s model, because the
tapestry is always already reproducing a prior work. Nevertheless, Alfred Barr and other
curators committed to the notion of artistic originality tried to preserve a distinction
between reproductive and original tapestry.
In fact, Rockefeller’s first Picasso tapestry was not the Guernica he
commissioned in 1955, but a work he bought three years earlier on Barr’s
recommendation. The tapestry, which Barr called Oedipus and the Sphinx had been
woven after a cartoon Picasso made in 1934 for Marie Cuttoli (Fig. 2.12). Cuttoli, whom
I will discuss in more detail in chapter 3, had commissioned such canonical modern
artists as Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Raoul Dufy, and Georges
Rouault to design tapestries for her during the 1930s, and those familiar with modern
tapestry in the United States around mid-century widely credited Cuttoli with
spearheading the revival of tapestry as a medium for modern art. Barr presented the
purchase of Oedipus and the Sphinx to Rockefeller as a particularly exciting opportunity
to acquire one of these rare and famous works, “the best of all the tapestries
commissioned by Marie Cuttoli.” He emphasized the importance of Oedipus and the
Sphinx further by pointing out that the first tapestry in the edition had been purchased at a
higher price ($6,000 instead of the current asking price of $4,000) by Dr. Albert C.
Barnes, the infamous art collector and founder of the Barnes Foundation in
Pennsylvania,
71
and by narrating his discovery of the tapestry as a particularly close call:

71
Although this is not mentioned in Rockefeller’s correspondence, another copy of Oedipus and
the Sphinx had been purchased by Helena Rubinstein and hung in her New York apartment. See
Dominique Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli: Myrbor et l’invention de la tapisserie moderne (Paris: Editions
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 109
I saw it at Mme Cuttoli’s an hour after Maria Martins and Senhora [sic] Bittencourt had
selected it for a show in Brazil where undoubtedly it would have been sold. (The
Brazilians led by Matorazzo have been buying like mad in Italy and Paris.) It was leaving
the house for the shipper the following morning so I bought it. (Blanchette [wife of
Nelson’s brother John D. Rockefeller III] was crazy about it.) I’ll write separately how it
should be paid for.
72

Barr purchased this work when he was in Paris scouting for possible acquisitions for
MoMA and other collectors. Although Barr lists several works of art in his letter to
Rockefeller, Oedipus and the Sphinx is the one about which Barr is most enthusiastic, as
reflected by his lack of hesitation in buying the work without Rockefeller’s prior
approval.
In 1963, Rockefeller went on to buy another Cuttoli tapestry, Window at Tahiti
(Papeete), which had been woven in 1935 after an original design by Matisse. Six years
later, when Barr and Dorothy Miller, then Senior Curator at MoMA, organized the
exhibition of Twentieth Century Art from the Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, they
displayed these two Cuttoli tapestries but did not include any that Rockefeller had
himself commissioned from de la Baume-Dürrbach.
73
This decision indicates that the
curators distinguished between the former as original, historically significant works of art
and the latter as mere reproductions that were unworthy of being exhibited in MoMA’s
galleries.
74
This was certainly the view of James Mellow, who wrote an article about
“Rocky As a Collector” on the occasion of the exhibition. Mellow argued that what
distinguished Rockefeller as a collector was his use of “a shadow cabinet made up of

Norma, 2010), 80, 98. Paulvé titles the tapestry Confidences. MoMA and Rockefeller staff
members also later referred to the work as Two Women.
72
AHB to NAR, 31 July 1952, folder 165, box 19, NAR Papers.
73
Oedipus and the Sphinx appeared under the title Two Women.
74
As Richard Meyer has shown, Barr did exhibit art reproductions both in and out of MoMA
before World War II. Barr’s later exclusion of reproductive tapestries may reflect a rising
standard of originality. See Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2013), especially 74-81; 123-124, 128-160.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 110
some of the country’s top-level curatorial names,” including Barr, Miller, and the late
René d’Harnoncourt, all MoMA staff members, but he noted:
To the chagrin of both Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr, he has had several of the
Modern’s Picasso masterpieces—including “The Three Musicians” and “Night Fishing at
Antibes” and even Picasso’s dramatic “Guernica”—reproduced in tapestry form, with the
connivance of Picasso himself, who has approved the work and selected the colors for the
yarns. Significantly, the only Picasso tapestry chosen for the Modern’s shown is the 1934
“Two Women,” a work for which Picasso expressly created the cartoon.
75

Mellow’s characterization of Miller and Barr as “chagrined” does not tell the whole story,
obscuring how actively (if also, at times, reluctantly) Barr facilitated Rockefeller’s
acquisition of these reproductive tapestries by checking yarn samples and color
transparencies. But the article does demonstrate how evident MoMA’s involvement in
Rockefeller’s collection was, even to outsiders, and it implies that it was Rockefeller’s
position of power at MoMA that made his collection of Picasso tapestries possible.
However, MoMA did not just reluctantly go along with the creation of
reproductive tapestries to accommodate a crucial patron like Rockefeller. Barr continued
to encourage Rockefeller to buy these types of tapestries, including a tapestry after
Picasso’s Girl on the Beach that was available at the Saidenberg Gallery in 1964 for
$15,000.
76
MoMA even commissioned its own reproductive tapestries, as it did in the
case of Miró’s 1933-34 painting Hirondelle Amour (Fig. 2.13).
77
The painting was one of
the works Barr recommended that Nelson Rockefeller purchase in 1952 along with
Oedipus and the Sphinx, and in 1958 Rockefeller included it on a list of promised gifts to
MoMA. But Rockefeller deleted the work from his revised list of promised gifts in 1969,
causing a great deal of consternation at the Museum. The situation was particularly acute

75
Mellow, “Rocky As a Collector,” 56.
76
AHB to NAR, 11 March 1964, folder 9, box A, AHB Papers.
77
I am using MoMA’s current title for the work, Hirondelle Amour, although in the
correspondence I cite it is often referred to as L’Hirondelle d’amour.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 111
because when William S. Rubin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, met with Miró
in 1967 he had used MoMA’s acquisition of Hirondelle Amour as evidence of the
institution’s commitment to representing the artist’s work. Rubin explained the dilemma
to Blanchette Rockefeller, Nelson’s sister-in-law and a member of MoMA’s Board of
Trustees: “This was in connection with a discussion of a possible ‘Homage to Miró’ show
to be held in 1973 in celebration of his eightieth birthday. Miró was surprised and
delighted by the range of work we possess and felt especially strongly about L’Hirondelle
d’amour, since it is the largest work from his most important series of the 1930s.” By
representing Hirondelle Amour as part of MoMA’s collection, Rubin had led Miró to gift
his own works to the Museum and to facilitate acquisitions from other sources. “If the
Governor knew all this,” Rubin continued, “I am sure he would understand how, quite
apart from the loss of so intrinsically great a work as L’Hirondelle d’amour, the Museum
Collection might stand to lose a great deal more from Miró himself, since he would
undoubtedly be very hurt if an important work which had been represented to him as
eventually coming to the Museum were suddenly to turn up elsewhere.”
78

Dorothy Miller, who by this time had retired from MoMA but was still actively
involved with Rockefeller’s collection, devised a possible solution to this problem. She
suggested that Rockefeller’s reason for keeping Hirondelle Amour might be to preserve
the arrangement of artworks at his country house, Kykuit, “in the event that his estate
should be given to New York State.” Indeed, Hirondelle Amour occupied a particularly
prominent place in the music room at Kykuit, but Miller suggested that since “Nelson is
fond of tapestries,” he “possibly would be willing to have a tapestry made for the house

78
William S. Rubin (WSR) to Blanchette Rockefeller, 25 February 1971, folder 163, box 19,
NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 112
and let the painting come to the Museum as formerly planned.” Miller thought a tapestry
reproduction of the work particularly appropriate because Miró painted Hirondelle
Amour for Marie Cuttoli as a tapestry design, although Miller was not sure if the work
had ever been executed in tapestry.
79
In fact, at least one Hirondelle Amour tapestry was
woven in the 1930s (Fig. 2.14) and was shown in New York at the Sidney Janis Gallery
in 1958, when it was acquired for the Seagram Building.
80
Rockefeller agreed to accept a
tapestry version of Hirondelle Amour in place of the painting, and Rubin organized the
weaving of an edition of three tapestries at the Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris. One of
the tapestries was designated for Rockefeller, a second for MoMA, and a third for Miró.
Miró apparently insisted that the works be woven at the Gobelins, home to “the very best
tapestry makers in the world.” Although the commission required special negotiation
since they normally produce works only for the French government and not for outside
clients, Rubin reported that “the Gobelins have generously agreed to execute this edition
as an accommodation to the Museum (charging it, as it does the French Government,
simply on the basis of labor costs and materials).”
81
MoMA assumed all the costs of
producing the tapestries,
82
and Uht, just as she had done with the Picasso tapestries,

79
Dorothy C. Miller to WSR, 30 Oct 1971, Dorothy C. Miller Papers (DCM Papers),
Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, DC.
80
Modern French Tapestries by Braque, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Rouault: exhibition,
April 21-May 17 (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1958). See Phyllis Lambert, Building
Seagram, foreword Barry Bergdoll (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 165,
278n77.
81
WSR to NAR, 16 May 1972, folder 163, box 19, NAR Papers. According to records published
by the Gobelins, they wove six copies of the Hirondelle Amour tapestry. The first four (1972,
1973, and two woven in 1976) were sold to MoMA. The last two were woven in 1977 and 1979.
Chantal Gastinel-Coural, Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins: État de la Fabrication de 1900 à
1990 (Lyon: CIETA, 1990), 27, 29.
82
BJ to CKU, 11 July 1972, folder 163, box 19, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 113
matched colors against the painting at Kykuit and made notations by hand on a diagram
of the work.
83

Despite the care taken in the production of the tapestry, Rockefeller was not
satisfied with the finished work and did not consider it a suitable alternative for the
Hirondelle Amour painting. Carol Uht conveyed the news to Rubin and reported back to
Rockefeller that the curator was “distressed and incredulous” at this development. Rubin
told Uht that Miró had been enthusiastic about the project and had visited the Gobelins
several times to supervise the selection of colors, the cartoon, and the weaving. Rubin
even claimed that he had had to travel to Paris to get the tapestry out of the country
because “the French customs had not wanted to part with it, as a French national
treasure.”
84
But Rockefeller would take nothing less than a painted copy of Hirondelle
Amour, which Rubin eventually agreed to after MoMA’s Miró exhibition closed in
December 1973 and the danger of displeasing Miró had more or less passed. Miró’s
permission was still required, but the artist was willing to authorize a copy “given the
generosity of Governor Rockefeller in bequeathing the original of Hirondelle/Amour to
the Museum of Modern Art of New York.”
85
Miró specified that the copy had to have
slightly different dimensions and be marked “copy” on both the front and back, so as to
distinguish it from the original, and when Rubin commissioned a local artist named Paul
Kichart to execute the copy, he enumerated additional variations, such as the copy being
painted in oils diluted with a synthetic resin medium rather than turpentine. After being
installed at Kykuit, the word “copy” on the front of the painting appeared too obvious,
and Rubin suggested that it be replaced with the word “replique” in a less contrasting

83
Copies in folder 163, box 19, NAR Papers.
84
CKU to NAR, 21 September 1973, folder 163, box 19, NAR Papers.
85
Joan Miró to WSR, n.d., translation, folder 163, box 19, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 114
color.
86
Rockefeller was pleased with the final result, and today the copy continues to
hang in the music room at Kykuit (now a National Trust property), in the place once
occupied by the original painting (Fig. 2.15).
Should the Hirondelle Amour tapestries MoMA commissioned be considered
originals, because their model was first intended as a tapestry design, or as reproductions,
because they were meant to replicate and replace an already extant painting? Even if
Rubin justified the tapestries as works that fulfilled Miró’s original intentions, his
willingness to create a painted copy of Hirondelle Amour in order to satisfy Rockefeller
speaks to the museum’s collusion with reproduction. At first, Rubin insisted on
differences between the original and the copy, specifying even more distinctions than
Miró himself had required. But ultimately Rubin prioritized the appearance of the copy
and Rockefeller’s satisfaction with it over Miró’s wishes, allowing Kichart to change
“copy” to the somehow less jarring “replique” without Miró’s direct approval. MoMA
did all of this in order to secure the presence of the “original” Hirondelle Amour in its
collection, and yet the museum’s actions problematize the painting’s relation to
reproduction. Its curators understood this tapestry model simultaneously as an
autonomous art object and as a prototype for the production of other art objects.
Despite the utilitarian purpose of a tapestry model as a design or prototype for
tapestry production, museums have repeatedly valued them as the material objects that
best preserve an artist’s intention, and today museums are more likely to exhibit tapestry
models such as Hirondelle Amour than the tapestries that they produced. We can see this
dynamic even more clearly in the subsequent history of Matisse’s cartoons for his

86
MoMA Memo re: “Copy of Miró Hirondelle Amour” September 1974, folder 196, box 19,
NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 115
Polynésie tapestry diptych, Le Ciel and La Mer, designed for the Manufacture de
Beauvais in 1946. Matisse used his technique of gouaches découpés or paper cut outs to
produce the cartoons, which consist of a checkerboard of deep blue and turquoise squares
overlaid with motifs cut from white paper and surrounded by a simple border (Figs. 2.16-
2.17). After the artist’s death in 1954, when the cartoons were becoming fragile and their
colors were fading, the Manufactures Nationales commissioned Lydia Delectorskaya to
restore the cartoons, demonstrating their commitment to preserving these works as
indexes of the artist’s intention.
87
Delectorskaya painted over Matisse’s paper cut outs
with gouache and applied them to a canvas backing, giving them a dramatically smoother
appearance than they had originally had. The Centre Pompidou in Paris now displays
Delectorskaya’s restorations as original works of art by Matisse (Fig. 2.18). The labels
that identify these works in the museum gallery list Matisse as the artist and the date as
1946, disavowing their history of subsequent alteration. Moreover, although the labels
credit the works as a donation from the Manufactures Nationales, they make no mention
of the fact that Matisse designed the originals as tapestry cartoons, thereby divorcing
them from their original context.
The Centre Pompidou’s curators may consider these works valuable additions to
the museum galleries because they are large and colorful, and because they do evoke the
paper cut outs for which Matisse is so well known. The museum’s display of these

87
Delectorskaya began working as Matisse’s assistant in 1932 and modeling for him in 1935. She
photographed Matisse’s work during the early 1950s and assisted with his late collage works.
After his death in 1954, Delectorskaya promoted Matisse’s work by organizing exhibitions and
assisting with research and publishing projects. She also wrote her own books on the artist,
L’apparente facilité: Henri Matisse, peintures de 1935-1939 (Paris: A. Maeght, 1986) and Henri
Matisse: contre vents et marées, peinture et livres illustrés de 1939 à 1943 (Paris: Editions Irus et
Vincent Hansma, 1996). See Jill Berk Jiminez, ed., Dictionary of Artists’ Models (New York:
Routledge, 2001), 147-148.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 116
restored cartoons warrants comparison with MoMA’s acquisition of Miró’s Hirondelle
Amour in that both demonstrate how art institutions are inclined to appropriate tapestry
models and re-contextualize them as extraordinary examples of an artist’s work. Instead
of exhibiting the finished tapestries that Miró and Matisse anticipated as the desired
results of their prototypes, these museums have displayed the prototypes themselves as
autonomous works. In some ways this is not at all surprising. Miró’s painting and
Matisse’s cartoons are autograph works by well-known artists, even if the latter have
been heavily restored, and each appears to be a finished work that is characteristic of its
artist’s signature style. Yet when we compare this museum practice with the treatment of
other reproductive media, its strangeness becomes apparent. Museums generally display
lithographic prints rather than the stones or plates on which the artist drew, cast bronze
statues rather than clay models, and photographic prints rather than negatives. Although
in these cases the autograph prototype might be displayed in exhibitions that specifically
address an artist’s working process or methods of art production, the prototype would
never substitute for the finished work as an adequate manifestation of the artist’s
intention. In the case of tapestry, however, the prototype already appears finished, and if
it does not, it can be “restored” to appear so. Museums can thus prioritize the hand of the
artist over his conception or intention, in direct opposition to the collectors, artists,
dealers, and curators who valued tapestries as the fulfillment of an artist’s idea.

The Dealer’s Multiples

Most tapestry weavers in the twentieth century worked strictly on commission,
weaving specific tapestries either directly for collectors or artists or, more often, for a
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 117
dealer seeking to exhibit and sell a small collection of tapestries. These dealers or other
clients who provided the financial backing for tapestries they planned to sell were called
éditeurs or the feminine éditrices in French, or, in English translation, publishers. The use
of this term indicates a parallel in France between the activity of publishing printed
materials such as books and art prints and the activity of producing tapestries. In both
cases the process required both an author or artist, on the one hand, and a printer or
weaver, on the other, as well as a “publisher” who could liaise between these two types of
producers to manage the process and attend to the product’s viability in the market.
Indeed, in the market for modern art, tapestries and printed materials such as lithographs
and engravings occupied similar positions. Both mediums produced works in multiple
and allowed collectors to buy a canonical artist’s work for significantly less than the cost
of a singular painting, thereby expanding the market for modern art to younger and less
affluent collectors. Such tapestry publishers as Denise René and Gloria Ross took
advantage of this new market for modern art by selling tapestries and art prints side by
side. But differences between the business models of tapestry and art print publishers
caused the former industry to decline while the latter continued to flourish.
Denise René was a postwar dealer best known for promoting geometric
abstractionists, kinetic artists, and Op artists including Piet Mondrian, Sonia Delaunay,
Alexander Calder, Yaakov Agam, and especially Victor Vasarely. René had been
collaborating with François Tabard to create tapestries by abstract artists since the early
1950s, when, in 1966, she began selling these works at her Left Bank gallery. The
Galerie Denise René Rive Gauche was located at 196 Boulevard Saint-Germain and, as
René explained to one of her artists, Josef Albers, it was “dedicated to Editions only, and
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 118
Tapestries, ‘multiples’!”
88
By establishing this gallery devoted to the twin multiples of
tapestries and art prints in the somewhat bohemian area of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, René
was clearly appealing to a younger and less affluent audience for abstract art.
René also encouraged artists like Albers, who had not previously designed
tapestries, to consider the medium by comparing it to art printing. René had been
publishing albums of works by Albers since the early 1960s, and she explained to the
artist that, for him, the processes for producing his tapestries and art prints would be
similar. Albers would send a model for a print or tapestry to René and receive a proof or
weaving sample in return, on which he could make corrections. René even suggested that
Albers could use one or more of his already extant prints as tapestry models, though she
encouraged him to provide original tapestry designs.
89

While Denise René engaged in a long-term collaboration with a single tapestry
workshop, the Atelier Tabard, the American tapestry producer Gloria Ross worked with a
variety of different weavers over the course of her 30-year career. These included
established European tapestry workshops such as the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh and
the Maison Pinton and Atelier Raymond Picaud, both in the traditional tapestry-
producing area around Aubusson, France, as well as a variety of independent weavers
and hand-woven rug manufacturers in the US.
90
Ross was adamant about labeling and
marketing the tapestries she published as “Gloria F. Ross” tapestries, turning her name

88
DR to Josef Albers (JA), 23 April 1966, folder 8, box 18, Series I.B. Josef Albers Papers, Josef
and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT.
89
DR to JA, 5 August 1966, folder 8, box 18, Series I.B., Josef Albers Papers.
90
Ross also experimented with tapestry weavers is Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Mexico, Turkey,
Portugal, and Australia. Near the end of her career she organized a decade-long collaboration
between Kenneth Noland and Native American weavers in the southwest US that produced 24
different tapestry designs. See Ann Lane Hedlund, Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry,
foreword by Grace Glueck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with
Arizona State Museum, the University of Arizona, Tucson, 2010), chapters 6 and 7.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 119
into a brand that often overshadowed the names of the workshops or independent
weavers who actually fabricated the works. Although Ross’s role in obtaining models
from artists and corresponding with weavers on the best way to translate them was
certainly an active one, after her first few projects Ross never wove the works herself.
Her branding or claim of authorship could thus exasperate some weavers who felt their
own work was denied as a result. Molli Fletcher was a New York artist who wove one
tapestry for Ross but took issue with how the work was credited in an exhibition
catalogue. Pointing out that Ross never named the weavers of her tapestries, not even in a
footnote, she complained that “one is left with the impression that you wove those
tapestries.” Fletcher found this particularly galling because she had considered the
process of working with Ross especially collaborative and appreciated how Ross
encouraged weavers to experiment. “It is their creative abilities that make the tapestries
what they are,” Fletcher wrote, and they “should be recognized as more than ‘magic
fingers’; they are a very talented group and should be given credit as such.”
91

Ross apparently found crediting the weavers and crediting her own production
role mutually exclusive practices, as though the American market would not be able to
conceive of an art form that required the collaboration of more than two participants, the
artist-designer and the fabricator. Since the success of Ross’s enterprise clearly relied on
the prestige of the artists with whom she worked—such artists as Milton Avery, Gene
Davis, Stuart Davis, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans
Hoffman, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Frank
Stella, and Jack Youngerman—Ross seems to have decided that if these names were

91
Ibid., 84.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 120
going to share the authorial spotlight with anyone it should be with herself, and not with a
bevy of weavers who could apparently remain safely anonymous.
Although Ross worked to preserve her personal tapestry brand, she never had her
own gallery. Instead, she worked with a series of fine art dealers to sell her tapestries on
commission. The first to represent her in 1967 was Richard Feigen, who had already sold
tapestries from Denise René at his gallery in Chicago the year before.
92
Ross then
reached an agreement with Richard H. Solomon, president of Pace Editions, the arm of
Pace Gallery that specializes in art prints and multiples. In 1972, Pace Editions became
the exclusive agent for Ross’s tapestries for two years and was her major East Coast
representative into the 1990s. Through this arrangement, Ross’s tapestries, like Denise
René’s somewhat earlier, were presented in the context of the fine art multiple to a
market in which collectors did not shy away from reproductions that allowed them to
acquire works by well-known artists at relatively low cost.
The expansion of the market for modern tapestries occurred during the same
postwar period and shared several similarities with the so-called “print renaissance” that
elevated lithography and art prints generally “from a little known minor art to one of the
most vital and creative forces in American culture today.”
93
This is how Daniel Fendrick
represented the movement in the catalogue of a 1974 exhibition entitled The American
Painter as Printmaker, and his language echoed the rhetoric that accompanied the
tapestry revival. In both cases, champions of the craft presented it as having gone into
decline only to be revived by the activities of celebrated modern painters so that it had
now come to occupy a prominent place in the contemporary art world. Fendrick also

92
Tapestries at Feigen (Chicago: Richard Feigen Gallery, 1966).
93
Daniel Fendrick, The American Painter as Printmaker (Washington, DC: Fendrick Gallery,
1974), 1.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 121
emphasized France as the origin of the print renaissance, focusing on how both Tatyana
Grosman, the founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Inc., in New York, and
June Wayne, founder of the Tamarind Workshop in Los Angeles, had both become aware
of lithography in France and modeled their American workshops on French precedents.
Fendrick thus presented Grosman and Wayne as rescuing the archaic craft of
lithography—whose purported obsolescence was nicely captured by Robert
Rauschenberg’s statement that “the second half of the twentieth century was no time to
start writing on rocks”—from its traditional home in France and bringing it to the US
where it could flourish in the vibrancy of postwar American art. Wayne in particular had
a mission “to resuscitate the art of lithography in America, recreate a population of
master-printers, and provide a center where mature artists could, with the help of skilled
technicians, print their editions. […] No longer would American artists have to travel to
Paris make lithographs.”
94

Art printing thus shared a workshop methodology that was similar to tapestry
weaving, a production process that relied on preserving the technical skills of master
craftspeople so that they could execute the designs of celebrated artists. The association
of tapestries and prints with craft and their resuscitation of supposedly vanishing skills
thus worked to justify or mitigate their status as reproductions. Dealers and curators
emphasized the archaic labor and skillful execution that produced tapestries and art prints
in order to distance them from the mass-produced, mechanical reproductions of their day.
Moreover, their rhetoric implied that such crafts ought to be preserved for the good of
contemporary artists, who would somehow benefit from reproducing their work with
such traditional methods.

94
Ibid., 1-2.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 122
In her introduction to a 1971 exhibition of Oversize Prints at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, Elke Solomon follows a similar train of thought by arguing
that the rise of print workshops and publishers in the US and Canada during the late
1950s and 1960s—Solomon mentions Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), the
Hollander Workshop, the Halifax Lithography Workshop, Brooke Alexander Ltd., and
Cirrus Editions, as well as ULAE and Tamarind—had infused printmaking with greater
capital and resources and thus fueled technical experimentation. Solomon framed this
experimentation in modernist terms as an exploration of the medium. “Printmaking,” she
writes, “is a distinct art form and its styles and problems are ultimately its own.
Consequently, curiosity and the desire to experiment are themselves sufficient motivation
to drive the artist beyond the traditional limitations of his medium and his materials.”
95
In
this way, too, the print renaissance is comparable to the tapestry revival, in that
champions of both crafts argued for the importance of medium specificity despite the
roles of these media as forms of reproduction that made multiple copies of an artist’s
design.
While art prints and tapestries shared artists, gallery space, and customers, their
technical differences led to very different business models. Art prints are much cheaper to
produce and can therefore be made in large editions of 100 or more, while the higher
material and labor costs of tapestry production limited tapestry editions. In France the
traditional size of a tapestry edition was six plus one or two “artist’s proofs,” equaling
eight exemplaires at most. Because tapestries had more limited editions than art prints
and were more expensive to make, they naturally sold for higher prices. Ann Hedlund has
calculated that while Gloria Ross priced her hand woven tapestries at anywhere from

95
Elke Solomon, Oversize Prints (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971), 6-7.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 123
$1,200 to $50,000, they averaged $12,000 and their median price was approximately
$10,000. Art prints in contrast, even those by canonical artists, could sell for as little as
$125.
96
But the higher prices of tapestries did not always translate into higher returns for
the artists who lent their names and designs. While artists could expect royalties of 50%
on the sale of art prints, American tapestry producers usually paid artists a much smaller
commission on each tapestry, closer to 20% or even less. These smaller royalty fees
could leave artists with the impression that they were being short changed, particularly
since they had no information about the tapestry maker’s production costs.
In Europe, by contrast, the artist’s fee was more often based on the cost of making
the tapestry. Archie Brennan, the director of the Dovecot Studios tapestry workshop in
Edinburgh, told Gloria Ross that David Hockney’s fee was 100% of the weaving costs
while the French tapestry artist Jean Lurçat was paid 120%, probably because he created
cartoons himself and thus removed this task from the weavers. Le Corbusier kept records
of his tapestry payments, which reveal that his tapestries were priced at double the cost of
their fabrication, or a 100% markup. The dealer received half of this markup and Le
Corbusier received the other half, so that he was paid 50% of the fabrication costs and
25% of the tapestry’s total price. In some cases, Le Corbusier and his collaborator, Pierre
Baudouin, who translated Le Corbusier’s designs into full-scale tapestry cartoons, sold
tapestries directly to collectors without a dealer. For these sales, Le Corbusier and
Baudouin split the dealer’s 25% between them, with Le Corbusier receiving two thirds
and Baudouin only one third. For creating the cartoon, Baudouin also received 30% to

96
At an extensive sale of contemporary prints at Sotheby’s, New York, in 1975, prints by modern
artists who also authorized tapestries sold for $125 to $4,000 or more, averaging $1,170.
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Prints, Old Master Prints, 13-14 Nov (New York: Sotheby
Parke Bernet, Inc., 1975).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 124
one third of the fabrication costs.
97
Le Corbusier and Baudouin did not always agree on
the best way to market the tapestries, but they generally resolved their differences by
acknowledging that each was profiting from the arrangement. Baudouin wrote to Le
Corbusier in 1958 estimating that the 99 tapestries they had produced to date had a total
surface area of 537,800 square meters and a commercial value of 85 million French
francs. Written before the revaluation of the French franc in 1960, the US dollar
equivalent at the time would have been about $172,170, of which Le Corbusier’s share
was 21,125,000 French francs or $42,790.
98
Few American artists made so much,
primarily because they designed far fewer tapestries, but also because they had less
control over how dealers priced those tapestries.

The Artist’s Series
Although tapestry was often not as profitable as fine art prints, many artists
nevertheless relished tapestry’s reproductive abilities. In a 1970 essay on “The Tapestry
Cartoon,” the French artist Mario Prassinos encouraged artists to take a more active role
in tapestry production by personally creating cartoons rather than making a prior model
that a cartooner or weaver would translate into the cartoon.
99
Prassinos viewed the artist-

97
See undated record of tapestry sales, C1-9-44; calculations of royalties established by Le
Corbusier in 1949, C3-1-429; and Pierre Baudouin to Le Corbusier, 11 Jan 1963, C3-1-432; Le
Corbusier Papers, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, France.
98
Pierre Baudouin to Le Corbusier, 8 Oct 1958, C3-1-493, Le Corbusier Papers.
99
The model is a work produced by an artist in any medium—oil paint, watercolor, gouache,
lithography, collage, even sculpture—that serves as the design for the finished tapestry. This
model is often much smaller than the intended tapestry but shows the composition and colors for
the finished work. From this model, tapestry makers make a cartoon, a working drawing that has
the same dimensions as the intended tapestry. The cartoon may depict colors or only outlines of
the differently colored sections, but it must provide a detailed and precise diagram of the
composition. As working drawings that are used to produce multiple tapestries, and sometimes
actually pinned to the loom to guide the weavers, cartoons often do not survive the production
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 125
made cartoon as a way to reinforce the authorship and increase the autonomy of the artist
within the reproductive practice of tapestry. By taking over the composition of the
cartoon, Prassinos argued, the artist could best extricate himself from the collaborative
process of tapestry production. This autonomy for the artist went hand in hand with
greater autonomy for the tapestry medium. By designing tapestry cartoons directly, the
artist “can now think in wool as he previously thought in oils and watercolours” so that
“his tapestries grow less and less like his paintings.” Prassinos evokes the familiar
opposition of the tableau with the decorative mural (see chapter 3) to reinforce the
importance of such a development for the artist: “This is his real triumph. He has gone
beyond the easel tapestry and is ready to face the great adventure of the mural.”
100

Prassinos thus weighted the artist-made tapestry cartoon with enormous
significance. It could preserve the artist’s authorship and autonomy while liberating
tapestry from the specter of easel painting. Yet, for Prassinos, the tapestry cartoon had
another, more magical function; it operated like a photographic negative or printing plate
from which innumerable positives could be produced throughout time: “I like to think
that the cartoon thus produced is an inexhaustible matrix from which a hundred thousand
tapestries can be made, all of them alike, and one can even imagine, two thousand years
after the death of the artist, two thousand years after the first weaving, now long defaced
or lost, that the work might still be resurrected in all its pristine freshness.”
101
This
statement powerfully encapsulates the appeal of tapestry’s reproductive abilities, the
fantasy of a medium that could generate exact replicas for thousands of years. Prassinos’s

process fully intact and are rarely valued as works of art in the same way as tapestry models
might be.
100
Mario Prassinos, “Le Carton de Tapisserie [The Tapestry Cartoon]”, Graphis 151, no. 26
(1970-1971): 435.
101
Ibid., 435.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 126
language suggests that tapestry had a longevity that photography or other modes of
reproduction lacked, while at the same time it makes a clear comparison between
tapestry’s two-step production process—composing a single cartoon which then
generates multiple tapestries—and similar processes in photography, printing, or cast
sculpture.
As in the production of Rockefeller’s Picasso tapestries, photographs of paintings
could themselves serve as tapestry models, but it was Henri Matisse who first used
photography in this way as a guide for tapestry weaving.
102
Just before creating the
Polynésie cartoons for the Manufacture de Beauvais, Matisse’s first project for the
French state was a tapestry after his 1943 painting Le Luth (Fig. 2.19).
103
Matisse
provided the weavers with two photographic reproductions of the work, a small color
reproduction that had been published in Verve in 1945 and a black-and-white
enlargement that would better indicate the facture of the original painting. Jean Coural
has suggested that Matisse chose Le Luth because he was inspired by fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century tapestries representing pastoral concerts, which had recently been on

102
In c. 1938, Man Ray created an extraordinarily large rayograph, Ombres, as a tapestry model
for Marie Cuttoli, but as this was a unique print, we could understand this photograph as an
original work used to create original tapestries, whereas Picasso, Matisse, and many others used
photography to create reproductions of already extant works that served as models for
reproductive tapestries. Virginia Gardner Troy discussed Ombres in “Critical Reception of the
Cuttoli Tapestries, 1930s-1960s” (paper presented at the College Art Association, New York, 15
February 2013).
103
In 1946 the Manufacture Nationales of France solicited Matisse to take part in a new
experimental tapestry workshop that would be innovative in its use of materials, type of weaving,
and design of cartoons by collaborating with celebrated artists. Matisse had a prior history of
tapestry design but had never before worked with the French government, and he seems to have
taken seriously this opportunity to reform the state tapestry workshops from within. His first
tapestry Fenetre à Tahiti (Papeete) was commissioned by Marie Cuttoli and woven in 1935 at the
Atelier Delarbre in Aubusson, France. Matisse also designed Tahiti II for Cuttoli but it was never
woven. He began a third tapestry model, La Nymphe dans la Foret, also called La Verdure, in
1936 but it was never woven; it is now at the Musée Matisse in Nice, France. See Jean Coural,
“Matisse et les Manufactures des Gobelins et de Beauvais: Notes et documents,” Bulletin de la
Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français (1994): 254.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 127
display in the landmark 1946 exhibition of French tapestry at the Musée National d’Art
Moderne in Paris (discussed in chapter 1), but also because the simplicity of the design
meant it could reasonably be executed by a young weaver more prone to
experimentation.
104
However, we should not ignore the possibility that Matisse was also
drawn to Le Luth because it had so successfully and so recently been reproduced in color.
Rockefeller was likewise drawn to commission tapestries after certain Picasso paintings
based on their color reproductions in Verve, suggesting how advances in color printing at
this time created a ripple effect and stimulated the proliferation of art reproductions in
other media.
105

According to Coural, who has studied the archival materials relating to Matisse’s
tapestry commissions for the Manufactures Nationales, providing the weaver with these
unconventional photographic “cartoons” was conceived as a way to grant the weavers
greater liberty of interpretation. Without a full-scale diagram, the best way to synthesize
two photographs of different sizes and color schemes into a single work of an entirely
different medium was left to the weavers’ discretion. However, Coural also emphasizes
that Matisse asserted his authorship by retouching the black-and-white photographic
enlargement—changing the arrangement of the rug and wall patterns, and adding a
border of simple interlaced lines—and signing the photograph “Matisse 46” in the lower
right corner, thus making it an original cartoon rather than a reproduction of an extant
work (Fig. 2.20).
106
We might see this act of photographic manipulation in relation to

104
Ibid., 255.
105
Verve was a Parisian art quarterly founded in 1940 and devoted to printing the finest color
reproductions of works of art. See Michael Camille, “‘Très Riches Heures’: An Illuminated
Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990):
87.
106
Coural, 244 and 256 (caption).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 128
Matisse’s exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris just the year before, when Matisse
displayed six paintings accompanied by large framed photographs of each work in its
earlier states. Matisse had been using photography to document his work in progress
since the 1930s, and recent museum exhibitions have referenced the Galerie Maeght
show in particular to argue for an understanding of Matisse’s art as serial.
107

If we can understand photographs of earlier states of a single painting as a series,
a sequence of images that are different from one another yet are all related to the same
pictorial problem or idea, then Matisse’s retouched photograph and even the untouched
color reproduction from Verve should likewise be understood as parts of a series that
stretches from the 1943 painting Le Luth to its incarnation as a tapestry edition woven
from 1947 to 1949 (Fig. 2.21). In this schema, Matisse appropriated the Verve
reproduction of his own painting and transformed its function, making it a model for a
new work in tapestry, and likewise appropriated the black-and-white enlargement by
altering it slightly and signing the newly resulting work. Understanding these
photographs, the painted Le Luth, and its edition in tapestry as all part of a single series
usefully distances us from relegating these works to either side of an original/copy
binary. At the same time, however, our willingness to see Matisse as a serial artist may
speak more to changing canons of artistic taste, the influence of postmodern serial and
appropriation art in particular, than to the concerns of Matisse or his contemporaries.
With his second tapestry project for the Manufactures Nationales, Polynésie,
Matisse was anxious to produce original tapestries that would be more marketable than

107
The exhibition was in December 1945 and was a subject in two recent Matisse exhibitions,
Matisse: In Search of True Painting, 4 December 2012-17 March 2013, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; and Matisse: Paires et séries, 7 March 2012-18 June 2012, Centre Pompidou,
Paris.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 129
reproductions. Matisse saw a finished exemplaire of the first tapestry, Le Ciel, during a
visit to Paris in fall 1947, and subsequently wrote to Georges Fontaine, the director of the
Manufactures Nationales, to express his approval of the tapestry, writing that it “seemed
perfect to me.” He wondered if the tapestry would be traveling to New York to be shown
at MoMA and if so, whether a collector would want to buy it. Matisse then asked
Fontaine if this first exemplaire would be considered a model from which collectors
could commission subsequent copies.
108
Fontaine replied that if they sold one of
Matisse’s Polynésie tapestries in the US it would be subject to high import duties because
it would only qualify as a work of art and escape such duties if it were an original work,
that is, a unique exemplaire. To avoid such costs, Fontaine proposed that they should
reverse or flip the composition for the next tapestry to create a mirror image of the first
one,
109
but Matisse rejected his proposal on the grounds that reversing the design would
ruin its rhythm. Instead he wrote: “I can modify important details, such as modifying the
curve of some birds or changing a fish in the sea—easily if I have the cartoons in front of
me.”
110
Ultimately, Matisse made his alterations not on the cartoons but on the tapestries
themselves, using his “artist’s proof,” the exemplaire that is sent to the artist, and
overlaying each tapestry in the dyptich with new pieces of paper to slightly alter their
compositions (Figs. 22-23).
Matisse’s willingness to alter his design in order to satisfy US Customs indicates
his commitment to placing his tapestries on the American market. It may also betray his
desire to enforce notions of artistic originality that could only imperfectly accommodate

108
Henri Matisse (HM) to Georges Fontaine (GF), 11 October 1947, as quoted in Coural, 260
(my translation and paraphrase).
109
GF to HM, 12 November 1947, Coural, 260
110
HM to GF, 14 November 1947, as quoted in Coural 262 (my translation).
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 130
the traditions of tapestry production. The practice of weaving each tapestry in an edition
of multiple exemplaires bore similarities with art prints and cast sculpture and was well
established in France, but Fontaine’s and Matisse’s anxiety over the status of the tapestry
multiple in the US, along with Rockefeller’s displeasure at discovering that his tapestries
were made in editions of three, suggests that the French tradition of the tapestry multiple
was becoming marginalized under the conditions of American modernism, which insisted
on the originality of the artist and his work. By slightly altering each exemplaire of the
Polynésie suite, Matisse enhanced the serial nature of the tapestry project. Although
Matisse’s insistence on making changes with his own hand rather than simply reversing
the compositions demonstrates a clear commitment to preserving the artistic integrity of
these works, it was the art market that motivated him to make such changes. In this case,
creating serial art is less a radical rejection of modernism’s emphasis on originality than a
way to accommodate the traditional practices of tapestry production to the market for
modern art.

The Death of the Artist
Tapestry’s reproductive qualities—the fact that each woven exemplaire manifests,
interprets, and, in some sense, reproduces a prior model; the fact that tapestries are
traditionally woven in editions of multiple copies; and the fact that tapestries so often
reproduce and substitute already extant and often well-known paintings—inspired
different reactions among the multiple and diverse figures involved in tapestry
production. Curators like Alfred Barr and such artists as Mario Prassinos privileged those
tapestries made from the original designs of artists who intended their work to be woven,
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 131
in an effort to preserve a realm of original artistic production within the sphere of
reproductive tapestry. Others more wholeheartedly embraced tapestry as a reproductive
medium, including collectors like Nelson Rockefeller and artists who used reproductions
of extant paintings as models for tapestries, as Matisse did with the weaving of Le Luth.
For these figures, the tapestry did not have to accurately reproduce the painting on which
it was based, as long as the artist could be credited with authoring those changes and thus
conceptually creating the final tapestry. All of these figures appear united in ascribing an
important, if not necessarily hands-on role, to the artist. Yet tapestry makers also
routinely wove tapestries after the work of deceased artists who naturally could not
personally authorize or approve the final results.
Sometimes the death of the artist could dramatically affect a tapestry maker’s
business. When Picasso died on April 8, 1973, Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach was
clearly concerned about the impact this would have on her livelihood. She raised her
prices 50% from 12,000 to 18,000 French francs per square meter (or from $2,850 to
$4,280). At the time Rockefeller had commissioned two tapestries on which work had not
yet begun, Girl with a Toy Boat and Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier). Picasso had
already authorized these works, and over the next two years de la Baume-Dürrbach
fabricated and released them for sale on the authority of Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline
Roque,
111
but Rockefeller did not commission any more. Rockefeller may have been
reluctant to continue the collection in part because he was distressed at learning the
tapestries were woven in editions of three, but no doubt he also lost interest in
commissioning new tapestries when he could no longer imagine Picasso as being
personally involved in creating them. Losing Rockefeller’s patronage must have been

111
CKU to JBD, 4 Mar 1975, folder 228, box 27, NAR Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 132
disconcerting, but de la Baume-Dürrbach continued to weave additional exemplaires of
Picasso tapestries for other private and public collectors. Picasso had already authorized
her to weave up to three copies of each work he selected for tapestry weaving, and de la
Baume-Dürrbach was entitled to complete these editions. Her last recorded tapestry is a
second copy of Night Fishing at Antibes that she completed for the Musée d’Antibes in
1988, a year before her death.
112

We have seen how Rockefeller initiated his own authenticating process with his
Picasso tapestries by getting the artist to sign photographs of the works. This kind of
authentication through the artist’s signature had become more common with tapestry
production and could of course only occur with a live artist. The Association des
Peintres-Cartonniers de la Tapisserie (APCT), founded in 1947 (see chapter 3), organized
artists and weaving workshops to place a label on the back of each tapestry that provided
the name of the artist or designer, the title of the tapestry and its dimensions, the name of
the weaving workshop, the edition number (e.g. 3 out of 6), and, most importantly, the
autographed signature of the artist. The signature implied that the artist had controlled
and approved the weaving of the tapestry by the workshop, even if the artist had done so
remotely. By signing each work individually, artists were likening these tapestry
multiples to art prints such as engravings and lithographs, which the artist would also
autograph although they were usually printed by others, and such signatures were crucial
to the market value of prints and tapestries alike. When Josef Albers created an album of
prints for Denise René in 1963, he first declined to sign any of the multiples and claimed
that he would only sign monoprints; however, René insisted on having the artist’s

112
Ledger of tapestries woven, JBD Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 133
signatures on the grounds that she had already financed the project and would not be able
to recoup her investment without them. She wrote Albers that without his signature, his
prints would be harder to sell and would have the same status as prints produced after an
artist’s death. “I can give you the example of the Mondrian Album, the Mondrian plates
can only be sold as ‘reproductions’ not ‘original plates.’”
113
Unfortunately, Albers’s
response is not recorded in his correspondence.
However, many tapestry makers did not hesitate to produce tapestries after the
work of deceased artists, and they routinely turned to the artist’s hier to authorize tapestry
reproductions even if that artist had never before worked in the tapestry medium. For
example, Helen Feeley, the widow of the American abstract artist Paul Feeley, was
solicited by both Gloria Ross and a rival tapestry maker Charles Slatkin to allow tapestry
reproductions of her late husband’s work. In January 1969 she reached an agreement with
Ross to reproduce Lacona in tapestry, an agreement which included Ross’s standard
exclusivity clause that prohibited Feeley from working with any other tapestry makers for
three years. Feeley informed Ross that Slatkin had also approached her about creating a
Paul Feeley tapestry and asked to be released from the exclusivity clause on the grounds
that a collaboration with Slatkin “would be good publicity for Paul.” Ross refused this
request,
114
which suggests that Ross felt the tapestry market was too small to support
multiple producers of the same artist’s work. The exchange also sheds light on how
artists and their heirs viewed that same market as expanding an artist’s visibility,

113
DR to JA, 18 Dec 1963, folder 6, box 18, Joseph Albers Papers.
114
Helen Feeley (HF) to Gloria F. Ross (GFR), 26 May 1969, and HF to CES, 15 Aug 1969,
Microfilm Reel #443, Paul Feeley Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington,
DC.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 134
providing “good publicity” for artists who, like Paul Feeley, did not receive much
attention beyond a small coterie of art world insiders.
Fernand Léger’s widow, Nadia Léger, actively promoted her husband’s work
through the tapestry medium by authorizing some twenty tapestries that were woven in
various workshops after her husband’s death.
115
Fernand Léger had already collaborated
on tapestries during his lifetime, including tapestries woven after extant works. For
example, in 1951 the artist and cartoonist Victor Vasarely invited Léger to take part in a
series of modern tapestries for Denise René to be woven at the Atelier Tabard. Léger
gave his 1937 painting Nature morte (à l’étoile) to Vasarely as a model to be converted
into a cartoon and then worked closely with François Tabard to revise certain aspects of
the composition, the choice of colors, and the details of weaving. Léger’s widow Nadia
used a variety of models for the Léger tapestries she authorized, including lithographs
and gouaches, as well as preparatory studies for murals or theater backdrops. Her
authority to approve the finished tapestries enabled her to intervene in the weaving
process. For example, in 1969 the French state bought the rights to weave two copies of
Ciel de France at the Manufacture des Gobelins, and Nadia Léger, unsatisfied with the
weaving of the first exemplaire, demanded a new set of colors for the second one.
116

Although Nadia Léger seems to have been a conscientious interpreter of her husband’s
artistic intentions, she also had financial motivations for authorizing the tapestries.

115
They are Constructeurs au cadre (Constructeurs sur fond bleu), Les Baigneuses, Ciel de
France, La Composition murale, Les Femmes au perroquet, La Grande Parade, La Plante noire,
Nature morte aux pommes, Liberté, Composition au medaillon, Création du monde,
L’Anniversaire, Femmes aux fleurs, La Voie de vivre, Les Baigneuses, L’Acrobate et sa
partenaire or Le Cirque, Composition, Composition à la figure, Queue de comète, and Les
Trapésiztes. See Fernand Léger et les Arts Décoratifs (Biot: Musée national Fernand Léger,
2002), 43-52.
116
Fernand Léger et les Arts Décoratifs, 48.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 135
Particularly when she was financing the tapestry weaving herself, as she did with a series
of tapestries woven by the Tabard workshop in the early 1960s, she was careful not to
allow additional tapestries to be woven until the first ones had sold.
117
For Nadia Léger,
tapestries seem to have offered a viable means of increasing income from her husband’s
estate while promoting her husband’s work and honoring his artistic commitments to
monumental art and the tapestry medium. Yet the very fact that so many Léger tapestries
could be created after Léger’s death demonstrates that tapestry required very little input
from the artist beyond his or her model, which often took the form of a preexisting
painting. Although tapestry weavers in the twentieth century strove to collaborate with
celebrated living artists, and although tapestry artists themselves sought to elevate the
importance of artist-made cartoons and more direct authorial control, tapestry was an
attractive medium precisely because it could reproduce an artist’s work in the artist’s
absence.
Tapestry thus testifies to the continuing power of authorship even after the artist
has been declared dead. This death of the artist was of course theoretical as well as literal.
Indeed, it may be surprising that modern tapestry continued for so long, into the 1970s,
and coincided with both the publication of Roland Barthes’s essay “Death of the Author”
(1967) and the rise of conceptual, performance, and appropriation art that explicitly
challenged the role of the artist as a maker of original, material objects. But, as Michel
Foucault made clear in his response to Barthes, “What Is an Author?” (1969), the turn of
post-structuralists’ attention to the “work” or the “reader” does not keep the “author”
from functioning as a means to unify, elevate, and authenticate certain objects or ideas as

117
FT to Denise Majorel, 26 February 1962, folder 30 J 294/1, Atelier Tabard Papers.
Chapter 2 Authorship in the Art Market Wells 136
a particular author’s work.
118
Tapestry demonstrates how the expanding market for
modern art kept author-function alive and allowed artists, dealers, and collectors to invest
the multiple with originality through such conventions as the limited edition, the artist’s
signature, and the authenticating photograph. But these efforts to mitigate or legitimate
reproduction should not blind us to the ways in which these same artists, dealers, and
collectors embraced tapestry’s reproductive possibilities. If tapestry was a convenient
way to generate more work by a valued artist for the market, it also forced participants to
reconsider what defined a work as having been created “by” an artist. Artists, dealers, and
collectors could simultaneously understand tapestry as a reproduction, a multiple, part of
a series, the execution of an artist’s concept, even an original. And in engaging with
tapestry’s multiplicity, these modernists engaged in an ongoing challenge to notions of
authorship and originality.

118
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113-138.
137
CHAPTER THREE
ART AS DECORATION AND TABLEAU

The revival of tapestry after World War II raised questions about the historical
lineage of modern art, but it was not the only revival of the period to do so. Beginning in
the late 1940s and continuing into the 1950s, a “Monet revival” brought the late work of
Claude Monet, particularly his monumental Water Lilies paintings, to greater attention.
1

In the United States, Monet’s Water Lilies came to be understood as sharing certain
affinities with Abstract Expressionism and particularly with the work of Jackson Pollock.
As period critics such as Clement Greenberg and subsequent scholars have described,
Monet and Pollock shared an interest in monumental scale; gestural, apparently
spontaneous brushstrokes; highly textured surfaces; and chromatic structure, in which the
painting is composed with areas of color that vary in hue and intensity rather than relying
on high contrasts of light and dark. The emergence of Abstract Expressionism enabled
critics to ascribe Monet’s work a new importance, turning him into a father of modernism
to rival Paul Cézanne, but the Monet revival also encouraged curators to recognize
Abstract Expressionism as the culmination of an important modernist tradition.
2
Thus the
Monet revival, like the concurrent tapestry revival, both increased the visibility of a past
artistic practice and facilitated the acceptance of contemporary art as part of a historical

1
This increased visibility occurred through essays written by such prominent critics as André
Masson and Clement Greenberg, as well as acquisitions by prominent museums. MoMA
purchased Water Lilies panels in 1955 and 1956 that were some of the most popular acquisitions
in the museum’s history. When a fire destroyed both works in 1958, a large international
outpouring of sympathy hastened the museum’s decision to acquire the Water Lilies triptych in
their collection today. See Paul Hayes Tucker, et. al., Monet in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) and Karin Sagner-Düchting, ed., Monet and
Modernism (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel 2001).
2
Michael Leja, “The Monet Revival and the New York School Abstraction,” in Monet in the
Twentieth Century, 103; Ann Gibson, “Things in the World: Color in the Work of U.S. Painters
During and After the Monet Revival,” in Monet and Modernism, 122.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 138
lineage.
Yet understanding the relationship between Monet and Pollock only in the
formalist terms of color and brushstroke misses a more fundamental similarity between
the two artists. That similarity lies in how Monet and Pollock positioned their work in
relation to the larger architectural environment and thus in relation to everyday life. Both
artists rejected certain conventions of the tableau or easel painting, conventions that
treated the picture as an autonomous window onto the world, and instead understood their
paintings as decorative coverings or dressings that should form an integral part of their
architectural surroundings. This chapter explores how Pollock and his contemporaries
interpreted art’s relationship to decoration and the tableau.
The idea that modern artists of the postwar period could have understood their
work as decorative or wanted it to be fully integrated with the décor of modern
architecture is surprising because it contradicts established narratives that place particular
importance on the early-twentieth century—the era of Monet’s late work—as the moment
when modern artists rejected the decorative in favor of the purity and autonomy of the
tableau.
3
Yet when we consider modern tapestry during the middle decades of the
twentieth century, it quickly becomes apparent that the division between the tableau and
the decorative environment was not definitive. Tapestries shared key similarities with the
tableau because they were portable art works hung vertically on the wall. These qualities
of portability and verticality enabled tapestries to be exhibited and marketed as stand-

3
Robert L. Herbert, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 71-73, 82-83; Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the
Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1991) 84-88, 94-96; Christopher Green, “The Aesthetics of Purity,” in Cubism and Its Enemies
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 158-167; Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and
the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20-27, 95.

Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 139
alone works of fine art that were comparable to painting and sculpture, but tapestries
were still understood as decorative art that could serve practical functions in architectural
space. Tapestries belonged to both a vertical sphere of high art and a horizontal sphere of
furniture and functional textiles; they were both portable and integrated with their
surroundings. But this dual quality of being both tableau and decoration was not unique
to tapestry. On the contrary, what this chapter proposes is that the art of Pollock and some
of his contemporaries was understood as tapestry-like in its simultaneous juxtaposition of
horizontality and verticality, of portable autonomy and decorative integration.
Tapestry had long been the most prestigious textile medium in Europe, and the
modern tapestry revival attracted the participation of numerous artists and dealers who
were not otherwise involved with the decorative arts. Many who began designing rugs
and other furnishings for modern interiors during the interwar period—artists as diverse
as Anni Albers, Raoul Dufy, and Jean Lurçat—focused their textile work on tapestries
after the Second World War. This chapter examines what was at stake in this shift from
the floor to the wall as well as how such figures as Le Corbusier could understand
tapestry to be both a mobile, nomadic object and an integral part of architectural space. I
follow the circulation of tapestries from fashion houses to art galleries, through corporate
headquarters, houses of worship, and airplanes, in order to investigate how tapestry
signaled modernism’s ongoing flexibility towards art as a form of decoration.

From Rugs to Tapestries
Modern artists’ work in textile mediums changed over the course of the twentieth
century. Numerous artists who began designing rugs and other textiles that operated in a
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 140
functional context of interior décor turned to designing tapestries that circulated in a high
art context during the middle of the twentieth century. This broad shift from rugs to
tapestries suggests an expanding market for modern art as the century progressed, which
allowed more artists to support themselves through gallery sales and patrons’
commissions rather than design work. But the change also suggests that tapestry
producers exploited the growing interest in modern art by positioning tapestries as works
that, due to their location on the wall, deserved the viewer’s focused attention and a
higher artistic status.
This understanding of tapestry as a superior art form, more equivalent in stature to
painting than to decorative arts, is borne out by the career of Marie Cuttoli, an art patron
and dealer who is often credited with spearheading the modern tapestry revival. In 1922
she opened a fashion boutique called Myrbor at 17 rue Vignon in Paris. Her husband,
Paul Cuttoli, was a French Senator who had been born and maintained a residence in
Algeria,
4
and many of Marie Cuttoli’s goods were handmade there. She soon began
commissioning Parisian artists to design rugs that were woven by women in Algeria.
5
Her
first rugs were designed by Jean Lurçat, who would go on to become the most famous of
France’s tapestry artists after World War II (Figs. 3.1-3.2). At the 1925 Exposition
Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Cuttoli exhibited fashion as
well as rugs and embroidered wall hangings. A photograph of the interior of the Myrbor

4
He was born in Saint-Eugène (now Bologhine), Algeria in 1864. He represented the Algerian
Department of Constantine in the French Chamber of Deputies from 1906 to 1919, and then
served in the French Senate from 1920 to 1940. The Cuttolis’ house in Algeria, Dar Meriem, was
located on the outskirts of Philippeville (now Skikda). See Dominique Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli:
Myrbor et l’invention de la tapisserie moderne (Paris: Éditions Norma, 2010) 19-21.
5
By drawing on this colonial labor force, Cuttoli’s practice demonstrates how much the
production of art textiles relies on the labor of marginalized workers, whether rural French
citizens and Indian weavers or, more recently, weavers in Afghanistan, China, and South Africa.
See Chapter 1.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 141
boutique taken around 1929 (Fig. 3.3) shows how Cuttoli displayed these products
together: clothing hangs on dress models, rugs by Lurçat and Fernand Léger are visible
on the floor, and display cases along the wall hold North African sculptures and ceramics.
Cuttoli followed the precedent of Paul Poiret and other designers in creating an enterprise
that was as much an interior design boutique as a fashion house. According to Dominque
Paulvé, Myrbor also had the air of a private house, where Cuttoli’s goods were mixed
with pictures by Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Dufy, Léger, Georges Seurat, Pablo
Picasso, and Paul Renoir from her own private collection. Paulvé describes Myrbor as
“the first concept store avant la lettre.”
6
What it displayed was a total modernist lifestyle,
a mixture of fashion, furnishings, and art that could infuse every element of a person’s
environment with a modern aesthetic.
Yet Cuttoli moved away from this “concept store” model to pursue a more
traditional career as an art dealer. In 1929 she renamed Myrbor the Galerie Vignon and
thereafter focused on showing the works of both well-known and emerging modern
artists.
7
Alexander Calder, for example, had his first exhibition of mobiles there in 1932.
At the same time, Cuttoli shifted her attention from rugs and embroideries made in
Algeria to tapestries that could be woven at the more prestigious workshops in Aubusson,
France. She began by commissioning models from Georges Rouault, whose first tapestry
Fleurs du mal was completed in 1932, and by 1939 Cuttoli had produced tapestries
designed by André Bauchant, Braque, Lucien Coutaud, André Derain, Dufy, Le
Corbusier, Léger, Lurçat, Man Ray, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Picasso. These works

6
Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli: Myrbor et l’invention de la tapisserie moderne, 45 (my translation).
7
At this time Cuttoli also bought a couture house on rue du Faubourg-Saint Honoré and
transferred her fashion operations there, but she quickly closed it to focus on the Galerie Vignon.
See Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli: Myrbor et l’invention de la tapisserie moderne, 45.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 142
were more illusionistic than Cuttoli’s earlier, highly abstracted rugs. One of Braque’s
tapestries from around 1938, Nature morte au Guéridon [Still Life with Pedestal Table],
demonstrates how Cuttoli’s artists engaged with issues of illusionism and materiality
(Fig. 3.4). A limited color palette of browns, creams, and blacks imitates marquetry,
creating what appears to be a variety of wood veneers inlaid to form the image of a
wooden table topped with a variety of objects and set in front of a wood-paneled dado.
The work draws on earlier Cubist collages by Braque and Picasso that employed
imitation wood veneer as well as Braque’s series of Guéridon images from 1921 to 1930
(Fig. 3.5). Had it been executed in marquetry this image would be clearly self-referential,
employing wood to represent wood, but in tapestry the work playfully subverts any
expectation of medium specificity. Embracing a shared illusionism between marquetry,
painting, and tapestry, Nature morte au Guéridon insists on comparability between the
decorative and fine arts. At the same time, however, the vertical composition of this work
indicates it should be viewed quite differently from a rug or tabletop. The quasi-Cubist
perspective of the image creates a push-pull effect—in which the floor seems to recede
back into space while the objects on the table tilt forward towards the picture plane—that
can be best appreciated when standing upright before the work. The imitation wood
border that surrounds the image appears mitered and beveled and turns the work into a
framed tableau on the wall. While such tapestries produced by Cuttoli would later be
critiqued for being too pictorial, we can more fruitfully understand their illusionism as a
deliberate and often playful acknowledgment of tapestry’s viewing conditions as a kind
of tableau hung on the wall.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 143
In the midst of her tapestry commissions, Cuttoli closed the Galerie Vignon to
combine forces with the dealer Jeanne Bucher; together they opened the Galerie Jeanne
Bucher-Myrbor in 1935. Here Cuttoli and Bucher often showed tapestries together with
paintings and sculpture. Their inaugural exhibition showcased the collection of Henri
Laugier, Cuttoli’s lover and collecting partner, including paintings by Braque, Dufy,
Léger, Lurçat, Miró, and Picasso; sculptures by Henri Laurens; and tapestries by Lurçat
and Rouault. Their 1936 Lucien Coutauld exhibition included paintings and gouaches
alongside his tapestry Paul et Virginie. An advertisement for the gallery from a 1935
issue of Cahiers d’Art gives a sense of how tapestries related to the dealers’ other
offerings (Fig. 3.6). At the top of the page, the advertisement lists paintings, sculptures
and tapestries, followed by a single image, a tapestry by Rouault that hangs in the center
of the white page as if it were a painting on a wall. Although tapestries are listed third
among the gallery’s main offerings, below painting and sculpture, they are still included
in the top half of the advertisement, “above the fold,” demonstrating that Bucher and
Cuttoli wanted to be known as dealers of all three media. The use of a tapestry as the sole
visual representation of the gallery’s stock further suggests that Bucher and Cuttoli were
banking on the rarity of modern tapestry at this early date, before the fully fledged
tapestry revival of the postwar period, to set their gallery apart. Certainly tapestries are
given a far greater prominence than the “Handmade Rugs” and “Art Prints” that the
advertisement lists in its bottom corners, well below the image of Rouault’s tapestry.
Although the rugs and prints are still made by hand, they read as down-market substitutes
for the elite media of painting, sculpture, and tapestry that are given pride of place at the
top of the page. What the advertisement helps clarify is that Cuttoli turned to tapestries
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 144
not despite her wish to focus on high art but because of it. Her shift from rugs to
tapestries reinforced her transition from a “boutique” to a “gallery” and her
transformation from a fashion designer or interior decorator to an art dealer.
The career of one of Cuttoli’s artists, Raoul Dufy, provides another model for this
shift from rugs to tapestries. Although Dufy was a modernist painter who experimented
with both Fauvism and Cubism before World War I, his mature style was more
naturalistic than many of his more avant-garde contemporaries, and he enjoyed relatively
strong commercial success and official recognition. Dufy famously collaborated with the
fashion designer Paul Poiret during the early-twentieth century, designing textiles for
Poiret’s fashion house and, in 1911, establishing a cloth-printing workshop with Poiret
called La Petite Usine. For the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels
Modernes, Dufy designed fourteen tapestry hangings that Poiret used to decorate one of
three barges moored on the Seine. By this time Dufy had also begun providing models to
the Manufacture de Beauvais, a division of the Manufactures Nationales that then
specialized in tapestries for upholstering furniture. Dufy designed a suite of furniture with
scenes and monuments of Paris that Beauvais executed in 1927 and later designed a
similar suite of dining chairs for Marie Cuttoli. Cuttoli’s set, woven in Aubusson in 1936
(Fig. 3.7), also portrayed monuments of Paris and related to the tapestry Dufy had
designed for her two years earlier, which depicted a view of Paris with the city’s
monuments exaggerated in scale and placed throughout the scene (Fig. 3.8). Dufy
subsequently created another set of tapestry-upholstered furniture for Cuttoli, a settee and
chairs decorated with allegorical symbols and poetry relating to Orpheus (Figs. 3.9-3.10).
Dufy’s early tapestry designs were thus tied to his work in fashion and interior décor.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 145
Catering to both the public and private market, Dufy designed tapestries to create
harmoniously decorated interiors in which an entire suite of wall hangings or furniture
would create a unified effect.
During the Second World War, Dufy provided models to tapestry workshops in
Aubusson at the behest of Lurçat, who had been commissioned by the French
government in 1939 to help revive the flagging industry. Dufy was thus an early
participant in what would become a burgeoning revival of France’s tapestry industry in
the postwar period, and one of the works he created during this period, Bel Été [Beautiful
Summer] (1941), was widely exhibited after the war as exemplary of the modern French
tapestry revival. After the war the Galerie Louis Carré—which was known for exhibiting
work by established modern artists such as Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Léger,
Matisse, and Picasso—commissioned Dufy to create five new tapestries that were woven
at a private workshop in Paris as unique exemplaires, rather than in editions of six as was
common in Aubusson. The Galerie Louis Carré exhibited Dufy’s later tapestries
numerous times, and they were included in major museum exhibitions of Dufy’s work.
8

These tapestries, commissioned by a prestigious gallery of modern art, woven as unique
works, and exhibited at major art museums, thus reinforce the rising prestige of tapestry
since the interwar period and its commensurability with other fine art media. Removed
from the ostensibly functional realm of fashion, furniture and interior décor, Dufy’s late

8
The Louise Carré tapestries are Amphitrite, 1948, 118 x 277 cm; La Musique de Tintoret, 1948,
141 x 330 cm; Le Cadre Noire, 1949, 130 x 393 cm; Les Trois graces (L’Oise, la Seine et la
Marne), 1949, 152 x 220 cm; and Amphitrite à Sainte Adresse, 1949, 136 x 297 cm. See Raoul
Dufy, Tapisseries de haute lisse (Paris: Galerie Louis Carré, 1948); Tapisseries, Aquarelles,
Dessins du Raoul Dufy, 30 Oct-30 Nov 1956 (Paris: Galerie Louis Carré, 1956); Tapisseries de
Raoul Dufy (Paris: Galerie Louis Carré, 1963); Raoul Dufy, 1877-1953 (Paris: Musée national
d’Art moderne, 1953); Raoul Dufy, 22 April-7 June 1954 at Kunsthalle Basel, 12 June-11 July
1954 at Kunsthalle Berne; Exposition Raoul Dufy, 3 July-18 Sept 1955, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec,
Alibi.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 146
tapestries could now operate as autonomous works of art without being subordinated to a
larger modern environment.
Even Anni Albers, whose training and career were very different from Dufy’s,
pursued a similar shift in her textile work from craft and design to art after the Second
World War. As a student at the Bauhaus during the 1920s and early 1930s, Albers was
part of a project to unite art and industry that arguably achieved its greatest success in the
weaving workshop.
9
As a prominent member of that workshop, Albers hand wove
textiles as functional rugs and fabrics, and as prototypes for industrial production. After
she and her husband, Josef Albers, moved to the United States in 1933 and took up
teaching positions at the innovative art school Black Mountain College, Albers continued
to design for industry and to use hand weaving as a means to that end. But beginning in
the 1940s and particularly in the 1950s, Albers also created what she called “pictorial
weavings.” In a 1989 interview, she acknowledged how far these non-functional woven
pieces departed from the ideals of the Bauhuas: “I developed there [at Black Mountain
College] gradually these what I call ‘pictorial weavings.’ Which was really not what the
Bauhaus was meant to do. . . . Gropius never quite forgave me that I went into the art
side.”
10

In 1959, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized a traveling
exhibition of Pictorial Weavings.
11
In a brief preface to the exhibition catalogue, Albers
justified the works as fulfilling a purely artistic, and notably modernist, objective of

9
Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann, Women’s Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1993).
10
Maximillian Schnell, interview with Anni Albers, Orange, CT, 16 Dec 1989, as quoted in
Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Anni Albers (New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 1999), 170.
11
It traveled to the Carnegie Institue of Technology, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Yale
Unviersity Art Gallery, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 147
exploring the textiles’ inherent materiality and rejected the value of their functionality:
“To let threads be articulate again, and find a form for themselves to no other end than
their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at, is the raison
d’etre of my pictorial weavings.”
12
Here, Albers deliberately removes her work from the
functional and horizontal register of upholstery fabric and rugs, the kind of textiles that
are “sat on” and “walked on,” to position it in the non-functional and vertical register of
objects “to be looked at.” Lifting her weavings from the chair seat and floor to the wall,
Albers aligns them with the tableau’s direct address to the viewer.
Interestingly, the 27 works in the exhibition included two that are titled Tapestry,
one from her Bauhaus years (1927) and another from 1948, and two works titled Vicara
Rug (1959) and Nylon Rug (1959), neither of which were woven by Albers herself.
13

Albers conflates these “rugs” and “tapestries” under the shared rubric of “pictorial
weaving,” implying that all of them should be viewed as upright pictures or tableaux.
Indeed, the illustrations in the catalogue isolate each work against a white background as
though it were hanging on a gallery wall. The image of Vicara Rug shows its top fringe
falling down over the work, indicating that it was indeed hung vertically to be
photographed and that such a vertical hanging is the proper way to view this object (Fig.
3.11).
The modern display technique of isolating individual objects against a white
backdrop thus reiterated the status of tapestry as non-functional, fine art. We can see such
techniques clearly in a 1974 exhibition catalogue from the Galerie Denise René that

12
Anni Albers, preface to Pictorial Weavings (Cambridge, MA: The New Gallery, Charles
Hayden Memorial Library, MIT, 1960).
13
Vicara Rug was woven by Inge Brouard and Nylon Rug by Gloria Finn. See checklist in Albers,
Pictorial Weavings, 1960.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 148
illustrates how modernists’ tapestries circulated after World War II. The exhibition
included many artists associated with interwar modern design: Josef Albers and Wassily
Kandinsky, who had both taught at the Bauhaus; Jean Arp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, and Theo
van Doesburg, who in the late 1920s collaborated on the decoration of the Café Aubette
in Strasbourg; Richard Mortensen, who worked in stage design; and Sonia Delaunay and
Le Corbusier. However committed these artists may have been to creating integrated
modern environments, their tapestries function at the Galerie Denise René as discrete
works that can be bought and sold as fine art. The catalogue illustrates each work in
isolation against the white page, but it also includes installation photographs that
document the numerous tapestry exhibitions held at the Galerie Denise René’s since
1952.
14
Hung in the white cube of the gallery, sometimes sharing space with modern
sculptures, the tapestries read as bold, monumental works that command the viewer’s
attention (Fig. 3.12). This, dealer Denise René suggests, is the proper way to view a
tapestry. Not as a decorative background for everyday life or as merely an element in a
total modern interior, but as an autonomous work whose context is the modern art
collection.
René thus presented tapestries as analogous to painting and sculpture, much as
Marie Cuttoli had done at the Galerie Jean Bucher-Myrbor. But in another way René
distanced her tapestry project from Cuttoli’s earlier enterprise. René’s commitment to

14
Tapestry exhibitions at the Galerie Denise René include: 12 tapisseries inédites executes dans
les ateliers Tabard à Aubusson (1952), 7 tapisseries inédites de Le Corbusier (1953), 4
tapisseries inédites de Kandinsky (1954), Vasarely, 12 tapisseries (1959), Tapisseries récentes
réalisées dans les ateliers Tabard à Aubusson (1964), Tapisseries d’Aubusson (1971), and
Aubusson Tapestries (New York, 1974). René also showed tapestries at other venues, such as the
Vasarely exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1967. See Marine Mathias,
Aubusson, la voie abstraite: Une Collaboration entre la Galerie Denise René et les Ateliers
Tabard (Aubusson: Le Musée de la Tapisserie d’Aubusson, 1993).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 149
non-objective artists and her focus on geometric abstraction differed strongly from
Cuttoli’s stable of École de Paris painters who consistently used recognizable subject
matter. René, by contrast, was known for organizing important international traveling
exhibitions and Parisian showings of non-objective artists like Piet Mondrian, whoe work
had previously been neglected in France. She was a tireless promoter of Constructivist
art, hard-edge abstraction, and subsequently of kinetic and Op art, whose market she
almost single-handedly invented.
15
She extended this support to tapestry, a medium in
which she similarly insisted on the value of geometric abstraction. In a preface to the
1974 exhibition catalogue, Raoul-Jean Moulin concurred that René’s stable of abstract
artists was inherently suited to the tapestry medium. Writing that “by its nature as much
as by its function tapestry belongs to the wall,” Moulin argued that through the
abstraction of René’s artists, “the tapestry once again could adapt itself to the straightness
of the wall, so as no longer to make a hole in it, to open it to the illusion of a painted
picture, but to dress it with the supple warmth of its fabric.” Abstraction allowed these
artists “to avoid any temptation of pictoriality.”
16
Moulin thus endorsed abstraction to
reject any association of tapestry with the pictorialism of the traditional easel painting.
Rather than being a window onto the world, the modern abstract tapestry should “dress
[habiller]” the wall with its “warmth.” This understanding of tapestry as a kind of
clothing or “dressing” that is worn by the architectural structure derived from

15
Some of her important exhibitions were Tendences de l’art abstrait (Paris, 1948); Espaces
Nouveaux (Paris, 1950); Klar Form, 20 artists de l’École de Paris (toured Scandinavia and
Belgium, 1951-52); Le Mouvement (Paris, 1955); Mondrian (Paris, 1957); Construction in
Geometry from Malevich to Tomorrow (toured US, 1960); Art abstrait constructif international
(Paris, 1961-62); Art et Mouvement (Tel Aviv, 1964; Montreal, 1967); Responsive Eye (New
York, 1964); Mouvement 2 (London, 1965). See Denise René l’intrépide: Une galerie dans
l’aventure de l’art abstrait, 1944-1978 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001).
16
Raoul-Jean Moulin, preface to Tapisseries d’Aubusson (Paris, New York, and Dusseldorf:
Galerie Denise René, 1974).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 150
longstanding architectural theories and was in turn profoundly influential on postwar
arguments about the role of modern art. This is a point to which we will return below.
Moulin’s claim that abstract tapestries are better suited than illusionistic ones to
the medium’s location on the wall entertains contemporary debates about the medium
specificity of tapestry, debates that often construed Cuttoli’s interwar tapestry
commissions as a pioneering but ultimately misguided attempt to revive tapestry as
modern art. Guillaume Janneau, who directed the Manufactures Nationales during the
1930s and engaged in parallel efforts to entice modernists to provide tapestry designs,
was particularly critical of Cuttoli’s activities after the fact. Calling her enterprise “as
remarkable by its success as it was misguided in its aims,” Janneau critiqued the way in
which Cuttoli’s tapestries “reproduced with astonishing exactitude” the cartoons of
modern artists. “The low-warp Aubusson weavers rendered the most out-of-the-way
tones, the finest shades, the most subtle transitions and the most intangible harmonies in a
manner which makes it almost impossible to distinguish from a distance their work from
the original.”
17
The idea that Cuttoli’s tapestries had been too imitative of painting was
often repeated after the Second World War, even by those who were sympathetic to her
accomplishments. A 1959 article in Réalités titled “Notre Dame d’Aubusson, patronne de
l’art modern [Our Lady of Aubusson, patron of modern art]” extolled Cuttoli’s career but
nevertheless characterized her conception of tapestry as “the faithful reproduction of
tableaux” rather than, as subsequent artists were more properly understanding it, as “a
strictly decorative art.”
18

17
Guillaume Janneau, “The Revival of Tapestry in France,” in French Tapestry, ed. André Lejard
(London: Paul Elek, 1946), 99.
18
“Notre Dame d’Aubusson, patronne de l’art moderne,” Réalités no. 162 (July 1959): 45.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 151
By rehearsing the familiar opposition of decorative art and the tableau, this author
retains a system of values from the turn of the century that aligns the progressive,
modernist possibilities for art with decorative qualities, rather than with the conventions
of easel painting.
19
The currency of such ideas in 1959 is surprising in light of
modernism’s alleged rejection of the decorative during the early-twentieth century.
20

Moreover, this continuing commitment to the decorative as a realm of abstraction and
medium specificity helps clarify why it would be problematic for those who promoted
tapestry as high art rather than decorative art to emphasize tapestry’s potential for
representational imagery or illusionistic renderings of three dimensional space. Instead,
postwar tapestry revivers largely rejected Cuttoli’s model of pictorialism and focused on
two aspects that even abstract tapestry shared with the tableau: verticality and portability.

Verticality
The tableau has long been defined by its verticality, by the fact that it hangs on
the wall rather than lying horizontally on a table or floor. Regardless of how naturalistic
or abstract a work might be, theorists have argued that it can be understood as a picture if
it is hung vertically before the viewer.
21
During the postwar period, however, numerous
artists and critics as well as tapestry revivers interrogated the equation of verticality with

19
Levine, “Décor/Decorative/Decoration in Claude Monet’s Art,” Arts 51, no. 6 (February 1977):
137.
20
Christopher Green, “The Aesthetics of Purity,” in Cubism and Its Enemies (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1987), 158-167. Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative
Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 84-88,
94-96. Robert L. Herbert, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 71-73, 82-83. Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the
Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20-27, 95.
21
See, for example, Walter Benjamin, “Painting and the Graphic Arts” (1917), in Selected
Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 82.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 152
the tableau. Leo Steinberg made the most significant contribution to understanding the
vertical tableau as an aesthetic problem in his influential essay of 1968-72, “Other
Criteria.” Steinberg employed the concepts of verticality and horizontality to theorize a
difference between the representation of nature and the cultural construction of symbols.
He argued that from the Renaissance until around 1950, painting was conceived as a
representation of the world that corresponded with a human’s erect posture. For
Steinberg, even such radically modernist movements as Cubism and Abstract
Expressionism retained this correspondence between the vertical picture plane and the
natural world as experienced by the vertical human body. Jackson Pollock, for example,
may have famously created paintings on the studio floor, but “after the first color skeins
had gone down, he would tack the canvas on to a wall—to get acquainted with it, he used
to say; […]. He lived with the painting in its uprighted state, as with a world confronting
his human posture. It is in this sense, I think, that the Abstract Expressionists were still
nature painters.”
22

Calling the non-objective abstraction of Pollock “nature painting,” reinforced the
radicalness of the shift to which Steinberg pointed around 1950, when such painters as
Jean Dubuffet and especially Robert Rauschenberg began to create works that, though
exhibited vertically on a wall, alluded to the horizontality of their construction and the
objects they present. Steinberg called this new type of work the flatbed picture plane:
“these pictures no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no
more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper
does.” Steinberg thus did not find significance in the physical orientation of the artwork,

22
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1968-1972), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-
Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 84.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 153
whether it was displayed vertically or horizontally before the viewer, but focused instead
on “the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation.”
Linking the impression of verticality with natural representation and that of horizontality
with cultural symbolism, Steinberg argued for “the tilt of the picture plane from vertical
to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift
from nature to culture.”
23

By way of example, Steinberg argued that a “narrative picture on a mosaic floor”
was still a “vertical” image, in that it represents figures as upright within an illusionistic
space that mirrors the upright space of the viewer. Steinberg paired this example with “a
rug on a wall,” implying that it represents the reverse, an object that, no matter how
vertically it is displayed, still suggests the horizontal register of the floor and thus
“psychically addresses” the viewer as a flatbed. Steinberg’s example of the rug on the
wall is significant given that he was writing this essay in 1968-1972, a time when many
well-known contemporary artists were designing tapestries and pile-woven rugs that were
exhibited on the wall and marketed as tapestries.
24

The general prominence of modern tapestry at this time may have inspired Man
Ray to retitle a much earlier work as Tapestry when, in 1962, he allowed it to appear in
the book, Collage: personalities, concepts, techniques.
25
Still known as Tapestry today,
the work, dating from 1911, is not technically a tapestry at all but a patchwork, sewn
from 110 sample swatches of men’s suiting fabric that Man Ray culled from his father’s

23
Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” 84.
24
See discussion of Gloria Ross in chapter 2 and Modern Master Tapestries Inc. in chapter 5.
25
Harriet Grossman Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage: personalities, concepts, techniques
(Philadelphia and New York: Chilton Co. Book Division, 1962), 199, 293. The photo illustrating
the work is courtesy of Man Ray, which suggests that the artist provided or approved of the title
Tapestry.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 154
Brooklyn tailor shop (Fig. 3.13). This patchwork technique is usually associated with
quilting, and indeed in his 1963 autobiography, Man Ray referred to the work not as a
tapestry but as a “crazy quilt.”
26
Titling the patchwork Tapestry rather than Crazy Quilt
implies that it should be viewed vertically on the wall, elevating the work both literally
and figuratively. Man Ray reinforced this elevation by mounting the patchwork onto
canvas and signing the canvas “Man Ray, 1911”—an act that was clearly done after the
artist first made the piece because he did not adopt the name Man Ray until 1912. Thus,
while the exact chronology of this work is unclear, it is evident that at some point after its
creation, Man Ray altered the work in ways that encouraged it be viewed vertically on the
wall and given a more prominent place in his oeuvre.
27

Man Ray’s Tapestry indicates how “tapestry” and “verticality” went hand in hand,
and also how central textiles were for exploring the issues of physical orientation and
psychic address that Steinberg identifies. Comparing Tapestry to Rauschenberg’s Bed of
1955 clarifies how textiles could dramatize this shift between the horizontal and vertical
registers (Fig. 3.14). Steinberg called Bed “perhaps Rauschenberg’s profoundest
symbolic gesture” and called attention to its pillow and “quilt coverlet.” Placing these
normally horizontal objects against the wall positioned them “in the vertical posture of
‘art’,” but for Steinberg Bed “continues to work in the imagination as the eternal

26
Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), 33. Technically speaking, the work is not
a quilt either, as it is not quilted, or stitched onto a layer of insulation or padding.
27
Neil Baldwin similarly argues that Man Ray’s physical alterations designated the object as a
work of art to be hung on the wall and seems to follow the artist’s prompt in treating Tapestry as
an important part of Man Ray’s oeuvre; he characterizes it as a pioneering example of abstraction
and the use of found materials by a young artistic genius. Tapestry was also chosen as the first
work that greeted visitors to a 2009 Man Ray retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York
and is discussed in the catalogue as an important early work. See Neil Baldwin, Man Ray,
American Artist (New York: DaCapo Press, 2001), 16; and Mason Klein, Alias Man Ray: The Art
of Reinvention (New York: The Jewish Museum; New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2009), 33.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 155
companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our
begetting, conceiving, and dreaming.” We continue to imagine Bed as horizontal despite
its vertical placement as “art,” because beds really are horizontal in the real world, and it
is precisely this collapse of the distinction between “art” and the “real world” that
Steinberg celebrated: “Insofar as the flatbed picture plane accommodates recognizable
objects, it presents them as man-made things of universally familiar character.”
28
We can
see the patchwork as one such universally familiar man-made thing. In both Man Ray’s
Tapestry and more blatantly in Rauschenberg’s Bed, the patchwork or quilt continues to
reference its normal function as a horizontally placed bed covering. Textiles thus have a
unique ability to signify both horizontal, functional bed coverings or rugs and vertical,
non-functional tapestries or “art.” This gives textiles an important role in exposing the
dialectic between functional horizontality and artistic verticality in works such as Bed.
A decade after Steinberg’s influential formulation of the flatbed, Rosalind Krauss
continued this critical investigation of verticality in her and Yve-Alain Bois’s 1977
exhibition and catalogue, Formless: A User’s Guide. Krauss countered Steinberg by
arguing that Pollock’s drip paintings present a radical horizontality, where Steinberg had
expressly excluded the artist from his theory of the flatbed. For Krauss, the periodic
vertical positioning of Pollock’s canvases during their creation was not germane, and she
argued instead that the finished paintings refer back to the horizontal position in which
they were made, that they exhibit a “bassesse.” Despite the vertical display of Pollock’s
paintings on the wall, they highlight “the viewer’s new relation to the canvas as though it
were a field onto which he or she were looking down. […] the axis of the image has

28
Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” 89-90.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 156
changed.”
29
For Krauss, this revolutionized the premise of gestalt or form, in which “all
images—whether seen on a horizontal plane or not—will enter the space of his or her
imagination as upright: aligned with the verticality of that viewer’s own body.”
30
Krauss
thus concurred with Steinberg that the most important aspect of the artwork was not its
“physical placement” but its “psychic address” to the viewer. Although they disagreed on
whether or not Pollock’s work should be regarded as radically horizontal, both were
interested in forming a new canon—of “flatbeds” for Steinberg and “bassesse” for
Krauss—that overturned modernism’s perpetuation of the vertical tableau.
The enormous weight that Steinberg and Krauss placed on the art object’s
references to horizontality opened up an alternative criterion for judging a work’s
aesthetic importance—alternative, that is, to the modernist criteria that both critics
associated with Clement Greenberg and expressly wanted to challenge. Steinberg was
one of the first critics to use the term “post-Modernist,”
31
while Krauss would become
one of postmodernism’s most effective theorists. These critics suggested that any work
which confounds a viewer’s expectation of a vertically oriented tableau, and that seems
instead to confront the viewer as a tilted, oscillating, horizontal field, should take pride of
place in an alternative canon of yet more radical artistic practice. One imagines that these
critics would welcome Man Ray’s Tapestry into such a canon, but it is less clear that they
would include the various other tapestries made by Man Ray and his contemporaries.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that during the same period that Steinberg and
Krauss were shifting criteria of artistic value by encouraging viewers to see vertically

29
Rosalind E. Krauss, “Horizontality,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, by Rosalind Krauss and
Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 95.
30
Krauss, “Gestalt,” in Formless, 89-92.
31
Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” 91.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 157
displayed works of art as horizontally oriented flatbeds and objects of bassesse, numerous
artists were engaged in a parallel practice that shifted tapestries from a horizontal register
of functional textiles to a vertical register of art.
Steinberg constructed the radical new orientation of the flatbed in part by insisting
on the tableau quality of Cubism, on its adherence to a traditionally vertical picture plane
that represents objects in nature. Cubism’s commitment to representing real objects in
nature became a topic of increased scholarly debate during the 1980s, when Christine
Poggi’s contribution to the question of Cubist realism returned to the issue of the
tableau.
32
In her 1988 essay, “Frames of Reference,” Poggi argued that Pablo Picasso’s
cubist collages and constructions juxtapose the paradigm of the tableau with an opposing
paradigm of the table, or table. Steinberg had also associated the horizontal plane with
the tabletop, but he saw it as a kind of tabula rasa, a blank surface on which data could
be entered and which therefore “stood for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching
center.”
33
For Poggi, however, the table is no metaphorical mind but an actual object in
the world and, by extension, “the plane of real objects that exist in three-dimensional
space.”
34
As such, it offers a paradigm of realism opposed to the illusionistic naturalism

32
Poggi’s article appeared in a special issue of Art Journal devoted to “Revising Cubism,” that
focused on contextualizing Cubism and its reception through considerations of political,
scientific, and economic currents. See, for example, Susan Noyes Platt, “Modernism, Formalism,
and Politics: The ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ Exhibition of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art,”
284-295; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of
Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” 323-340; Robert Mark Antliff, “Bergson and Cubism: A
Reassessment,” 341-349; David Cottington, “What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in
Picasso’s Collages of 1912,” 350-359; and Robert Jenson, “The Avant-Garde and the Trade in
Art,” 360-367; all Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988). Rosalind Krauss had already objected to
such biographical and social histories of Cubism in her essay “In the Name of Picasso,” in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)
23-40.
33
Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” 88.
34
Christine Poggi, “Frames of Reference: ‘Table’ and ‘Tableau’ in Picasso’s Collages and
Constructions,” Art Journal 47, no. 4, Revising Cubism (Winter 1988): 312.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 158
of the tableau. For Poggi, Picasso never synthesized the planes of the table and the
tableau into a unified paradigm. On the contrary, Picasso’s project was to make the
viewer aware of the juxtaposition, to recognize the irreconcilable opposition between the
horizontal and vertical planes of signification. “These two apparently exclusive worlds
collide to form a single compelling scene that once again undermines as it establishes the
opposition of table and tableau.”
35
It is notable that Marie Cuttoli and her collecting
partner, Henri Laugier, acquired several Picasso collages such as the well-known Le
Violon of 1914 (Fig. 3.15), Bouteille, journal, et verre sur une table (1912), and Etude de
tête d’homme au chapeau (1912-1913), collages similar to those discussed in Poggi’s
study. That these icons of modernist experimentation shared wall space with Cuttoli
tapestries is suggestive of their similar orientation. Laugier and Cuttoli deemed both
Picasso’s collages and Cuttoli’s tapestries appropriate works for a modern art collection,
but both types of work also functioned to upset the dichotomy between a horizontal
register of functional, decorative objects—rugs, tables, Poggi’s table—and a vertical
register of art and the tableau.
This kind of simultaneous juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical planes can help
us understand how figures in the postwar period interpreted tapestry as a kind of rug, an
ostensibly functional, decorative object, elevated to the wall and thus to the tableau’s
vertical address to the viewer. This understanding of tapestry is literalized in the German
language, where the word for tapestry, Wandteppich, is a Teppich [rug] on the Wand
[wall]. The French word for tapestry, tapisserie, likewise contains the word for rug, tapis,
embedded within it, suggesting a fundamental similarity underlying the two objects. The
common-use definition of tapestry as a vertically displayed textile suggests that the most

35
Poggi, “Frames of Reference,” 319.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 159
important difference between the tapis and the tapisserie is in their different orientations
towards the verticality of the human body rather than in their weaving techniques. As
Mildred Constantine, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), explained in a
1965 exhibition catalogue:
The original distinction between the rug and tapestry was based on the method of
weaving, the one being usually a pile, the other a flat surface. Even this difference has
largely vanished. Today, even more than in the past, the use of these hangings is
generally interchangeable. They have surrendered their utilitarian function to a primarily
aesthetic one. […] In short, the terms themselves have become interchangeable in modern
times.
36

What allows the rug and the tapestry to become interchangeable is their common “use”
which is no longer a “utilitarian function” but “a primarily aesthetic one.” Implicit in
Constantine’s argument is the assumption that it is by virtue of being hung vertically on
the wall that either rugs or tapestries can be regarded as aesthetic rather than functional.
Yet Constantine’s use of the term “interchangeable” to describe the terms rug and
tapestry suggests that viewers regarding the tapestries in her exhibition—which included
works by Arp, Calder, Max Ernst, Klee, Léger, Matisse, Miró, and Picasso—could
justifiably find them interchangeable with rugs on the floor. The lack of distinction
between rugs and tapestries during this period suggests less a clear elevation of the rug to
the wall than an oscillating interchangeability in which vertical wall hangings continue to
reference the horizontally laid, functional weavings of beds and floors.
Although Steinberg emphasized the novelty of the flatbed picture plane by
excluding Pollock and Picasso from its paradigm, he did acknowledge an important
precedent for it in Monet’s Water Lilies. In a 1956 essay discussing one of the
monumental Water Lilies panels dating from 1914 to 1926, which had recently been

36
Mildred Constantine, An Exhibition of Contemporary French Tapestries (New York: Charles
E. Slatkin Galleries, 1965), note on page 6.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 160
acquired by MoMA, Steinberg anticipated his later interest in the implied horizontality of
a vertically displayed work of art: “It is wonderful to look at for an hour or so at a time,
for you can do things to it with your eyes—tip it into a horizontal plane, then let it snap
back to an upright sheet; [….]. You can invert the picture or yourself at will.”
37
With no
horizon line or other stabilizing points of reference, the Water Lilies dizzily subvert the
traditional orientation of the picture plane vis-à-vis the human body: “the law of
gravity—that splendid projection of the human mind lodged in its body—is abrogated
[…]. The whole world is cut loose from anthropomorphic or conceptual points of
reference.”
38
For Monet’s contemporaries, such dizziness was most often articulated as
an upside-down effect, because the Water Lilies depicted inverted reflections of clouds,
trees, and other greenery on the surface of the water lily pond. René-Marc Ferry was
amongst the reviewers of the 1909 exhibition who described Monet’s paintings as
“upside down,” but interestingly he also referred to them as “tapestries.”
39
The two
descriptions do not seem unrelated, for both articulate how the Water Lilies take the
horizontal surface of the water and display it vertically on the wall, creating a kind of
Wandteppich that subverts the expectations of realism traditionally accorded to the
tableau.
If Monet’s Water Lilies were innovative in shifting a horizontal plane onto a
vertical one, this shift was manifested even more clearly in the Water Lilies rugs that
Monet authorized. When Monet’s friend and supportive critic Gustave Geffroy was
named administrator of the Manufactures Nationales in 1908, Geffory had already begun

37
Steinberg, “Monet’s Water Lilies” (1956), in Other Criteria, 235.
38
Steinberg, “Monet’s Water Lilies,” 239.
39
René-Marc Ferry, “Notes d’art: Les Paysages d’eau de M. Claude Monet,” L’Eclair (May 14,
1909); as quoted in Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, 221.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 161
courting Monet to provide a design for France’s state-run tapestry workshops. Knowing
that Monet was working on the Water Lilies series, Geffroy suggested that some of these
works could serve as models for the Manufacture de la Savonnerie, which specialized in
weaving pile rugs. Thus, seven years before Monet created the monumental Water Lilies
panels (installed at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1926 and sometimes called the
Grandes Décorations) as a gift to the French state, the artist’s first public commission
was for these comparatively unknown Water Lilies rugs. Three rugs were woven in total
from 1911 to 1913,
40
and in 1922 Geffroy exhibited them at the newly built Musée des
Gobelins in Paris. He commissioned the decorator Henri Rapin to create an elaborate
wooden case that framed the Water Lilies rugs in a wall of wood paneling (Fig. 3.16).
The installation appears to integrate the Water Lilies with a fully decorated interior,
presenting the rugs not as separate tableaux but as elements that make up a harmonious
ensemble. It is not clear why the rugs were hung vertically like easel paintings,
particularly since Geffroy apparently chose to weave the Water Lilies as rugs—rather
than tapestries—because the pictures appeared to represent the horizontal surface of a
pond.
41
By moving the works from floor to wall and by integrating them into a
harmonious whole, Geffroy’s installation anticipated two key aspects of the Orangerie
installation. For Monet’s Grandes Décorations place the viewer in an immersive

40
The first two panels were woven by Edmond Coupignay and Henri Issartial from January 1911
to March 1913 and the tondo was woven by Edouard Contet from August 1911 to December
1912. The rectangular rugs are 97 x 100 cm and 89 x 108 cm. The round rug is 88 cm in diameter.
See Jean Vittet, “Claude Monet et Les Gobelins: une correspondence inédite de Gustave
Geffroy,” in La tapisserie hier et aujourd’hui: actes du colloque, École du Louvre et Mobilier
national et Manufactures nationales des Gobelins, de Beauvais et de la Savonnerie, 18 et 19 juin
2007, 95-114 (Paris: École du Louvre, 2011), 95-99.
41
Jean Vittet in discussion with the author, April 2012.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 162
environment, completely surrounded by monumental images of the water lily pond that
subvert any clear distinctions between horizontality and verticality.
Consider The Water-Lily Pond, Clouds, one of the monumental Grandes
Décorations in the first room of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (Fig. 3.17). A few
clusters of water lilies skate across the surface of the pond, indicating to us the
horizontality of that surface. But these flowers are almost completely overwhelmed by
the trees and clouds that are reflected on this surface. The work is almost like the top few
inches of a Constable landscape that have been cut off, blown up, and turned upside
down. And yet those water lilies are there, insisting on the horizontality of what we are
looking at vertically on a wall. The horizontality of the “real” objects on the water’s
surface and the verticality of the “reflected” objects on that same surface are collapsed
into one horizontal/vertical plane.
The Water-Lily Pond, Clouds is one of the paintings with no foliage or trees
framing the water’s edge, but even where Monet included such framing devices, the
disorienting effects of the Water Lilies are hardly lessened. In the second room of the
Orangerie, we confront paintings in which the pond is framed by weeping willows. In
these works, such as The Water-Lily Pond with Willows, Bright Morning with Willows
(Fig. 3.18), the verticality of the trees stands in for the verticality of the human viewer.
Here the relationship between the plane of our own bodies and the plane of the water lily
pond seems more comprehensible, as the trees clearly contrast with the rippling surface
of the water. Yet that watery horizontal surface is still hung vertically on the wall. Any
contrast between it and the willow trees is subverted by their contiguity on a single
surface of paint. The water’s surface seems to tilt forward, pushing between the dripping
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 163
leaves of the willows. Again and again, the Water Lilies dramatize this tilt between
horizontal and vertical, as they repeatedly display this strange condition of exhibiting a
horizontal ground on a vertical wall.
Such oscillations clarify that the Water Lilies rugs produced at the Manufacture de
Savonnerie should not be seen as departing from the aims of Monet’s original paintings,
but rather as reinforcing the Water Lilies’ collapse of vertical and horizontal registers. If
any tapestry on the wall seems to refer back to the horizontal orientation of functional
rugs and quilted bedspreads, then this effect of an oscillating horizontal/vertical plane
must be all the greater when viewing a plush pile rug as a vertical tableau. The
Savonnerie Water Lilies are thus a stunning instance of how the social associations of
particular media—the sense that pile rugs belong on the floor, and that tableaux belong
on the wall—can amplify the work’s aesthetic effect.
Postmodernist art critics such as Steinberg and Krauss and revisionist scholars
such as Poggi have insisted on the radicality of subverting the dichotomy between the
horizontal and the vertical in the medium of painting. However, they have failed to
acknowledge that tapestry and other textiles placed on the wall exhibit the same
subversion. Throughout the twentieth century, tapestries routinely upset the dichotomy
between horizontal and vertical in a way that works of fine art could emulate through
Impressionist illusionism, Cubist collage, and the incorporation of actual textiles or other
mundane materials. In these divergent ways, artists thought through the relationship
between the world of art represented by the vertical plane of the tableau and the real
world represented by the horizontal plane of functional objects.

Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 164
Art for Modern Architecture
Architecture offered another important realm in which artists, architects, and
critics of the postwar period thought through the relationship between art and the
functionality of the real, everyday world. One of the most important thinkers on the
subject of modern tapestry was Le Corbusier, an architect and painter who also designed
numerous tapestries over the course of his career. In 1952, he theorized tapestry as a
muralnomad or a “nomadic mural,” proposing that modern tapestry embodied
simultaneously the seemingly irreconcilable paradigms of the decorative ensemble and
the portable tableau. On the one hand a large-scale work wedded to the wall and on the
other a mobile object that could be detached from that wall, tapestry was, according to Le
Corbusier, a modern-day improvement on the mural’s limitations:
The destiny of the tapestry of today appears: it becomes the “mural” of modern times. We
have become “nomads” living in apartments […]. We cannot paint a mural on the walls
of our apartment. On the other hand, this woolen wall which is the tapestry can be taken
down off walls, rolled up, caught under the arm at will, and hung elsewhere. Thus I
baptized my tapestries “Muralnomad.”
42

Le Corbusier described modern life as “nomadic”—because people move restlessly from
apartment to apartment—and then positioned tapestry as uniquely suited to this modern
nomadism. The crucial feature of tapestry is that, unlike a painted mural, it can be taken
down off the wall, easily folded or rolled up for transport, and then hung up in a new
space. Tapestry not only suits the modern nomadism of others, of its owners, it also
becomes a nomad itself.
Le Corbusier’s emphasis on the portability of tapestry was part of a broader effort
to promote tapestry as a more functional alternative to painting and therefore as better

42
Le Corbusier, “Tapisseries Muralnomad,” in Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Tissé ed. Martine Mathias
(Paris: Philippe Sers, 1987), 14 (my translation).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 165
suited to modern life. Tapestry enthusiasts argued that the medium could continue to
perform a crucial function in contemporary life by humanizing modern architecture.
Whether commentators cited the rough concrete of Brutalist buildings or the asceticism
of glass and steel constructions, they considered modern architecture “cold” and in need
of tapestry’s “warmth.” As the American Craftsmen’s Council argued in an exhibition
catalogue, modern tapestry could ameliorate this coldness like no other medium, its
woolen fibers providing “a sense of warmth that paintings do not offer”
43
and that
countered modern architecture’s impression of coldness, its “prevailing intellectual
frigidity, which is less endurable than frost.”
44
Here the Council supported the widely
circulating idea that, as a handicraft, tapestry could provide a human element to buildings
produced by machine, just as a tapestry’s color could offset the monochromatic effect of
modern interiors. Even in news outlets like The New York Times with no particularly
orientation towards craft, we see arguments that tapestry could insulate against noise, or
that, in its flexibility, tapestry was ideally suited to the sometimes-odd contours of
modern buildings, adapting itself to curved or angled walls with ease.
45
These arguments
in favor of tapestry suggest its decorative function as an application to an already
constructed modern architecture. Construing tapestry as such an “applied art” or
decorative art would seem to preclude any understanding of tapestry as a truly
autonomous fine art, yet it was precisely tapestry’s autonomous mobility, its

43
Rita Reif, “If You Can’t Afford the Painting, How About a Tapestry of It?” New York Times.
19 August 1967: FS14.
44
American Craftsmen Council, Contemporary French Tapestries (New York: The Museum of
Contemporary Crafts, 1959), 3.
45
American Craftsmen’s Council, Contemporary French Tapestries, 4; Reif, “If You Can’t
Afford the Painting,” FS14.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 166
independence from the wall, and its nomadic flexibility, its difference from the structure
of framed easel paintings, that allowed tapestry to serve these “decorative” functions.
Tapestry’s independence from the wall on which it hangs likens it to the “curtain
wall” of modern architecture. Such an exterior curtain wall, a term that itself trades on the
flexible autonomy of textiles, was so named because it is independent from the building’s
load-bearing structure. As a non-load-bearing, non-structural enclosure, the curtain wall
could be made of a very lightweight material, such as glass, giving rise to the “glass box”
architecture of the postwar period. The easy reproducibility of glass curtain walls on
modern skyscrapers the world over led to both praise and criticism. As an easily
manufactured construction system, the glass curtain wall seemed to some a “new
vernacular,” but to others it exemplified the threatening hegemony of corporate culture.
46

Part of the “coldness” of modern architecture then, came not only from its formal
qualities—its hard, industrially produced materials of glass, steel, and concrete or its
monochromatic, clean-edged surfaces—but also from its cultural associations with the
anonymity, banality, and reproduction of corporate capitalism. This modern/corporate
architecture had to be “humanized,” personalized with handmade, highly colorful, and
highly textured artworks whose “warmth” would mitigate modernism’s oppressive
effects.
The use of tapestry to humanize a potentially unappealing, modern environment
finds one of its clearest expressions in a corporate decorating project, Air France’s 1969
overhaul of its Boeing 707 jets. To help personalize these ubiquitous planes, which had

46
Scott Murray, Contemporary Curtain Wall Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2009), 44. For an example of a period discussion of this problem, see “The Monotonous
Curtain Wall,” Architectural Forum 111, no. 4 (October 1959): 142-147.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 167
become the most widely flown jetliners of the 1960s, Air France employed the decorator
Pierre Gautier-Delaye to redesign the interiors with a blue and gold color scheme and
commissioned four Parisian galleries and the Manufacture des Gobelins to provide
modern tapestries by more than two-dozen artists for the first class cabins (Fig. 3.19).
47

Air France had already commissioned large tapestries for its ticket agencies and airport
lounges, such as the trio of tapestries by René Perrot that Air France purchased in 1958
for the lounge at its new terminal at Idlewild Airport in New York—and it was not the
only airline to do so. KLM, for example, commissioned a tapestry from Jean Lurçat in
1953, La Conquete de l’Air [The Con quest of the Sky], that hung in its ticket agency on
the Champs Elysées (Fig. 3.20). But ordering tapestries by so many contemporary artists
for the airplanes themselves was absolutely novel.
We could read these works as continuing the role of earlier tapestries and
decorative schemes that ornamented ocean liners in order to turn floating hulks of steel
and machinery into elegant, comfortable retreats.
48
While Air France’s tapestries
similarly provided a decorative covering for the potentially off-putting, industrial spaces
of modern transportation, they were also appreciated as works of art in their own right,

47
Le Demeure provided tapestries by Monique Arradon, André Broderie, Emilio Gilioni, Louis-
Marie Julien, Jacques Lagrange, Mathieu Matégot, Jean Picart le Doux, Mario Prassinos, Marc
Saint-Saëns, René Schumacher, Michel Tourliere, and Robert Wogensky. The Florence Garnier
gallery provided tapestries by Maurice André, Sonia Delaunay, René Fumeron, Camille Hilaire,
Jeanne Houp le Beau, Xavier Longobardi, and Yves Millecamps. The Galerie de France provided
tapestries by Pierre Alechinsky, Hans Hartung, Jean Le Moal, Alfred Manessier, Gustave Singier,
and Pierre Soulages. The Galerie Denise René provided a tapestry by Victor Vasarely. The
Gobelins wove a tapestry by Georges Mathieu. See Frank Elgar, “L’Esthétique au service de
l’industrie et du transport Aérien,” Air France Revue 8, no. 38 (1969): 78. My thanks to Vanessa
Schwartz for first bringing the Air France tapestries to my attention.
48
Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106-108; Anne Wealleans, Designing Liners: A History of
interior design afloat (New York: Routledge, 2006); Anne Massey, “Nationalism and Design at
the End of Empire: Interior design and the ocean liner,” in Designing the Modern Interior: From
the Victorians to Today, ed. Penny Sparke, et. al., 207-218 (Oxford: Berg, 2009).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 168
autonomous from the larger decorative scheme of which they were a part, and in this way
they unexpectedly turned the B707 into a kind of flying art gallery or museum. As an
article in Plaisir de France described, airline passengers would benefit from being able to
“live for several hours in the intimacy of prestigious works: a wonderful occasion to
discover an artist (many if one travels often), or to deepen one’s acquaintance with his
oeuvre.” The author even speculated that “perhaps within a few months, the demanding
and informed traveler will ask, along with his ticket and his reservation, for the artist of
his choice.”
49
Tapestries in the B707 could function simultaneously as humanizing
decoration and as autonomous objects meant to be appreciated as works of art by the
discerning viewer.
Most of the tapestries that Air France commissioned for its airplane interiors were
small, only 100 cm high and 60 cm across, and thus lacked the monumental mural quality
that excited artists like Le Corbusier. Yet it was precisely because these tapestries were
commissioned for a specific site in the B707 interior that they had to take on the smaller
dimensions of the traditional easel painting. Although these tapestries were the same
scale as a portable tableau, they were designed to fit the confinements of a particular
decorative ensemble. From photographs of the B707 interiors, it is difficult to judge
whether the tapestries were framed like easel paintings or inset like upholstered panels
into the wall. A tapestry by Alfred Manessier seems to float against the wood paneling in
a narrow frame (Fig. 3.19), while a tapestry by Camille Hilaire appears to be framed
behind the wood paneling itself and is even partially obscured by the leather chair’s
headrest (Fig. 3.21). This ambiguity echoes the contradictory ways in which such

49
A.F., “Dans les Avions: des tapisseries que vous ne verrez qu’en vol,” Plaisir de France (June
1969): 40 (my translation).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 169
tapestries could be understood as both autonomous artworks and integrated decorative
elements.
When Air France introduced the Boeing 747 to its fleet in 1970, the company
commissioned Sheila Hicks to create a mural-like tapestry that covered the entire back
wall of the bar area. Departing from the colorful, abstract, yet pictorial compositions of
the earlier tableau-sized tapestries, Hicks created an entirely monochromatic work whose
visual interest derives from its irregular grid of highly textured squares. Images of Hicks
weaving the work show the tapestry emerging as a kind of collage of smaller and larger
squares embroidered into the canvas backing (Figs. 3.22-3.23). We can just make out the
faint semicircular outline at the top of the canvas that delimits the dimensions of the wall
Hicks’s tapestry was to fill. Another photograph of Hicks in front of the loom shows a
picture of the B747 in the background (Fig. 3.24), reinforcing the site specificity of the
commission. The monochromatic, all-over patterning of the work reinforces its role as a
decorative background, a tapestry fully integrated with its architectural setting. This is
certainly how Hicks’s tapestry functions in a publicity image of the B747 bar (Fig. 3.25),
where smiling, well-dressed passengers enjoy each others’ conversation and the services
of the bartender and flight attendant, paying as much attention to the carpeted wall behind
them as to the carpeted floor underneath their feet. But if this is tapestry at its most
integrated with an architectural surround and a decorative scheme, it is also tapestry at its
most portable and nomadic. Though Hicks’s tapestry mural seems unable to leave the site
of its installation, that site itself moves across oceans and continents. This, Air France
suggests, is modern nomadism at its best, flying around in the latest jets while cocooned
by tapestries, nomadic murals for the jet age.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 170
While tapestry producers enjoyed new patronage from airlines, they also returned
to weaving for a more traditional setting, the house of worship. And it was in such
religious sites that curators, dealers, and critics most clearly celebrated the role of
tapestry and other modern artworks as décor. MoMA circulated an Exhibition of Modern
Church Art throughout the US from 1948 to 1950 with photographs, artists’ sketches, and
representative works from two recent projects in Europe. The first was Notre-Dame-de-
Toute-Grâce in Assy, France, constructed from 1937 to 1946 in a modern style and
adorned with a large mosaic mural by Léger on the façade, a monumental tapestry by
Lurçat in the apse (Fig. 3.26), a painting by Bonnard, bronze tabernacle doors by Braque,
a bronze statue of the Virgin by Jacques Lipchitz and stained-glass windows by Rouault.
The second church was St. Matthew’s in Northampton, England, where the Rev. Walter
Husey had commissioned a sculpture of the Madonna and Child from Henry Moore and a
painting of the Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland for the late-Victorian building.
Although the MoMA exhibition included artists’ sketches and representative works by a
few of the artists, all of the commissions were represented by photographs of the finished
artworks installed in their respective churches, emphasizing the integration of the
artworks with their architectural surround and with one another.
This widely circulated exhibition made American audiences even more familiar
with European churches that, according to MoMA’s press release, had already “received
widespread publicity for the active part they have taken in the field of contemporary
arts.”
50
Subsequent American exhibitions of modern religious art would look back to

50
Press Release, “Exhibition of Modern Church Art,” n.d., Circulating Exhibition Files, Modern
Church Art, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY. The exhibition traveled to
Williams College, Williamstown, MA; Baltimore Museum of Art; Isaac Delgado Museum of Art,
New Orleans; San Francisco Museum of Art; Art Center School, Los Angeles; Springfield art
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 171
these European precedents and put even more emphasis on modern art’s role as
decoration. In 1951 and 1953, artists represented by the Kootz Gallery in New York
collaborated with architect Percival Goodman on two separate synagogues, the
Congregation B’Nai Israel in Millburn, New Jersey, and the Congregation Beth El in
Springfield, Massachusetts. The Kootz Gallery displayed its artists’ works before they
were installed, calling the exhibitions Art for a Synagogue. In her review of the 1953
exhibition, noted art critic Emily Genauer contextualized this project as part of a rising
trend of modern religious art, citing Notre-Dame-de-Tout-Grâce in Assy, Matisse’s
designs for the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France, and a recent exhibition in New
York organized by the Union Theological Seminary and the Episcopal Church of the
Ascension.
51
If Genauer wanted to familiarize her readers with this development, she also
sought to reconcile them with modernist abstraction by characterizing it as decorative:
The artists all represent the most extreme wing of modernism. They are intransigently
opposed to the idea that art must communicate specific meanings and primarily interested
in the sensuous qualities of color and form per se. It is contended, however, that their
choice, as was that of the French abstractionists, is highly logical. Such assignments are
basically decorative, to make beautiful the House of God.
52

Calling modernist abstraction an “extreme wing” yet “basically decorative” recovers a
function for abstract art beyond the communication of “specific meanings” that abstract

Museum, MO; J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Vassar College; University of
Tennessee, Nashville; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis; South Bend Art Association; and the Fort Worth Art Association.
51
Genauer was an art journalist from 1932 until the 1980s with regular writing posts at the New
York World, the New York World-Telegram, the Herald Tribune, the New York World Journal
Tribune, Newsday, and the New York Post. She won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. US
Rep. George A. Dondero and Roy W. Howard, Genauer’s editor at the New York World-
Telegram, considered her subversive because she wrote about Communist artists. See Robert F.
Worth, “Emily Genauer, Critic and Champion of 20
th
-Century Art, Is Dead at 91,” New York
Times, 25 August 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/nyregion/emily-genauer-critic-and-
champion-of-20th-century-art-is-dead-at-91.html.
52
Emily Genauer, “Works of Faith,” This Week Magazine [New York Herald Tribune], 24 May
1953.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 172
artists so “intransigently” reject. Genauer downplays the potential of abstract art to
convey religious meanings and understands the function of modern art in the house of
worship as essentially secular and decorative. However, her comments also demonstrate
how mid-century critics celebrated the commissioning of modern art for houses of
worship in large part because it seemed to provide modernism with a raison d’être, giving
art an actual function as decoration for modern life.
The award-winning art critic Aline Loucheim reviewed the Art for a Synagogue
exhibitions for the New York Times and similarly celebrated the synagogue commissions
as proof that modern art can function as decoration.
53
Loucheim titled her review of the
first 1951 exhibition “Modern Decoration for a Synagogue,” and opened it by lamenting
how the modern artist often seems to be “too parsimonious to indulge in the intoxication
of luxurious beauty.” Among the artworks Loucheim discussed were a mural for the
lobby created by Robert Motherwell and the ark curtain designed by Adolph Gottlieb.
Loucheim had mixed feelings about Motherwell’s mural (Fig. 3.27), praising the artist for
having “ingeniously adapted his style to the theme—converting symbols such as Jacob’s
Ladder, the tablets, Candelabra, etc.—into an over-all abstract pattern.” But though the

53
Loucheim won the International Award for Best Foreign Criticism at the Venice Biennale in
1951 and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for best newspaper art criticism in 1953. She would go
on to win the American Federation of Arts Award for best newspaper criticism in 1956.
Loucheim had studied the history of architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University and began work as an art critic for ARTnews magazine in 1944. She was the managing
editor of ARTnews from 1946 to 1948 and then an associate art editor and critic for the New York
Times from 1948 to 1953. In 1954 she married the modern architect Eero Saarinen and continued
reviewing art under the byline Aline B. Saarinen. She went on to become a sought after television
art critic, commentator, and reporter. She made features and documentaries, including The Art of
Collecting (see Chapter 4) and worked for NBC’s Sunday and Today shows as well as NBC
News, eventually becoming head of their Paris News Bureau. During the 1960s she also served
on the Design Advisory Committee of the Federal Aviation Administration, the US Commission
of Fine Arts and the New York State Council of the Arts. See “Biographical Information,” Aline
and Eero Saarinen papers, Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/aline-
and-eero-saarinen-papers-5589/more.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 173
mural made “a handsome painting” it did not, in Loucheim’s opinion, fulfill its
“architectural function” because it was too large-scale for its intended site and “looks best
from a distant, fixed point, impossible to attain in the [synagogue] lobby.” But Loucheim
had nothing but praise for Gottlieb’s curtain, calling it a “brilliant achievement” that
Gottlieb had first sketched as a painting but “reconceived in terms of the material and
techniques of appliqué, embroidery and joined segments of fabric which were used.”
While Loucheim thus commended how Gottlieb’s curtain explored the specific
materiality of textiles, she also extoled its symbolic and decorative function, calling it a
“magnificent abstract pattern,” with “legible and wonderfully decorative symbols” and a
“sense of Eastern ornament and splendor [that] are especially appropriate to the
religion.”
54

Loucheim found the works in the second, 1953 exhibition far superior to the first
in both beauty and “relatedness to the architecture.” She argued that this second
collaboration “proves forcefully that modern art can have a grandeur, a beauty and a
luxuriant richness which makes it appropriate as decoration for houses of worship.” She
again had particular praise for Gottlieb’s ark curtain and its relation to the “rich
decoration of Eastern art.” But she also had a more favorable impression of Motherwell’s
contribution, a kind of combination tapestry/rug that was designed to “stretch from the
ceiling down on to the floor under the table bearing the Ark.” According to Loucheim’s
description, the work seems to have had little relation to Motherwell’s customary
abstraction and included such recognizable symbols as “decorative Hebrew script,”
“stylized eagles,” “Matisse-like flowers,” and “the Star of David.” But Loucheim saw no

54
Aline B. Loucheim, “Two Shows with Unusual Themes: Sidelights on Leonardo—Modern
Decoration For a Synagogue,” New York Times, 7 October 1951, 119.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 174
contradiction between Motherwell’s and Gottlieb’s abstraction and the symbolic and
decorative potential of modern art. Acknowledging that “these artists, of course, seem the
natural choice for decoration of a house of worship where abstractions are considered
more appropriate than figurative art,” Loucheim insisted that “the exhibition points up the
general potential of good modern painters and sculptors for the enhancement of many
kinds of buildings.”
55
The lesson Loucheim wanted her readers to learn was that modern
art could succeed as decoration for modern life.
Modern architects not only agreed with Loucheim, they took an active interest in
humanizing or decorating their work with tapestry. Gordon Bunshaft, the New York-
based partner of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), corresponded with the French
weaver Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach and her dealer Nelly van Doesburg about
purchasing tapestries for his clients. He also collected modern tapestries himself, owning
five by 1967.
56
He displayed Deux Harlequins, a tapestry woven by de la Baume-
Dürrbach in 1957 after Picasso’s painting of 1920, in the library of his New York
apartment
57
(Fig. 3.28)—another copy of the same tapestry was acquired by Philip
Johnson—and Girl on the Beach, woven by de la Baume-Dürrbach in 1962 after
Picasso’s painting from two years earlier, was displayed in the living room of his East
Hampton house.
58
Bunshaft also had a tapestry by Le Corbusier that may have hung in a
bedroom in East Hampton (Fig. 3.29), and he commissioned a work by the New York-

55
Loucheim, “Art for Religion: Collaborative Project for a Synagogue Successfully Employs
Modern Design,” New York Times, 24 May 1953, X8.
56
Reif, “If You Can’t Afford a Painting,” FS14.
57
According to JBD’s records, Bunshaft acquired the tapestry in 1961. Ledger of tapestries
woven, Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach Papers (JBD Papers), Célérier-Dürrbach Family
Archive, Dijon, France.
58
Joseph Adams, “Exciting Tour of East Hampton Homes,” Summer Magazine Section, The
Sunday Review, 2 August 1964: 8M. folder 24, box 2, Gordon Bunshaft Papers, Avery Library,
Columbia University, New York, NY.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 175
based tapestry artist Jan Yoors for the lobby of the Marine Midland Bank Building in
lower Manhattan (Fig. 3.30).
59

De la Baume-Dürrbach’s records reveal the extent to which her practice relied on
architects’ commissions for office buildings and is exemplary of how tapestry makers
benefitted from the patronage of corporations via modern architects. The Seagram
Building in New York, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in collaboration with
Philip Johnson and completed in 1958, alone acquired three tapestries from de la Baume-
Dürrbach after works by Léger (Fig. 3.31) and a tapestry of Robert Delaunay’s 1930
painting La Joie de Vivre,
60
and would acquire additional tapestries from other sources,
including three Miró tapestries, Femme, fleur, étoile (Fig. 3.32), Hirondelle d’amour
(Fig. 3.33), and Composition (Fig. 3.34), from Marie Cuttoli.
61
As Phyllis Lambert
emphasizes in her recent account of the building, both Philip Johnson and she, the
project’s Director of Planning, strove to create the Seagram Building as a
“Gesamtkunstwerk” that would demonstrate the “interplay of art and architecture.”
62
This
direct involvement in art acquisition turned architects into quasi art dealers. Larger-scale

59
Marc Goldstein to David J. Laub, 28 September 1971, folder G (1968-1974), Communications
& Ephemera, Yoors Family Archive, New York, NY.
60
The Delaunay tapestry was woven in 1952 and the three Léger works were L’Homme à la
nature morte (woven in 1958 after the painting of 1950), L’Homme à la pastèque (woven in
1951), and Fleur du Mexique (woven 1952 after the painting of 1951). In 1969 SOM
commissioned de la Baume-Dürrbach to weave a diptych of Picasso’s Eté 1955 for the
headquarters of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a division of the
World Bank, in Washington, DC. And in 1973, Wallace Harrison commissioned a tapestry of
Picasso’s Mercure, from 1924, for the Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) headquarters at 75
Rockefeller Plaza. Ledger of tapestries woven, JBD Papers.
61
Phyllis Lambert does not mention Léger’s L’Homme à la nature morte, but records that “at the
end of 1974, Seagram had eight tapestries and fourteen wall hangings and decorative carpets
valued at $118,000 by Christie’s.” Johnson originally wanted to commission six new Miró
tapestries for the entrance hall of the Four Seasons but the commission proved too expensive. See
Phyllis Lambert, Building Seagram, foreword by Barry Bergdoll (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2013), 159, 164-65, 169, 278n77, 279n85-86.
62
Lambert, 150. See Lambert, chapter 5, “Architecture and Art Allied,” 150-193.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 176
tapestry dealers such as Modern Master Tapestries Inc. routinely granted architects the
same discounts they would give to other dealers, in recognition of the fact that architects
were generally purchasing the work for resale to their clients.
63
Architects were thus
encouraged to profit from and promote the placement of modern tapestries within their
buildings. Bertrand Goldberg even organized an exhibition of two-dozen tapestries from
the Galerie Denise René that was shown in 1964 at his recently completed Marina City in
Chicago.
64

As these projects demonstrate, architects were often commissioning tapestries for
the new headquarters of major corporations, where the tapestries became part of
corporate art collections. Such collections answered the same perceived need to humanize
corporate architecture, but they were also tracked as financial investments. The art
collection of Chase Manhattan Bank is exemplary in this regard. David Rockefeller,
whose family members were major art collectors and patrons of MoMA, was the bank
president and had personally taken charge of building the bank’s new headquarters,
when, in 1959, he established an art program that worked to integrate art with the
architecture of new and preexisting bank offices. The result was a corporate art collection
whose size, prestige, and value quickly became a model for others. In November 1970,
Chase sent a complete inventory of its art collection to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then MoMA’s
Director of Collections. The inventory carefully recorded the initial cost and current

63
Contracts between Modern Master Tapestries Inc. and their artists specify that the artist will
receive 20% of the net retail price, defined as the retail price less any professional discounts
allowed to architects, designers, or other art galleries. See, for example, Dominique Mazeaud to
Olivia Motch, 20 January 1982, Modern Master Tapestries File, Roy Lichtenstein Papers, Roy
Lichtenstein Foundation, New York, NY. I will discuss this firm in more detail in chapter 5.
64
Denise René (DR) to François Tabard, 25 January 1963; DR to Charles E. Slatkin, 18
December 1964; folder 30 J 296/2, Atelier Tabard Papers, Archives Departementales de la
Creuse, Gueret, France.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 177
value of each piece as well as the collection as a whole. Chase conservatively estimated
that the entire collection of 1,601 works had increased in value by more than 56 percent,
from a cost of $1,376,561.78 to a current value of $2,148,007.43.
65
Tellingly, the
inventory had an entire section of “Tapestries, Fabrics, and Banners,” which included
tapestries by Jean Arp, Gottlieb, Miró, Motherwell, and Theodoros Stamos.
66
Although
the practice of corporate art collecting is well documented, the role that tapestries played
within such collections has gone relatively unnoticed. Despite this historical oversight,
the discourse surrounding tapestry suggests it was privileged as a medium that could
more effectively achieve the humanizing function that all corporate art was meant to
perform. Tapestries were routinely marketed to corporate clients as a superior alternative
to painting, on the grounds, for example, that their texture and monumental scale were
particularly suited to the smooth, expansive walls of modern office buildings. The Chase
inventory suggests that such discourses were at least partially successful, and that
tapestry acquired a recognized place within the official/corporate complex of art
collecting and display.
The Empire State Plaza Art Collection demonstrates how standard the inclusion
of tapestries in such collections could be. Initiated in 1965 by Nelson Rockefeller, the
Governor of New York state and David Rockefeller’s brother, this project was part of the

65
The estimate was conservative because only a fraction of the collection had been reappraised,
and those works that were not reappraised were listed as having a current value equal to their
original cost. The cost of each artwork included both its purchase price and any subsequent
expenses for framing, conservation, etc. See Chase Manhattan Bank Art Collection Inventory,
October 1970, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Archives, New York, NY.
66
Chase purchased Arp’s Ramure from the Denise René Gallery in Paris and his Sailboat in the
Forest (1958) from the Chalette Gallery in Saint-George, Switzerland. From Modern Master
Tapestries Inc., Chase bought Gottlieb’s Burst (1968), Miró’s, Spanish Dancer, Motherwell’s
Burnt Sienna (1968), and Stamos’s Sunset (1968). Chase Manhattan Art Collection Inventory,
MoMA Archives.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 178
Governor’s plans to rebuild the South Mall in Albany. He assembled a committee to
choose works of art that would be acquired by the State of New York with public funds
and displayed throughout the South Mall complex.
67
Rockefeller conceived the collection
as an opportunity to assemble a high-quality representation of the contemporary “New
York School” in recognition of New York’s importance to postwar art. Among the works
included in the collection were three tapestries, Burst by Gottlieb, Primary Tapestry by
Ellsworth Kelly, and Burnt Sienna by Motherwell, which were approved in 1968 along
with a Calder sculpture and paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Jensen, Alexander
Liberman, and David Novros. This turn to tapestries may have been partly motivated by
cost. The committee did its best to be economical with its taxpayers’ dollars, and while
the tapestries ranged in price from $1,720 to $2,620, the other works bought at the time
cost anywhere from $2,250 to $22,500. Yet the acquisition committee’s unanimous
approval of the tapestries also suggests that these were acceptable, and perhaps even
expected, objects within the landscape of official public space and within the New York
School of modern art that the Empire State Plaza Art Collection represented.
At Albany, tapestries were part of a museum-like art collection that was open to
the public and accompanied by brochures that guided visitors among the works. In the
corporate context, however, tapestries and other artworks were positioned as part of the
décor. Florence Knoll’s interior designs for the CBS headquarters, designed by Eero
Saarinen and opened in New York in 1965, demonstrates how interchangeable art and

67
The committee, called the Art Commission for the Empire State Plaza, was chaired by Wallace
K. Harrison and included Seymour H. Knox, Dorothy C. Miller, Robert M. Doty (secretary), and
René d’Harnoncourt until his death in 1968. In 1959, Miller had also been appointed to the art
committee for One Chase Manhattan Plaza, Chase’s new headquarters building in lower
Manhattan and the project that catalyzed the bank’s corporate art collection. Gordon Bunshaft, a
partner with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and the project’s chief architect, also served on the
committee, along with James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred Barr.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 179
decoration could be. Tapestries and large-scale paintings were chosen to coordinate with
prescribed color schemes that differentiated each floor, and Knoll’s sketches included
undefined objects labeled “sculpture or plant,” indicating that Knoll was more interested
in an object’s position and scale than in its aesthetic status. Recent scholarship has argued
that this kind of collecting and decorating by committee, controlled by executives and
imposed on the employees, could be just as oppressive as the architecture it was designed
to improve.
68
However, what is more significant for our understanding of modern art as
décor (and vice versa), is how contemporaries perceived the oppression of modernism as
deriving from its Gesamtkunstwerk-like totality, a sense that modern art was part of an
all-embracing environment.
A feature in the April 29, 1966 issue of Life magazine speaks to this perception.
A photo-spread titled “Total Design on a Grand Scale” accompanied an article by Chris
Welles titled “How it feels to live in Total Design,” and together they presented the pros
and cons of this new trend, “a growing movement in the business community to create
harmonious monuments” that integrate “every aspect of the interiors into the over-all
design.”
69
Focusing on the CBS headquarters and the new American Republic building in
Des Moines, Iowa, designed by SOM in 1965, the feature reported that these all-
encompassing modern design schemes could increase a company’s reknown and
productivity. In the case of American Republic, “the impact of the building has been
decisive. More than 10,000 visitors have flocked to see it. The president reports that,
since moving into the building last year, his business volume has increased 47%, mostly

68
Alex J. Taylor, “Executive Modern: Abstract Art and the Planning of Corporate Space,” paper
presented at College Art Association, New York, 14 February 2013.
69
“Total Design on a Grand Scale,” Life 60, no. 17, 29 April 1966, 51.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 180
owing to the surge in morale of the employees.”
70
Welles acknowledged these advantages
but nevertheless presented such schemes as totalitarian policies that treated the employee
like a child “needing discipline from more sophisticated superiors to route his actions
along approved channels.” Welles’s term for these autocratic overlords was “integrated-
art-form people,” because “they excitedly embraced the view of architects that the once-
prosaic office building could become an integrated art form” (emphasis original). And
Welles stressed that it was in the modern interior that the employee felt the effect of this
integrated art form most keenly: “it is not until he goes in his office that he feels the
impact of the new world of centralized esthetic planning. For his office is as much a
triumph of design as the exterior façade. And over this design, and its use, the company
attempts to retain complete—if not tyrannical—control.”
71

Of course, not every corporate interior was as highly regulated as that of CBS or
American Republic, but this controversy in the pages of Life reminds us that one of the
chief ways in which postwar subjects encountered modern art was as part of the “total
design” of corporate art collections and interior décors. The efforts of tapestry promoters
to extol tapestry’s superior ability to humanize cold modern architecture, and thus to
privilege tapestry as an object for inclusion in these corporate art collections and
interiors, speaks to the complex and seemingly contradictory aims of corporate art
collecting. On the one hand such collections sought to identify individual works by
established or promising artists that would rise in financial value, and on the other hand it
sought works whose color or scale could fit specific sites and harmonize with a total
décor. These goals seem contradictory only if we continue to insist on an opposition

70
Ibid., 56.
71
Chris Welles, “How it feels to live in Total Design,” Life 60, no. 17, 29 April 1966, 59.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 181
between the tableau, the individual art object, and decoration as a total environment.
Attending to the role of tapestry in corporate art demonstrates that such an opposition
does not necessarily reflect how these works of art/décor were actually used or
understood by their contemporaries.
The efforts of such public art critics as Aline Loucheim and such modern
architects as Gordon Bunshaft to integrate art with architecture remind us that even in the
1950s and 1960s, modern art still needed to be defended as a worthwhile component of
modern life. The efforts of Le Corbusier and others to promote tapestry as a similarly
valuable addition to modern life and architecture should be seen in this context, not as the
isolated concerns of a fringe group who were trying to elevate tapestry against all odds,
but as part of a larger conversation about the role and merits of all modern art.

Portability
Le Corbusier’s theory of the muralnomad, first published in 1952, was closely
related to his earlier “Law of Ripolin,” which the architect articulated in his 1925 L’Art
décoratif d’aujourd’hui [The Decorative Art of Today].
72
In this text, Le Corbusier
promoted covering modern buildings inside and out with a coat of white paint rather than
more elaborate ornamentation, yet such whitewashing was not a neutral, transparent layer
that revealed the modern structure underneath but an opaque skin or clothing that
covered, cladded, or “dressed” the architectural frame.
73
Le Corbusier’s Law of Ripolin
thus builds on Adolf Loos’s 1898 essay “The Principle of Cladding,” and Gottfried

72
Le Corbusier, L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (Paris: G. Cr es et cie, 1925).
73
Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 15-19, 118.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 182
Semper’s Principle of Dressing,
74
which Semper articulated in his mid-nineteenth century
treatises Die vier Elemente der Baukunst [The Four Elements of Architecture] (1851) and
Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishcen Künsten [Style in the Technical and
Tectonic Arts] (1860).
Although most famous for his diatribe against surface decoration in “Ornament
and Crime,” Loos justified the need for cladding of various kinds and argued that
cladding should be more frankly asserted. His “law” of cladding declared that “we must
work in such a way that a confusion of the material clad with its cladding is impossible.
That means, for example, that wood may be painted any color except one—the color of
wood.”
75
Similarly, “any and all materials used to cover walls—wallpaper, oilcloth,
fabric, or tapestries—ought not to aspire to represent squares of brick or stone.”
76
What
Loos advocated is a kind of truth to materials in which the difference between the
materiality of the cladding and that which it clads is honestly proclaimed. Loos justified
the continued use of cladding on both functional and decorative grounds, arguing that it
could improve weatherproofing or hygiene but could also operate as “the means to a
specific effect—as in the color painting of statues, the tapestries on walls, the veneer on
wood.” Such an assertion of cladding as a substance worthy of its own visibility and
materiality reflected Loos’s belief in the important contemporary and historical role
played by cladding. He looked directly to Semper in asserting that because “cladding is

74
In the original German both Loos and Semper use the same word, Bekleidung, meaning
clothing or apparel but also siding or sheathing. I am following published translations in referring
to Semper’s principle as “dressing,” and Loos’s as “cladding.”
75
Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding” (1898), in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays,
1897-1900 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 67.
76
Ibid., 68.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 183
older even than structure,” tapestries or hung carpets do not imitate the structure that
supports them but “reveal clearly their own meaning as cladding for the wall surface.”
77

In his writings on the Principle of Dressing, Semper argued that the first human-
made enclosures were woven fences and textiles hung from temporary structures. This
historical priority of textiles was so important to Semper that he called it the primordial
art (Urkunst), the only art that was entirely medium specific for, “it alone generates its
types from itself or from analogies in nature; all other arts, including architecture, borrow
types from this art.”
78
Semper felt it was the enclosing textile, not its hidden structure of
support, that was the origin of architecture and the true producer of architectural space.
“Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space,”
79
he argued,
prioritizing the dressing that inhabitants could see and touch over architecture’s
inaccessible frame.
Semper’s theory had profound implications for nineteenth-century design reform,
the study of craft, and the subsequent development of modernist architecture—the
analogy between Semper’s textilian dressing and the glass “curtain wall” is obvious—but
it is important to note that Semper developed his theory in the context of a heated
contemporary debate on the polychrome architecture of ancient Greece. Both of Semper’s
treatises discuss antique polychromy extensively, and what those discussions make clear
is that Semper insisted on the historical priority of dressing in order to explain why so
many ancient cultures, including that of classical Greece, covered their buildings with

77
Ibid., 67.
78
Gottfried Semper, Prospectus: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical
Aesthetics (1859), in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis
Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 175.
79
Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of
Architecture, in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, 104.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 184
color. Although polychromy seemed to hide and falsify a building’s materials, Semper
understood it as the expression of a prior, original, or Ur-material, because it alluded to
the colorful patterns of textiles that predated permanent walls. If Loos wanted cladding to
be true to its own materials, rather than to those of the structure it clad, Semper
envisioned a kind of historically inflected expression of medium in which dressing
articulates the primordial roots of all architecture. This defense of polychromy, leads, via
Loos’s emphasis on truth-to-materials, to Le Corbusier’s advocacy of whitewash as the
modern heir to architecture’s tradition of dressing. Recognizing Semper and Le Corbusier
as being in conversation rather than in opposition allows us to understand why Le
Corbusier began designing tapestries less than a decade after his Law of Ripolin appeared
to banish such decoration from modern architecture.
Scholars of Le Corbusier’s tapestry practice have focused on the European
context,
80
but his concept of the muralnomad also sheds light on American art of the
same period and particularly on the monumental paintings of Jackson Pollock. The
canonical paintings Pollock exhibited at his solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery
in late 1950 exemplify the closeness of the relationship, but several unrealized projects
initiated in the run up to the that famous exhibition also demonstrate the Semperian logic
of Pollock’s work. For another exhibition at Parsons earlier that year, titled Murals in
Modern Architecture, Pollock collaborated with Peter Blake, an architect who had been
appointed curator of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Industrial Design by
Philip Johnson in 1948. Blake had designed an “Ideal Museum” for an earlier series in
Architectural Forum, and he constructed a model of this design complete with miniature

80
Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses; Martine Mathias, ed., Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Tissé, 14
(Paris: Philippe Sers, 1987); Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe
1927-1957 (New Haven and London: 2009).
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 185
Pollock paintings to be included with Pollock’s exhibition at Parsons (Fig. 3.35). The
model shows an open structure, fifty by one hundred feet, where Pollock’s apparently
unstretched paintings hang without frames on glass partitions and at right angles to
mirrored walls that would appear to extend the paintings indefinitely. This project was
immediately understood in Semperian terms. As Arthur Drexler, Blake’s successor at
MoMA, described, the objective of this project was to allow the paintings, rather than
walls, to define architectural space: “The project suggests a re-integration of painting and
architecture wherein painting is the architecture” and “its sole purpose is to heighten our
experience of space.”
81
Blake’s Ideal Museum thus manifests Semper’s Principle of
Dressing as another way in which textiles—now understood as woven canvases that are
themselves clad with Pollock’s interwoven skeins of paint—hang as the enclosures and
creators of architectural space. Blake used mirrors to extend these canvas walls
indefinitely because he read Pollock’s paintings as endlessly repeatedly patterns, not
discrete works. What Blake wanted to show, and what Pollock and Parsons seem to have
encouraged, was modernist painting’s potential role as Semperian dressing, as a space
producing, free-hanging enclosure.
Also in 1950, Pollock envisioned his work in another architectural setting, a
Roman Catholic church that Tony Smith was designing for the artists’ friend, Alfonso
Ossorio. Smith’s plan was for a series of interconnecting hexagons elevated on pillars;
one hexagon was to consist of Pollock’s works. An existing painting, Lucifer (1947), and

81
Arthur Drexler, “Unframed space; a museum for Jackson Pollock’s paintings,” Interiors
(January 1950): 90. Victoria Newhouse discusses Pollock’s projects as turning art into
architecture but does not acknowledge Semper’s Principle of Dressing, with which architects
such as Blake and Drexler were likely familiar. Victoria Newhouse, Art and the Power of
Placement (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2005), 158-159.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 186
five new commissions were to be suspended or hung to form a freestanding hexagon,
82

Pollock’s canvases becoming the textile walls of a pavilion or tent. This project could be
seen as echoing Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de Temps Nouveaux of 1937, in which the
structure was detached from the colored fabrics it held up and only those fabrics were
visible from the interior.
83
Both works practically illustrate Semper’s theory, in which it
is not walls or structure but their “dressing,” the apparently ornamental, colorful, all-over
patterning of surfaces that defines a space.
If Pollock’s large canvases are related to Le Corbusier’s tapestries through their
shared Semperian logic, then it is notable that Pollock described his painting practice as
creating a kind of portable mural, much in the way that Le Corbusier described his
tapestry practice as muralnomad. In his oft-quoted 1947 application for a Guggenheim
Fellowship, Pollock described his intention “to paint large movable pictures which will
function between the easel and mural.” Pollock cited his 1943 Mural for Peggy
Guggenheim as a precedent, and recounted how the work had traveled from
Guggenheim’s residence to the Large-Scale Paintings exhibition at MoMA and Yale
University. In his ambition to create “large movable pictures,” Pollock thus placed as
much emphasis on the “moveable” as the “large,” highlighting his work’s ability to

82
Newhouse, Art and the Power of Placement, 159. See also John Keenen, “Architecture,” in
Tony Smith: Arhictect, Painter, Sculptor (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 36-49. The
arrangement anticipates some aspects of the nearly octagonal Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas,
designed by Phillip Johnson. John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create
paintings for the chapel in 1964, and he completed them in 1966. As with the unrealized Pollock
chapel, Rothko’s mural-sized paintings provide the only decoration of the space and surround the
viewer on all sides. However, the paintings do not entirely displace the walls as Pollock’s works
seem to have been designed to do. Instead, Rothko’s paintings hang as monumental yet isolated
tableaux framed by the white walls behind them. The arrangement of some of the paintings into
triptychs more closely recalls the tradition of freestanding altars rather than Semper’s Principle of
Dressing. See “Image Gallery,” rothkochapel.org.
83
Wigley discusses this project in relation to Semper. See Wigley, White Walls, Designer
Dresses, 248.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 187
circulate to various display venues despite its large size. Although Pollock believed “the
tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural,”

it was the portability of
easel painting that Pollock was unwilling to sacrifice.
84
Like Le Corbusier, he wanted to
combine the portability of the tableau with the monumentality of the mural.
The relationship between Pollock’s “large moveable pictures” and Le Corbusier’s
muralnomad tapestries becomes particularly clear in Pollock’s November-December
1950 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The three largest paintings in the show,
Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, One: Number 31, 1950, and Number 32, 1950 were
all hung without stretchers (Figs. 3.36-3.37), so that each canvas was displayed in its
entirety from edge to edge, just has it had been painted on the floor of Pollock’s studio.
While this unusual hanging technique has been interpreted as strengthening the “mural
quality” of the paintings,
85
I would argue that the hanging of these canvases loose,
unframed and un-stretched, allowed them to function not just as murals or walls but as
textile walls: as flexible, autonomous dressing. As Victoria Newhouse has argued,
Pollock “replaced the traditional idea of the representational easel painting as window
with the conception of a canvas that has become a wall, displacing rather than
embellishing architecture.”
86
Yet Newhouse does not cite Semper or the textile basis of
his Principle of Dressing, and thus does not articulate how the ability of canvas to
“become a wall” rather than to “embellish” a wall seems to depend on hanging that
canvas exactly as one would a tapestry, on allowing the canvas to stretch its textile
expanse all the way to the floor, independently of any stretcher, frame, or structure. In a

84
Jackson Pollock, “Application for Guggenheim Fellowship” (1947), in Jackson Pollock: Key
Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel and Kirk Varnedoe (New York: the Museum
of Modern Art, 1999), 17.
85
Newhouse, Art and the Power of Placement, 160.
86
Ibid.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 188
later recollection, the critic Rosa Slivka described the experience of visiting this
installation as feeling not only “totally surrounded,” but “blanketed,” as though retaining
the canvases’ soft, supple textility allowed the viewer to feel cocooned or wrapped by the
canvas as dressing.
87

Newhouse’s insistence on the Abstract Expressionist painting becoming the wall
rather than embellishing it responds to an unacknowledged specter that haunts the
discussion: Cecil Beaton’s photographs, published in Vogue in March 1951, of fashion
models in front of Pollock’s paintings at the Parsons gallery (Fig. 3.38). Newhouse wants
to present Pollock’s paintings as constructive rather than decorative, as creating
architectural structure rather than merely being applied to that structure. This is a
distinction that Semper’s Principle of Dressing effectively eliminates, but Newhouse
retains it as though to counter Thomas Crow’s well-known essay “Fashioning the New
York School,” in which he argued that Pollock’s mural-sized works were inherently
decorative in that they functioned as backgrounds before which figures could pose.
Drawing a connection between the 1943 Mural for Peggy Guggenheim and the canonical
works from the Beaton photographs, Crow asserted that the “appropriation” of Pollock’s
paintings “in the realm of style and fashion was inseparable from the very origin of this
kind of object: the large-scale abstract painting with its ‘all-over’ composition.” For
Crow the circumstances of the Mural commission—Pollock’s financial dependence on
Guggenheim, her “court” of European émigrés, and this court’s engagement with
fashionable posing—determined that “the big canvas would always carry the meaning of

87
Rosa Slivka in conversation with Victoria Newhouse, 4 Oct 1999, as quoted in Newhouse, The
Power of Placement, 160.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 189
stage and backdrop.”
88
Crow’s essay responded in turn to T.J. Clark’s famous
characterization of the Beaton photographs as the “bad dream of modernism:”
89
what
Crow challenged was the notion that the “good dream” actually existed, that there really
had been some pure modernism outside of fashion’s reach.
The threat or “bad dream” of Beaton’s photographs is that Pollock’s paintings
would inevitably become like the fashionable dresses in front of them, but what Semper’s
Principle of Dressing and its expression through Le Corbusier’s muralnomad, Blake’s
Ideal Museum, and Pollock’s 1950 installation at the Parsons gallery suggest is that this
is precisely how modern tapestries and the paintings that emulated them were understood:
as dresses or “dressing” for architectural structure, as producers of architectural space and
comfort and warmth, as enclosures. We can understand these works as portable, a French
adjective from the verb porter meaning both “to wear” and “to carry.” Conceiving of
tapestry as not just portable but portable, both portable and “wearable,” shows us how the
portability and autonomy of the tapestry—qualities it shared with the tableau—are
precisely what allowed it to function as dressing or decorative, even fashionable,
covering. The notion of tapestry as portable thus collapses the distinction between the
tableau as a discrete, portable object and the decorative as an all-encompassing
environment.
Similarly, understanding the tapestry as a tapis/serie or Wand/teppich allows us to
appreciate the relationship between the horizontally laid, functional rug and the vertically
displayed art tapestry as dialectical rather than oppositional. Realigning our perspective

88
Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 47-8.
89
Timothy J. Clark, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New
York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990),
178.
Chapter 3 Art as Decoration and Tableau Wells 190
in this way enables us to acknowledge how the architects of modernism, along with its
artists, dealers, and critics, wanted to see art as functioning in the service of modern life.
Their utilization of art to humanize and warm the interiors of modern apartments,
corporate offices, and airplanes should not be understood as the demeaning appropriation
of art into the domain of fashionable decoration. Rather, we must see the decorative as
continuing to offer a model that—as surprising as this may seem—some of the most
significant artists of the postwar period would wish to emulate.
191
CHAPTER FOUR
GREENBERG’S VOCABULARY OF TEXTILES

Understanding Jackson Pollock’s work in relation to tapestry raises questions
about the alleged purity of modernism, about the extent to which modernist painting was
understood as autonomous from the larger decorative environment. The notion that
modernist painting strove for such purity comes largely from the writings of the postwar
period’s most important art critic, Clement Greenberg. It would be difficult to
overestimate Greenberg’s significance for histories of modernism, or to imagine a figure
less likely to embrace tapestry’s role in the postwar period as a sybol of France’s cultural
leadership, as a form of art reproduction, and as a synthesis of high and decorative art.
One could easily presume that Greenberg, who championed the originality of American
modernism in the monumental works of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters,
could have had no stake in the Frenchness, reproductive abilities, or decorative appeal of
tapestry. The established view of Greenberg is as a dogmatic autocrat, an “Art Czar,”
who presumably disdained any art that he did not bring to critical acclaim himself.
1

However, a careful examination of Greenberg’s writings and archival papers reveals that
he was not only familiar with modern tapestry, but also encouraged associations between
textiles and the paintings of his favored artists.
Tapestry had a crucial conceptual impact on Greenberg’s criticism and,
consequently, on our understanding of modernism. I will show that Greenberg, like other
modern art critics both before and after him, used a vocabulary of textiles in his writing
by crafting metaphors and choosing terms that described or explained modernist painting

1
Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Boston: MFA
Publications, 2006).
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 192
as a kind of weaving, textile, or tapestry. While this chapter presents “tapestry” very
broadly as a set of objects and terms united under the rubric of weaving—from rugs and
tapestries to carpets and canvases—I argue that the presence of this generalized
vocabulary of textiles in the writing of Greenberg and others expresses the contemporary
presence of actual tapestries in the modern art world, a presence that I have explored
more fully in the previous chapters. We can consequently understand tapestry as part of
the visual and conceptual culture out of which modern art and criticism developed.
As an active member of the New York art scene from the late 1940s to the late
1960s, Greenberg could hardly have been unaware of modern tapestry. Indeed, there is
ample evidence that he had multiple contacts with the medium. First, he occasionally
referred to artists’ tapestries in his writing, critiquing Matisse’s tapestries as among “the
feeblest of the things he had done” and praising works by Fernand Léger when
“translated into tapestry.”
2
Second, from 1958 to 1960, Greenberg worked as a consultant
and guest curator at French & Co., a gallery in New York dealing in French art and
antiques. French & Co. collaborated with the Parisian dealer Denise Majorel and with the
American dealer Lawrence Jeppson to market modern French tapestries in the US,
3
and
their expertise with antique tapestries made them a natural choice to prepare modern
works for hanging and to treat them for moths. These were services that the gallery
regularly performed, for example, for Nelson Rockefeller, whose eighteen Picasso
tapestries imported from France between 1955 and 1975 were often first sent to French &

2
Greenberg, “‘Feeling is All’” (1952) and “Master Léger” (1954), in The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago press, 1993), 100, 172.
3
For example, the gallery co-published Jeppson’s book, Murals of Wool (Washington, DC:
Jeppson Galleries, Inc.; New York: French & Company Inc., 1960).
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 193
Co. to be lined and strapped.
4
Third, we know from Greenberg’s carefully kept diaries
that he saw a number of tapestry exhibitions at local galleries, such as an exhibition at the
Sidney Janis Gallery of “Modern French Tapestries by Braque, Léger, Matisse, Miró,
Picasso, Rouault.”
5
Such shows continued throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, so that
when Greenberg visited the Aberbach Gallery on February 9, 1974, he undoubtedly saw
the exhibition of Sonia Delaunay tapestries then on view.
6

Greenberg’s use of a vocabulary of textiles is significant not only because it
reflects the critic’s familiarity with modern tapestry, but also because it works to
contradict his signature theory of medium specificity. Despite the extensive critique and
revision that Greenberg’s career has received since the 1970s, his core understanding of
modern art as the development of medium specificity persists as a widely held, and
widely taught, interpretation of modernism. Greenberg first alluded to medium specificity
in his earliest important essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), but he developed the
notion more completely in an essay written the following year, “Towards a Newer
Laocoön.”
7
Here Greenberg argued that abstraction in painting, sculpture, poetry, and
music is symptomatic of an interest in “purity,” so that practitioners of each art renounce

4
Picasso Tapestry records, Art Series, Record Group 4, Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers,
Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.
5
Box 19, Clement Greenberg Papers, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
California. Modern French Tapestries by Braque, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Rouault:
exhibition, April 21-May 17 (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1958).
6
Box 21, Clement Greenberg Papers. Sonia Delaunay: Tapestries, January-February (New
York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1974).
7
The title of the later essay references G.E. Lessing’s 1766 treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the
Limits of Painting and Poetry, which argues, against the tradition of ut pictura poesis, that
painting and poetry have entirely different characters and should not imitate one another.
Greenberg views modernism as furthering Lessing’s call for separation between the arts. Clement
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1,
Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian, 5-22 (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1986); Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), in The
Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, 23-38.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 194
all illusion or subject matter outside of the particular artistic medium itself. In abstract
painting, Greenberg continued, this turn to medium specificity is expressed primarily
through flatness, for rather than representing something else, the modernist painting
presents exactly what it is, a “real and material plane,” a flat, two-dimensional surface
onto which paint is applied.
8
Although such a strict insistence on the literalness of
abstract painting would seem to preclude any metaphorical comparisons between painting
and other media, it was in fact by imagining modernist painting as a kind of textile that
Greenberg and other critics could describe its inherent, medium-specific qualities.
9

Drawing attention to a vocabulary of textiles in the writing of Greenberg and
other modern art critics raises questions about the conceptual limits of medium
specificity, suggesting that the theory operated less as a dogma than as a tentative
elucidation. We should understand Greenberg less as a hyper-rational critic whose
premeditated dictates determined the development of modernism than as a provisional
responder trying to make sense of the modern art already around him. Doing so will give
us not only have a better appreciation for Greenberg’s contextual influences, such as
modern tapestry, it will also contribute to correcting the oversimplifications of earlier
revisionists.
10

8
Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” 35.
9
In The Literate Eye, Rachel Teukolsky has similarly argued that early formalist critics could
only construct the autonomy of the work of art through writing, something outside of the work
itself. However, like most scholars of modernist criticism, Teukolsky is concerned with
formalism more broadly rather than with medium specificity, which I argue has a more particular
connection with the discourses of weaving and design reform. See Rachel Teukolsky, The
Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 17.
10
The trends of this revisionist scholarship have been ably discussed by Francis Frascina in
Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2
nd
ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). An
earlier wave focused on the institutionalization of modernism through the lens of Cold War
politics, beginning with Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” Artforum 11,
no. 9 (May 1973): 43-54; and culminating with Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 195
Perhaps the most radical implication of understanding textiles and weaving as
integral to Greenberg’s extraordinarily influential view of modernism is that modernism
itself could be understood as a kind of craft discourse. Attending to the pervasive
vocabulary of textiles both before and during Greenberg’s day reveals how modernist
critics treated painting as akin to the craft of weaving, but also how they understood
painting as its own craft that was in need of innovation and reform. Moreover, by
situating Greenberg within a longer lineage of critics who employed a vocabulary of
textiles, we can see how modernism’s interest in medium specificity developed from
nineteenth-century discourses of “truth to materials” and design reform. Design reform is
a general name given to the efforts of numerous nineteenth-century figures who wanted
to improve manufactured goods, architecture, arts, and crafts, and who placed scholarly
and critical importance on the decorative arts. Many of these figures, including John
Ruskin, A.W.N. Pugin, Gottfried Semper, and William Morris, argued that the
manufacture of objects should be based on the differentiation of their media, techniques,
and materials, anticipating modernism’s later embrace of media purity. Examining the

Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Subsequent critiques focused on
issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. Some examples: Anne Wagner, “Lee Krasner as
L.K.,” Representations 25 (Winter 1989): 42-57; David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and
Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American Art’,” The Oxford Art Journal 14, no.
7 (1991): 44-66; Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in
the 1940s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); Jackson Rushing, Native
American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995); Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); and Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing
in the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Greenberg has
also been the focus of critique by the so-called October school, most directly by Rosalind Krauss
in The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). All of these avenues of critique
have been extremely valuable and productive for the field of modernist art, but they have also
resulted in a somewhat one-dimensional view of Greenberg as a villain to be overthrown. See
Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of
the Senses (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 196
formation of medium specificity before Greenberg shows how important the vocabulary
of textiles was even in the early days of modern criticism’s development.

Medium Specificity before Greenberg
In Greenberg’s own day, the postwar tapestry revival encouraged scholars to think
critically about the historical relationship between painting and textiles, and some
questioned the revival’s narratives of tapestry’s “decline” during the nineteenth century.
Pierre Vaisse did so most explicitly in his 1973 essay, “La querelle de la Tapisserie au
début de la III
e
République” [The Tapestry Debate at the beginning of the Third
Republic], which demonstrated that much of the discourse surrounding the postwar
tapestry revival was already current during the late-nineteenth century.
11
Important art
critics and state officials such as Henry Harvard, Gustave Geffroy, and Charles le Blanc
sought to reform tapestry by making it exploit the particular qualities of weaving rather
than painting. They argued that tapestry had become too illusionistic and should return to
its medieval roots, to abstracted imagery and symbolism, pure color contrasts, simpler
design and coarser weave, in order to regain its autonomy. These nineteenth-century
tapestry revivers anticipated the discourses of medievalism and medium specificity that
structured the postwar tapestry revival, but they were also part of a larger conversation
within their own period about design reform, about the need for all forms of decorative
and industrial arts to express their own materiality or exhibit “truth-to-materials.”
Harvard, Geffroy, le Blanc, and their design-reform colleagues thus anticipated not only
the particular rhetoric of the postwar tapestry revival but also a broader modernist

11
Pierre Vaisse, “La querelle de la Tapisserie au début de la III
e
République,” Revue de l’art, no.
22 (1973): 66-86.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 197
principle, which was also codified during the postwar period through Clement
Greenberg’s criticism, that an artwork’s value derived from how well it manifests the
specific qualities of its medium.
A decade after Vaisse’s article appeared, the Dutch art historian Jeroen Stumpel
returned to the relationship between tapestry and painting during the late-nineteenth
century. Stumpel argued that the Neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat and his most
sympathetic critic, Félix Fénéon, understood tapestry as a desirable model for the
development of a newly modernist painting in works such as A Sunday on La Grande
Jatte (Fig. 4.1). He proposed that Seurat took design reformers’ emancipation of tapestry
from painting even further by reversing the direction of influence entirely and submitting
painting to the “principles” or medium-specific qualities of tapestry.
12
In proffering this
argument, Stumpel made two important claims. First was that Fénéon’s well-known
description of Seurat’s painting style as peinture au point referred not to the French
phrase for being properly cooked au point, as Linda Nochlin first proposed, but to
tapisserie au point or needlepoint, the French word point referring to both a point and a
stitch.
13
Second, Stumpel connected Seurat’s interest in tapestry to the prior work of
Michel-Eugène Chevreul, a chemist whose De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs
et de l’assortiment des objets colorés [The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of
Colors] was among the texts on color theory that influenced Seurat’s work. Although
Chevreul’s influence on Seurat and other nineteenth-century artists was well

12
Jeroen Stumpel, “The Grande Jatte, that Patient Tapestry,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly
for the History of Art 14, no. 3/4 (1984): 214.
13
Ibid., 214-215. See Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966), 109. Robert Herbert seconds
Stumpel’s interpretation in Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (Berkeley: The Art
Institute of Chicago, in association with University of California Press, 2004), 114.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 198
acknowledged, Stumpel emphasized Chevreul’s relationship to tapestry as never before.
Chevreul’s treatise was published in Paris in 1839 as a guide for artists and craftsmen,
and it resulted from his experiments at the Manufacture des Gobelins, the state run
tapestry workshop where Chevreul had been directing dye works since 1824. The chemist
argued that the practice of juxtaposing contrasting colored threads side by side allowed
the two colors to mix optically, that is, in the beholder’s vision, creating a tone of higher
value and hue than could be achieved by mixing the pigments physically before dyeing
the threads. Chevreul’s work thus suggested how a supposed deficit of the tapestry
medium, its inability to blend pigments on the surface of the work (as could be done in
painting), could actually become a benefit, creating luminous, vibrant, yet harmoniously
colored tapestries that exploited the specific qualities of the medium. Seurat’s divisionist
or pointillist technique borrowed from this quality of tapestry, keeping each dot of paint
separate like a distinct stitch of thread in order to achieve a shimmering surface of intense
color.
William Innes Homer had already discussed Seurat’s debt to Chevreul at length in
his 1965 work, Seurat and the Science of Painting. While Homer did not treat Chevreul
as a design reformer or discuss the chemist’s connection to tapestry production, he
detailed Seurat’s attention to the scientific color studies of his day and drew on Fénéon’s
criticism to argue that Seurat understood himself as reforming art through scientific rigor:
In 1886 Seurat and his friends did not envision themselves as creators of a radically new
style, but rather as reformers of a random, unscientific type of Impressionism—a style
which they considered themselves to be extending and correcting with the aid of modern
science. […] Realizing the limitations of the Impressionists’ approach, he [Seurat]
gradually evolved a more rigorously controlled method and technique by applying laws
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 199
proposed by scientists who had made exacting studies of physical and optical phenomena
and had furnished convincing demonstrations of their conclusions.
14
[emphasis mine]

Yet if we recognize that Seurat drew on the theories of design reformers and tapestry
revivers as well as optical scientists, we can appreciate Seurat as practicing a kind of
design reform applied to painting. Such a view is supported by the writings of Fénéon. In
the critic’s best-known review of Seurat from 1886, for example, Fénéon considered the
techniques that Neoimpressionists used to “reform” Impressionism as being more
rigorous, methodical, and rational, not only because he associated them with science but
also because he linked them to the craft of weaving:
His immense picture, La Grande Jatte, across whatever part that you examine, stretches
out its monotonous and patient blemishes like a tapestry: here, in effect, the hand of the
painter is pointless, illusion impossible; there is no place for morsels of bravura; let the
hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, discerning and skilled; whether depicting an
ostrich, a bale of straw, a wave, or a rock, the brushwork remains the same. And if it is
possible to uphold the advantages of ‘belle facture,’ slashed and swabbed, for the
depiction, I imagine, of rough grasses, waving branches, or shaggy furs, at least the
‘painting of stitches’ [or ‘needlepoint painting’] establishes itself for the execution of
smooth surfaces, and, notably, for nudes, to which it has not yet been applied.
15

Not only did Fénéon describe the painting as unrolling like a tapestry and being
composed of stitches rather than traditional painterly marks, he also described its
“smooth surface” as a surface lisse, evoking flat woven haute-lisse and basse-lisse [high-
warp and low-warp] tapestries as well as the labor of the lissier, the tapestry weaver.

14
William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964),
162.
15
This is my own translation, which differs slightly from the most cited translation in Nochlin,
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 109. The original French reads: “Son immense tableau,
La Grande Jatte, en quelque partie qu’on l’examine, s’étale, monotone et patiente tavelure,
tapisserie: ici, en effet, la patte est inutile, le truquage impossible; nulle place pour les morceaux
de bravoure; que la main soit gourde, mais que l’œil soit agile, perspicace et savant; sur une
autruche, une botte de paille, une vague ou un roc, la manœuvre du pinceau reste la même. Et si
se peuvent soutenir les avantages de la ‘belle facture’ sabrée et torchonnée pour le rendu,
j’imagine, d’herbes rêches, de ramures mobiles, de pelages bourrus, du moins la ‘peinture au
point’ s’impose-t-elle pour l’exécution des surfaces lisses, et, notamment, du nu, à quoi on ne l’a
pas encore appliquée.” Reprinted in Françoise Cachin, ed., Félix Fénéon: au-delà de
l’impressionisme (Paris: Hermann, 1966), 66-67.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 200
Significantly, this passage appears directly after Fénéon discussed the color theories of
the physicist Ogden Rood and even provided mathematical equations for color mixtures.
The two passages do not exist in Fénéon’s essay as contrasting opposites—craft versus
science—rather, they both contribute to the interpretation of Seurat’s work, and that of
other Neoimpressionists, as being methodical, systematic, and disciplined. Fénéon
wanted to discount the emotional, expressionist bravura of earlier painting. But for
Fénéon the road to a more systematic painting lay not only in the science of optics but
also in the traditional craft of weaving, a craft in which weavers work day after day, hour
after hour, to slowly build up the woven surface according to a predetermined plan
expressed in the cartoon or working drawing.
Fénéon saw the domains of science and craft not as mutually exclusive but as sites
of particular overlap, and this overlap was all the more striking at the Manufacture des
Gobelins, where Chevreul was allegedly putting the use of color on a more scientific,
methodical footing.
16
Although Chevreul’s position at the Gobelins and his influence on
nineteenth-century painters may have been exceptional, they were also indicative of the
ways in which design reform—the effort to make the production of decorative arts and
manufactured objects more methodical and medium specific—suggested avenues for
painting reform. As Homer and others have argued, Seurat and his Post-Impressionist
contemporaries saw themselves as just such reformers, improving upon their

16
Cindy Kang’s research demonstrates that while many figures, including government officials
and such artists as Aristide Maillol, blamed Chevreul for turning tapestry weaving at the Gobelins
into a highly methodical, formulaic, and uncreative process, Chevreul’s scientific work did not in
fact significantly alter production at the Gobelins. Despite Chevreul’s lack of impact on actual
tapestry weaving, however, I am interested in how outside artists and critics perceived the
scientist to have forged a new method for art making in both painting and tapestry alike. Cindy
Kang, “Wilted Colors: The Gobelins, the Nabis, and the Ethics of Dyeing in Nineteenth Century
France,” (paper presented at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 27 March 2013).
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 201
Impressionist forebears by incorporating design: more attention to composition, more
method, more drawing. They conceived of painting as a craft that could be reformed
along lines similar to the craft of weaving and other branches of design. Although
Stumpel emphasized these figures’ interests in weaving and craft, we should not assume
that Homer and other scholars were consequently incorrect in stressing the influence of
science on early modernists’ conceptions of painting. Rather, design reform offered a
precedent for rationalizing artistic practice through the application of scientific
discoveries, methodical procedures, and material-based training.
17
Design reform began,
after all, as an effort to improve manufactured goods by uniting art with industry.
18
If we
acknowledge that the methods for creating modernist painting came not only from the
fields of science and industrialization but also from the realm of craft, we can begin to
understand how modernists viewed painting itself as a traditional craft in need of modern
reform.
It is also worth noting that for Fénéon and the Post-Impressionist painters he
reviewed, the identification of painting with craft centered on a particular conception of
the painter’s labor. Fénéon’s criticism of “bravura” and “belle facture” rejected the image
of the painter as a virtuoso performer and replaced it with the image of a diligent worker
whose hands are “numb.”
19
The need to reform painting by turning it into work, and thus

17
David Brett and Barbara Keyser have argued that design reform also applied recent findings in
the natural sciences, particularly in botany and evolutionary biology, through ornament’s
stylization of natural forms. David Brett, “Design Reform and the Laws of Nature,” Design Issues
11, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 37-49; Barbara Whitney Keyser, “Ornament as Idea: Indirect Imitation
of Nature in the Design Reform Movement,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 2 (1998): 127-
144.
18
James A. Schmiechen, “Reconsidering the Factory, Art-Labor, and the Schools of Design in
Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Design Issues 6, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 58-69.
19
Stumpel argued that Seurat understood his labor of painting as akin to that of working class
craftsmen such as weavers. He claimed that at least once Seurat based the price of a painting on
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 202
returning rigor and discipline to the craft, was understood by the well-known English art
critic Roger Fry to be the cornerstone of the movement he coined as Post-Impressionism.
Fry is an important transitional figure in many histories of modern criticism because his
formalism is seen as directly anticipating Greenberg’s work. What I will show here,
however, is that the affinities between Fry’s and Greenberg’s criticism are much more
multifaceted, for Fry was uniquely placed to promote modernism as a kind of design
reform applied to painting.
Fry was instrumental in promoting Post-Impressionism, a movement that, as we
have seen, has been understood both by its participants and by subsequent art historians
as a craft-oriented reform of earlier painting. Yet Fry was also himself a design reformer
who worked to involve artists in the design of textiles and furnishings. He worked with
Charles Robert Ashbee at the Guild of Handicraft, one of the foremost institutions linked
to the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain,
20
before setting up the Omega Workshops in
1913 with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. This collaborative workshop hired artists
part-time to give them employment during the lean years of World War I and turned them
to designing decorative arts influenced by the aesthetics of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism,

the number of hours he had worked to produce it and based his hourly wage on that of weavers.
Stumpel, “The Grand Jatte, that patient tapestry,” 224. Deborah Silverman has argued that
Vincent van Gogh similarly associated his labor as a painter with that of the weaver. She has
demonstrated that van Gogh was influenced by design reform in his early training and later came
to identify his paintings with the woven surfaces on which they were painted, developing a
practice she calls “weaving painting.” Silverman points to van Gogh’s observations of weavers at
work in Nuenen as well as his knowledge of Chevreul’s color theories and collecting of colored
yarns. For Silverman this insistence on painting as a kind of weaving allowed van Gogh to
reconcile his artistic practice with his moral beliefs by recasting the act of painting as a form of
labor that produced concrete objects, just as weavers produced actual utilitarian goods. Debora
Silverman, “Weaving Paintings: Religious and Social Origins of Vincent van Gogh’s Pictorial
Labor,” in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 150, 162, 164.
20
For more on Fry’s relationship to Ashbee and the Arts and Crafts movement, see Christopher
Reed, ed., A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996),
167-191.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 203
and Cubism. While the Omega Workshops was a commercial venture with highly
practical aims, it was also a utopian venture that promoted artistic freedom and
experimental design. Fry also used what I have identified as a vocabulary of textiles and
design to describe modernist painting, a vocabulary that Greenberg inherited and
developed along with Fry’s formalist method and attention to medium specificity.
Moreover, Fry’s design work grew out of a British Arts and Crafts tradition that linked
artistic and political reform through a commitment to socialism, and it is widely
acknowledged that socialism was a central concern of Greenberg’s early work.
Examining Fry’s criticism thus illuminates how British design reform may have
influenced Greenberg’s writing through its emphases on socialism, truth to materials, and
rigorous craft.
In a lecture Fry delivered at the Grafton Gallery at the close of his seminal 1910
exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the critic contrasted Paul Cézanne, Paul
Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh with their earlier Impressionist counterparts according to
their craftsmanship. Characterizing Impressionist painting as too concerned with the
transcription of nature, Fry argued:
[T]his worship of skillful representation has had several bad effects upon art. It has
caused the artist to abandon technical skill in the strict sense of the word. Technique is
usually now applied simply to skill in representation, but I mean here the actual skill in
the handling of the material, the perfection of quality and finish. And if in that point the
artists whose works are here exhibited compare unfavourably with the artists of early
ages, the fault must be set down, at least in part, to the exigencies of that representative
science which has resulted in the loss of the tradition of craftsmanship.
21

Fry associated this “tradition of craftsmanship” not only with paintings of the Italian
primitives and other “early ages,” but also with contemporary decorative arts and design.
As he went on to say in the same lecture:

21
Roger Fry, “Post Impressionism,” Fortnightly Review 89 (May 1911): 861-862.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 204
We may get, in fact, from a mere pattern, if it be really noble in design and vital in
execution, intense aesthetic pleasure. And I would instance as a proof of the direction in
which the post impressionists are working, the excellences of their pure design as shown
in the pottery at the present exhibition. In these there is often scarcely any appeal made
through representation, just a hint at a bird or an animal here and there, and yet they will
arouse a definite feeling.
22

That Fry included ceramics in the first Post-Impressionist exhibition demonstrates that
his often-cited formalism and his commitment to art as a sphere largely independent from
general history and everyday life did not preclude him from considering decorative arts
and painting together as a unified artistic practice with common concerns and goals.
23

This becomes especially clear later in the talk in a long passage about the use of light and
shade in painting. Fry called this established practice “the enemy of two great organs of
artistic expression—linear design and colour” and praised the Post-Impressionists for
suppressing light and shade at “immense gain to the artist.”
24
The primary gain, Fry
elaborated, is that “all the relations which make up the unity of the picture are perceived
as inhering in the picture surface,” creating a flatness that eliminates the sense of depth
and illusionism, so that “the pictures gain immensely in decorative unity.”
25
This quality
of “decorative unity” was crucially important for Fry, and it rendered traditional
distinctions between hierarchies of painting and, we might surmise, between painting and
the decorative arts, insignificant:
This fact [that flatness allows for decorative unity] has always been more or less present
to the minds of artists when the decoration of a given space of wall has been demanded of
them; in such cases they have always tended to feel the need for keeping the relations
upon the flat surface, and have excused the want of illusion, which was supposed to be
necessary for a painting, by making a distinction between decorative painting and

22
Ibid., 862.
23
In “Art and Life,” Fry argues that major historical changes do not necessarily correspond to
major artistic changes and thus asserts that art has its own history and does not merely reflect its
particular time or place. Fry, “Art and Life,” from notes of a lecture given to the Fabian Society
in 1917, and republished in Vision and Design (1920), (New York: Peter Smith, 1947) 1-10.
24
Fry, “Post Impressionism,” 864.
25
Ibid., 864-65.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 205
painting a picture, a distinction which I believe to be entirely fallacious; a painting of any
kind is bound to be decorative, since by decorative we really mean conforming to the
principles of artistic unity.
26

In an earlier “Essay in Aesthetics,” published in New Quarterly in 1909, Fry described
this decorative unity in terms that evoked the weaving of monumental tapestries, calling
it “the necessity for a closely woven geometrical texture in the composition” and
claiming that this necessity “is much greater in heroic and monumental design.”
27

By describing the quality he valued most, decorative unity, as a “closely woven
geometrical texture,” Fry utilized a vocabulary of textiles that permeates the writing of
modern art critics. This vocabulary not only relates painting to tapestry and other forms
of weaving, it privileges “tapestry”—understood here as a broad set of allusions to
weaving and textiles—as a model, even perhaps as the best model, for modernist
painting. Consider Fry’s preface to the catalogue of the second Post-Impressionist
Exhibition, held at the Grafton Galleries in 1912, in which Fry wrote an often-cited
defense of the Post-Impressionists’ departure from the naturalism of Impressionism:
Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual
appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek
to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.
By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical
structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and
contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual
life appeal to our practical activities.
28
[emphasis mine]

Here a painting’s “closely-knit unity of texture” is privileged as the manifestation of its
clear, logical structure and as the element that will appeal to the viewer’s “disinterested
and contemplative imagination.” In later cases, Fry relied on the broader notion of
“design” to describe what earlier painting had lacked and what Post-Impressionists had

26
Ibid., 865.
27
Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics” (1909), in Vision and Design, 21.
28
Fry, “The French Post-Impressionists” (1912), in Vision and Design, 157.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 206
accomplished.
29
As with Fry’s references to weaving, his use of the term “design”
implied structure, but structure in a more architectonic sense. Employing this vocabulary
of textiles and design enabled Fry to theorize modernist painting as a newly decorative
painting whose superiority to previous work was based on the successful incorporation of
the principles of design reform.
When Fry republished a collection of his essays as Vision and Design in 1920, he
had the opportunity to write a reflective coda titled “Retrospect.” Here he recalled that his
reaction to Impressionism had been to lament “the absence in their work of structural
design.” Although he acknowledged overemphasizing the “divorce” between
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and while he especially regretted not giving
greater recognition to Seurat, he insisted that Post-Impressionism was remarkable
precisely because it was able to “recover once more the language of design.” Moreover,
Fry credited this turn to design as the defining quality of modernist painting, citing
Cubism as a further example of the importance of design, and he argued “that the modern
movement was essentially a return to the idea of formal design which had been almost
lost sight of in the fervid pursuit of naturalistic representation.”
30
Even in this
retrospective essay, then, Fry remained convinced that modernism, beginning with Post-
Impressionism, represented a kind of design reform applied to painting, for it was the
reformation of painting through the instillation of design, structure, decorative unity, and
craftsmanship.
There was also, in Fry’s critique of “the fervid pursuit of naturalistic
representation,” an implicit call for medium specificity and truth-to-materials. Fry

29
See, for example, Fry, “Art and Life” (1917), in Vision and Design, 7-8.
30
Fry, “Retrospect” (1920), in Vision and Design, 190-192.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 207
asserted that Impressionism and other movements he considered pre-modernist imitated
nature too slavishly, treating the materials of painting not as ends in themselves but as
mere vehicles for the representation of something outside of painting. This call for
painterly autonomy from the excesses of naturalism is one reason Fry has been
characterized, and critiqued, as a formalist art critic whose work laid the groundwork for
that of Clement Greenberg.
31
Yet the numerous studies of Fry’s significance for the
development of modern art criticism have rarely moved beyond Fry’s formalist method to
consider his interests in design reform and socialism. Meanwhile, those scholars who
have examined the impact of design reform on modernism have curiously disregarded
Fry’s own contribution to this line of development.
32
But these two genealogies of
modernism—formalism and design reform—could be integrated by recognizing how
Fry’s commitment to formalist criticism and the defense of modernist painting was linked
to his commitment to socialism and the defense of modern design, and how both aspects
of Fry’s work anticipate Greenberg’s criticism. Integrating these two strains represents
more than just a minor revision to the Fry-Greenberg relationship, for it opens up an
understanding of modernism as the distillation of broader intellectual currents dating to
the nineteenth century.

31
This lineage, which usually groups Fry and Clive Bell together as precedents for Greenberg,
has been put forward both by specialists in nineteenth-century art criticism and by post-modernist
scholars who have critiqued the formalism of Fry, et. al. See, for example, Kate Flint, ed.,
Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 1-
27; and Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” in The Return of the Real: The
Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 4.
32
Christopher Green, ed., Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art (London: Merrell
Holberton in association with The Courtauld Gallery, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1999); Nikolaus
Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius, 2
nd
ed. (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art; London: The Architectural Press, Ltd., 1949), 6.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 208
Take, for example, the shared interest in socialism among many modernists and
design reformers, including Fry and Greenberg. Fry’s socialism was linked to his
commitment to design reform and was thus inherited from such figures as William
Morris, whose own socialism became much more visible in Greenberg’s day through the
1955 publication of E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.
Although the Cold War climate subjected Thompson’s work to critical silence and
caricature, his work demonstrated that radical leftist views were as much a hallmark of
design reformers as of fine artists.
33
In his 1912 essay “Art and Socialism,” Fry showed
clearly his agreement with this tradition of design-reform socialism that was linked to
greater freedom for craftsman and better objects for everyone:
Under the present system of commercialism the one object, and the complete
justification, of producing any article is, that it can be made either by its intrinsic value,
or by the fictitious value put upon it by advertisement, to sell with a sufficient profit to
the manufacturer. In any socialistic state, I imagine—and to a large extent the Great
State will be socialistic at least—there would not be this same automatic justification for
manufacture; people would not be induced artificially to buy what they did not want, and
in this way a more genuine scale of values would be developed. Moreover, the workman
would be in a better position to say how things should be made. After years of a purely
commercial standard, there is left even now, in the average workman, a certain bias in
favour of sound and reasonable workmanship as opposed to the ingenious manufacture of
fatuous and fraudulent objects; and, if we suppose the immediate pressure of sheer
necessity to be removed, it is probably that the craftsman, acting through his guild
organizations, would determine to some extent the methods of manufacture. Guilds
might, indeed, regain something of the political influence that gave us the Gothic
cathedrals of the Middle Ages.
34

Fry’s contrast of “sound and reasonable workmanship” to the “ingenious manufacture of
fatuous and fraudulent objects” reasserts the traditional call from such nineteenth-century

33
Thompson discusses the Cold War reception of his book in his 1976 postscript to the revised
edition. Thompson sees Morris as an original socialist thinker who drew on Romanticism’s earlier
critique of capitalism and its emphasis on dream and fantasy to promote an alternative way of life
and alternative socialist values that subverted bourgeois society. E.P. Thompson, William Morris:
Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), especially 769-770, 790.
34
Fry, “Art and Socialism,” originally published as “The Great State” in Harpers (1912),
reprinted with considerable alterations in Vision and Design, 48.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 209
design reformers as John Ruskin for truth to materials.
35
While elsewhere Fry linked this
kind of medium specificity to the autonomy of art from naturalist representation, here he
linked it to greater autonomy for the artisan laborer and associated this freedom of the
craftsman with the traditional utopia of nineteenth-century design reformers, the Middle
Ages. Fry’s writing thus demonstrates how the intertwining of medium-specific
craftsmanship, artistic freedom and workers’ control over the means of production,
socialism, and the Middle Ages remained a powerful model for modernists well into the
twentieth century.
For Fry, writing his first version of “Art and Socialism” in 1912, artistic freedom
would be achieved when artists and craftsmen alike were liberated from the need to
produce for the capitalist market. In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg also viewed
the capitalist market as a threat to artistic freedom, but he associated such artistic freedom
not with a broad swath of arts and crafts practices as did Fry, but with the narrowly
defined “superior culture” of the avant-garde.
36
What threatened this avant-garde was the
enormous sea of commercially produced art for the masses, the “kitsch” that had
expanded exponentially in the seventeen years since Fry’s essay. Views of socialism had
changed in the interim as well. The Russian Revolution had taken place, Stalin had risen
to power, and by 1939 Greenberg, like many of his colleagues, favored an alternative

35
Ruskin renounced what he called “architectural deceits” including objects that falsely appeared
to be structural supports; the painting, veneering, or gilding of surfaces to represent some other
material from that in which an object was made; and the use of cast or machine-made ornaments.
John Ruskin, “The Lamp of Truth,” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), reprinted in The
Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art, ed. Joan Evans (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), 201-
208.
36
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1,
19.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 210
Trotskyist vein of socialism.
37
In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Greenberg rejected Stalin’s
state-sponsored socialist realism as kitsch designed to placate the masses and linked it to
the state-sponsored academic styles of Hitler and Mussolini.
38
But he still held out hope
that socialism more generally could preserve the true, superior culture of the avant-garde
in the face of capitalism’s degenerating culture and decline.
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” was also, of course, the first of Greenberg’s essays to
present a definition of the modernist avant-garde as medium specific: “In turning his
attention away from subject matter of common experience,” Greenberg wrote, “the poet
or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft.”
39
Greenberg’s association of craft
with medium defines the term “craft” as the shaping of particular materials and the
skillful exploitation of a medium’s specific characteristics. Medium specificity,
Greenberg implied, is itself a craft or skill that the avant-garde has had to learn and in
which it continues to train.
Associations between the medium specificity of early modernist criticism and the
renewed commitment to craft among design reformers had been developing for some
time. Design reformers’ calls for truth to materials and medium-based craftsmanship,
particularly in debates about the reform of tapestry away from excessive illusionism,
provided a model of medium specificity for later critics, including Greenberg. Moreover,
design reform paralleled the activities of a modernist avant-garde in seeking to reform the
status quo of artistic production through the instillation of what Fry called “design”:
technical skill, knowledge of materials, rigor of composition, and decorative effect.

37
See Serge Guilbaut, “New York, 1935-1941: The De-Maxization of the Intelligentsia,” in New
York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 17-47.
38
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 20-21.
39
Ibid., 8-9.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 211
Design reform was also often linked to a social mission and a socialist ideology that
connected it with broader intellectual currents, including the sympathies of modernists
such as Greenberg.

Clement Greenberg on the Decorative
Recognizing how Greenberg’s theory of medium specificity related to an earlier
discourse of truth-to-materials developed by design reformers allows us to see the close
relationship between postwar modernism and nineteenth-century ideas of the decorative
arts. As mentioned in the last chapter, many narratives of modern art suggest that
modernists rejected the decorative arts, and particularly the idea of the all-encompassing,
completely integrated, decorative environment, during the early-twentieth century. By
examining the role of tapestry in postwar interiors and art collections, however, I
demonstrated how figures in the postwar period remained committed to the decorative
and functional potential of modern art. Similarly, examining the vocabulary of textiles
that Greenberg employed in his criticism reveals that he remained more committed to
articulating the decorative qualities of modernist painting than has previously been
acknowledged. Indeed, current scholarship argues that Greenberg had a decidedly anti-
decorative stance,
40
but close reading of his criticism brings a more complex set of
attitudes to light.
Greenberg’s 1948 essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” is one of his earliest
formulations of a new, all-over, “polyphonic” painting and its significance for the history
of art. Here Greenberg rehearsed his familiar genealogy of modernism beginning with

40
The best example is Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and
Craft in the Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 339-364. I
will discuss Auther’s work in the next chapter.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 212
Édouard Manet but also reformulated it, describing modernism’s turn to flatness not as a
process of greater and greater medium specificity, as he had done in “A Newer Laocoön,”
but rather as a war between the traditional concept of easel painting as a window onto the
world and a new concept of decorative painting, reprising the opposition between
decoration and the tableau that I discussed in the last chapter. For Greenberg, the easel
picture was “a boxlike cavity,” a window cut through the wall on which it hangs, whereas
Manet “flattens this cavity out for the sake of decorative structure and organizes its
elements in terms of flatness and frontality” so that “the easel picture begins to feel itself
compromised in its very nature.” Greenberg argued that “the evolution of modern
painting from Manet on has subjected the traditional cabinet picture to an uninterrupted
process of attrition.”
41

Greenberg described the result of this war of attrition in terms that recall a woven
tapestry: “The product of this was a tightly covered, evenly and heavily textured
rectangle of paint that muffled contrasts and tended—but only tended—to reduce the
picture to a relatively undifferentiated surface.” Ultimately, Greenberg argued, the attack
on easel painting led to the practices of the “most ‘advanced’ artists” of his contemporary
moment, artists who created “the ‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic’ all-over picture,” which
Greenberg described as “a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar
elements.” Although Greenberg insisted that the successful example of such knitted
paintings “still remains easel painting somehow” because it will, like the tableau “still
hang dramatically on a wall,” he acknowledged that “this sort of painting comes closest
of all to decoration—to wallpaper patterns capable of being extended indefinitely—and

41
Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2,
Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 221-222.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 213
in so far as it still remains easel painting it infects the whole notion of this form with
ambiguity.”
42
Greenberg thus defined the modernist painting in much the same way that
his contemporaries defined tapestry. Both types of objects owed their status as fine art,
rather than decorative art, not to their illusionist portrayal of the outside world but to their
autonomy and vertical placement. Both the all-over easel painting and the tapestry still
hang on the wall, but, unlike wallpaper, they are distinct from that wall. Their bounded
edges and portability allow them to still be understood as discrete, autonomous works of
art despite their decorative qualities.
Greenberg’s vocabulary of textiles enabled him to articulate the decorative
qualities of modernist painting, but it also allowed him to describe a two-step process that
his “advanced” artists employed to create their all-over works. First, these artists
“atomize the picture surface into separate brush-strokes”—recalling the pointillism or
“stitches” of Seurat—and second, they combined these atomized brush strokes in such a
way as to create “one single, indivisible piece of texture.”
43
Greenberg turned to the
medium of music,
44
and ultimately to that of weaving, in order to explain his meaning:
To characterize what I mean I have advisedly borrowed the term “polyphonic” from
Messrs. Kurt List and René Leibowitz. For the resemblance in aesthetic method between
this new category of easel painting and Schönberg’s principles of composition is striking.
[…] Just as Schönberg makes every element, every voice and note in the composition of

42
Ibid., 222-223.
43
Ibid., 223.
44
The comparison with music has, of course, played a significant role in shaping ideas of
modernist art. See, for example, Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of
Sources (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Christopher Butler, Early Modernism:
Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005); and Anne Leonard, “Musical Metaphors in Art Criticism,” in The Routledge Companion
to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 209-217 (New York:
Routledge, 2014). While the significance of music as a point of comparison with modernist
painting is thus well established, my interest is in articulating how the relatively unrecognized
vocabulary of textiles suggests close relationships between modernist painting and the decorative
arts.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 214
equal importance—different but equivalent; and they likewise weave the work of art into
a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each
thread, so that we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts. [emphasis
mine]
45

Thus the separation of brushstrokes into distinct “threads” and the weaving of these
threads together into a unified, highly textured mesh is what defined the most advanced
painting for Greenberg in 1948. When faced with describing this new practice, the critic
turned gratefully to other media, to music and ultimately to weaving, which suggests that
even if Greenberg understood all-over painting as a continuation of medium specificity—
and he suppressed such medium specificity in this essay’s account of modernism’s
development—then he still could not describe such painting in entirely medium-specific
terms. That is, Greenberg could not explain all-over painting by using a vocabulary that
was unique to painting. He relied on other media to flesh out his conception.
While it would be entirely normal for anyone to describe new phenomena through
references to other phenomena, it is precisely such normalcy that has been denied to
Greenberg in art historical literature. Instead, scholars tend to ascribe Greenberg with an
almost superhuman ability to isolate and compartmentalize the arts, as well as the very
process of looking.
46
Yet the significance of Greenberg’s vocabulary of textiles lies not
only in the basic acknowledgement that Greenberg employed intermedial comparisons,
but also in Greenberg’s choice of textiles and weaving as the best metaphor for modernist
painting. This specific choice suggests that tapestries were not only visible within
Greenberg’s cultural field but were also available to the critic as a conceptual model.

45
Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 224.
46
Caroline Jones’s important work, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses, attempts to place Greenberg’s criticism within a broader
epistemological development of “bureaucratization,” but it perpetuates an understanding of
Greenberg as committed to purifying modernist painting from contamination with the other arts.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 215
Moreover, that choice demonstrates Greenberg’s willingness to view painting and the
decorative arts in relation to one another as existing on a kind of continuum, in which
certain aspects were common to both. These common elements were not tangential. On
the contrary, they were essential to Greenberg’s definitions of modernist painting. For
while Greenberg occasionally used “decorative” to describe something negatively, the
term exists much more consistently in Greenberg’s writing as a synonym for abstraction
and flatness, as, for example, at the beginning of “The Crisis of the Easel Picture.”
“Decorative” in this sense is not the opposite of “high art,” but the opposite of naturalistic
illusionism in art, and by employing the term in this way, Greenberg continued an
understanding of the decorative shared by Fry and many other early critics of modern art.
By associating the decorative with flatness and abstraction, Greenberg clearly saw it as
crucial to the history of modernist painting.
One could argue, however, that Greenberg maintained a distinction between art
that is decorative and the decorative arts. Indeed, in his article “The Case for Abstract
Art,” which first appeared in Saturday Evening Post in 1959, Greenberg distinguished
between, on the one hand, “abstract pictures and free-standing pieces of abstract
sculpture,” which had only emerged in the West in the past fifty years, and, on the other
hand, “abstract decoration,” which was “almost universal,” existing in many cultures.
The difference, Greenberg argued, between abstract art and abstract decorations is that
the former applies to “solo works of art meant to be looked at for their own sake and with
full attention, and not as adjuncts, incidental aspects, or settings of things other than
themselves. These abstract pictures and pieces of sculpture challenge our capacity for
disinterested contemplation in a way that is more concentrated and, I daresay, more
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 216
conscious than anything else I know of in art.”
47
Here we can see Greenberg preserving a
traditional distinction between the decorative as an integrated environment and the
tableau or easel painting as a stand-alone art object, as well as how the logic of medium
specificity lent itself to that of aestheticist formalism. For in terms of both their
production (as medium specific) and their reception (as aesthetically removed from
everyday life) artworks had to be understood as things that existed “for their own sakes,”
recalling the familiar nineteenth-century appeal for “art for art’s sake.”
However, this effort to explain to the readers of Saturday Evening Post why
abstract art should be appreciated as something distinct from abstract decoration cannot
be taken as Greenberg’s sole opinion on the issue, for elsewhere he consistently praised
the way that abstraction had created a unified period style across multiple media and
spheres of artistic production, from painting and sculpture to architecture and design to
decorative arts and crafts. In his 1949 essay “Our Period Style,” Greenberg praised
“‘International Style’ architecture, cubist and post-cubist painting and sculpture,
‘modern’ furniture and decoration and design” as the “manifestations of the new style.”
He argued that “the arts and crafts can draw energy” from this period style “as from a
common fund whereby they fertilize and invigorate each other.”
48
Greenberg praised
such cross-fertilization between modern sculpture and architecture, which he felt shared a
dynamic conception of space as “all-pervasive and all embracing” so that “inside and
outside are interwoven.”
49
Greenberg’s concept of interweaving described not only the
particular construction of modern sculptures and buildings, but also the close relationship

47
Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art” (1959), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,
Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 77.
48
Greenberg, “Our Period Style” (1949), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, 323.
49
Ibid., 324.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 217
between these two media and between all types of artistic production that share “our
period style.”
If Greenberg wanted to distinguish a sphere of high art from the ubiquity of
abstract decoration, then, he also wanted to view this abstract art as part of a broader
stylistic movement that expressed something fundamental and new about his
contemporary culture, a culture “conditioned by industrialism” that “is native to our
century” and “owes well-nigh nothing to the past.”
50
We can see such contradiction even
within single essays by the critic. For example, in his 1952 essay “‘Feeling is All’,”
Greenberg insisted that Matisse’s work was not decorative, before praising Barnett
Newman’s work for being so. Critiquing “the habit of referring to Matisse as a
decorator,” Greenberg argued that “pure decoration is the area in which he has failed
oftenest.” Instead, Greenberg called Matisse “an easel painter from first to last” which “is
obscured—if it really is—only by the unprecedented success of his efforts to assimilate
decoration to the purposes of the easel picture without at the same time weakening the
integrity of the latter.”
51
Here Greenberg wanted modernist painting to be almost but not
quite decorative, to assimilate the flatness and abstraction of decorative art without itself
becoming decoration. Yet later in the same essay Greenberg praised Newman’s work as
“the first kind of painting I have seen that accommodates itself stylistically to the demand
of modern interior architecture for flat, clear surfaces and strictly parallel divisions.”
52

What is this if not the adjustment of modernist painting to “settings of things other than
themselves” or the interweaving of paintings with the modern architecture that surrounds

50
Ibid., 323. Jones has emphasized this aspect of Greenberg’s criticism in Eyesight Alone,
arguing that Greenberg viewed modernist painting as part of the “rationalized décor” of
contemporary life. Jones, Eyesight Alone, 206.
51
Greenberg, “‘Feeling is All,’” 100-101.
52
Ibid., 104.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 218
them? While Greenberg was not entirely consistent on the issue of how decorative
modern art should be, he still had much in common with the critics we examined in the
last chapter, critics such as Emily Genauer and Aline Loucheim who praised modern art’s
function as a decorative addition to modern architecture. Acknowledging Greenberg’s
inconsistencies is important because it allows us to see Greenberg’s criticism not as an
effort to mastermind clear hierarchies between fine and decorative art from some
removed, supra-historical vantage point, but rather as an attempt to form an immediate
response to the variety of artworks and critical voices that surrounded him.

Greenberg’s Tapestries
If we can accept that Greenberg’s attitudes towards the decorative or even the
decorative arts were not necessarily negative, then we become more open to recognizing
how Greenberg turned to these other arts as models for modernist painting. In his 1951
essay “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” Greenberg described Cézanne’s painting
technique as a “mosaic of brushstrokes” in comparison with “the tighter-woven touches
of the orthodox Impressionists,” creating a distinction between two types of painting by
likening them to two different crafts, mosaics and weavings.
53
Greenberg used a
vocabulary of textiles more explicitly when discussing another early modernist, Claude
Monet, and his relevance to current painting. In “The Later Monet” of 1957, Greenberg
characterized Monet’s work as “a monotonously woven tissue of paint dabs”
54
that
suppressed not only the illusion of deep three-dimensional space but even the kind of
decorative, flattened contrasts between light and dark that Greenberg associated with

53
Greenberg, “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art” (1951), in The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. 3, 85.
54
Greenberg, “The Later Monet” (1957), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 9.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 219
Cézanne and the Cubists. Whereas the latter emphasized “dark-and-light, ‘dramatic’
structure,” Monet provided “chromatic ‘symphonic’ structure,”
55
and in this way he
anticipated the emphasis on color by many late modernists. In particular, Monet’s Water
Lilies not only forecast the larger canvases of Abstract Expressionism, they also declared
“that the surface of a painting must breathe, but that its breath is to be made of the texture
and body of canvas and paint, not of disembodied color; that pigment is to be solicited
from the surface, not just applied to it.”
56
Here Greenberg used the vocabulary of textiles
to begin formulating his conception of later abstract painting as a surface in which the
cloth of the canvas and the color of the paint form one single, indissoluble structure that
can “breathe” as a single organism. Painting in this view is no longer the application of
color to a surface—a combination of two autonomous materials—but rather the fluid
creation of colored surfaces as inseparable unities.
Greenberg began to see this breathing, cloth-like painting in contradistinction to
an earlier interwoven painting, as became clear in his 1964 catalogue essay “Post
Painterly Abstraction,” which he wrote for the exhibition of the same name that he
curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Here Greenberg set up a contrast
between the painterly abstraction of Abstract Expressionism and the post-painterly
abstraction of Color Field painting by comparing each practice to different aspects of the
textile medium. Greenberg characterized “the typical Abstract Expressionist picture” by
its “close-knit variations or gradations of light and dark” and by its “interweaving of light
and dark gradations.”
57
In contrast to this tightly packed, highly-textured method of all-

55
Ibid., 10.
56
Ibid., 11.
57
Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction” (1964), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,
194.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 220
over painting, the Color Field artists in the show embraced the open weave of the canvas
itself by diluting their paint “to an extreme” and soaking it “into unsized and unprimed
canvas,” making their technique extraordinarily close to that of dyeing cloth.
58
Abstract
Expressionists, we might say, wove a new tapestry of intersecting threads of paint on top
of the surface of the canvas, while Color Field painters used the canvas itself as part of
their tapestry, binding it with the color of the paint.
Greenberg had made the comparison between Color Field painting and cloth
dyeing even more explicit in a 1960 essay on Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. He
described Louis’s breakthrough as the decision to identify color more closely with its
ground by “using thin paint on an absorbent surface” and thereby adapting the techniques
of watercolor painting to oil.
Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment
almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are
superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric
underneath. But “underneath” is the wrong word. The fabric, being soaked in paint
rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like dyed cloth:
the threadedness and wovenness are in the color. Louis usually contrives to leave certain
areas of the canvas bare, and whether or not he whitens these afterwards with thin
gesso—as he has taken to doing lately—the aspect of bareness is retained. It is a gray-
white or white-gray bareness that functions as a color in its own right and on a parity with
other colors; by this parity the other colors are leveled down as it were, to become
identified with the raw cotton surface as much as the bareness is.
59

By allowing the “threadedness and wovenness” of the “cotton duck canvas” to breathe
through the thinned paint, Louis allowed the woven cloth to become paint, the painting to
become woven cloth. Moreover, Greenberg’s description of “parity” between the
bareness of the unsized and unprimed canvas and the dyed areas of color recalls tapestry
weaving, in which the threads comprising the blank ground exist on the same place as
and must be woven in along with the threads comprising figures, colors, or designs.

58
Ibid., 196.
59
Greenberg, “Louis and Noland” (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 97.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 221
Noland similarly worked on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, but left even
more of this surface unpainted. For Greenberg “the naked fabric acts as a generalizing
and unifying field; and at the same time its confessed wovenness and porousness suggest
a penetrable, ambiguous plane, opening up the picture from the back so to speak” and
creating an openness between “the bare wovenness and the color-stained wovenness.”
60

Greenberg thus interpreted Louis and Noland as looking to dyed, woven cloth as models
for their paintings.
This could be seen as simply another stage of modernism’s medium specificity,
for if artists had previously turned to decorative abstraction and flatness to suppress
three-dimensional illusionism and emphasize the specificity of painting as “colors placed
on a two-dimensional surface,”
61
they were now turning to the specificity of the surface
itself, emphasizing that painting’s traditional support throughout the modern period—that
is, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—was woven canvas cloth. Yet the fact
that Greenberg could only describe this new type of medium-specific painting by
referencing a seemingly disparate activity, dyeing cloth, suggests that, if taken to its
extreme limits, such a medium-specific painting would become nothing else but a piece
of fabric, colored perhaps, hanging on the wall.
Greenberg himself acknowledged this multiple times in his declarations that
“even an unpainted canvas now stated itself as a picture.”
62
For Greenberg, this
conflation between fabric and painting was the inevitable outcome of modernist
experimentation on the limits of medium specificity:

60
Ibid., 99.
61
Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1949), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, 315.
62
Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture” (1967), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4,
252.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 222
The aim of the self-criticism, which is entirely empirical and not at all an affair of theory,
is to determine the irreducible working essence of art and the separate arts. Under the
testing of modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown
themselves to be dispensable, unessential. By now it has been established, it would seem,
that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or
norms: flatness and the delimination of flatness; and that the observance of merely these
two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a
stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a
successful one. (The paradoxical outcome of this reduction has been not to contract, but
actually to expand the possibilities of the pictorial: much more than before lends itself
now to being experienced pictorially or in meaningful relation to the pictorial: all sorts of
large and small items that used to belong entirely to the realm of the arbitrary and the
visually meaningless.)
63

It is worth noting that this passage, from the 1962 essay “After Abstract Expressionism,”
comes after Greenberg’s discussion of the work of Jasper Johns, an artist Greenberg
admired for exploiting the pictorial possibilities of “his number, letter, target, flag, and
map images.” What Greenberg enjoyed was the way in which Johns contrasted flatness
with representation:
The original flatness of the canvas, with a few outlines stenciled on it, is shown as
sufficing to represent adequately all that a picture by Johns really does represent. The
paint surface itself, with its de Kooningesque play of lights and darks, is shown, on the
other hand, as being completely superfluous to this end. Everything that usually serves
representation and illusion is left to serve nothing but itself, that is, abstraction; while
everything that usually serves the abstract or decorative—flatness, bare outlines, all-over
or symmetrical design—is put to the service of representation. And the more explicit this
contradiction is made, the more effective in every sense the picture tends to be.
64

What these passages make clear is that Greenberg welcomed the expanded limits of
pictorial possibility, the way in which medium specificity had forced artists and viewers
alike to open their eyes to the pictorial potential of seemingly other media, of woven
cloths, flags, targets, or maps. That Greenberg would embrace all of these objects under
the rubric of “the pictorial” and “flatness” demonstrates his willingness to concede the
unspecificity of painting’s supposedly medium-specific qualities. It shows, moreover, the

63
Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.
4, 131-132.
64
Ibid., 127.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 223
ways in which these other objects could serve as models by exhibiting the very qualities
that modernist painting embraced as medium specific.
Throughout his criticism, then, Greenberg turned to a range of other media and
objects as points of comparison with, models for, and explanations of modernist painting.
In this variety of references, however, the vocabulary of textiles remained a consistent
presence, from Greenberg’s 1948 essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” to his 1967
piece of “The Recentness of Sculpture.” The surprising consistency of this language to
describe a range of artistic practices expresses the visibility of tapestries and other types
of weavings within the art world in which Greenberg circulated. As discussed in the
introduction to this chapter, Greenberg attended exhibitions of modern tapestries and may
have been exposed to them through his work at French & Co. He also likely became
familiar with modern tapestries through his association with the artist Helen
Frankenthaler. The two were romantically involved from 1950 to 1955 and remained
friends thereafter, when Frankenthaler embarked on a series of tapestry projects. The first
of these dates to 1956, when Frankenthaler designed a set of modern tapestries for the
Temple of Aaron synagogue in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 1963, Frankenthaler allowed
her sister, Gloria F. Ross, to use her painting The Cape, executed the previous year, as a
model for a hooked wall hanging (Figs. 4.2-4.3). This was the start of Ross’s career as a
producer of tapestries in both hooked and flat-weave techniques after works by American
modernists, and it was the start of a two decade long collaboration between the sisters.
65

Frankenthaler is of course best known for developing the stain technique that
Greenberg applauded in the work of Louis and Noland. Greenberg brought these two

65
Ann Lane Hedlund, Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry, foreword by Grace Glueck (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Arizona State Museum, the
University of Arizona, Tucson, 2010), 156.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 224
artists to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, when they saw her painting from the previous
year, Mountains and Sea. This work, an abstract landscape of gestural lines and thin
washes of oil paint seeped into the canvas, has been canonized in the art historical
literature both as a breakthrough in Frankenthaler’s own development and as initiating
similar revolutions in the work of Louis and Noland.
66
Frankenthaler’s centrality to the
history of Color Field painting and her close relationships with Greenberg and Ross
dramatize how interconnected the spheres of tapestry and painting could be within
modernism.
Greenberg’s criticism constructs an affinity between Color Field painting and
textiles. Yet a comparison between Frankenthaler’s tapestries and the paintings on which
they were based demonstrates that it was not always easy to weave tapestries that
captured the highly textile aesthetic qualities of a Color Field canvas. In the first project
of the sisters’ collaboration, for example, Frankenthaler’s painting The Cape exhibits
stains around the areas of color that clearly indicate the wicking of the pigment’s medium,
in this case oil, outward into the canvas support. The appearance of these halos suggests
that the medium of this work is less the traditionally worded “oil on canvas” than oil in
canvas. But in the pile tapestry woven by Ross, such a spreading outward of pigment
makes no sense—and it was only imitated around the areas of blue—because this is not
how the tapestry is made. The pigment is not applied to the surface but rather woven
through the weft to create the surface of the work. Although in Ross’s tapestry the shapes
of the colored areas still indicate blottings and smears, they do not speak of the nature of
the textile in the same way. In other cases, however, Ross’s tapestries align more ably

66
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989); Greenberg, “Louis
and Noland,” 96.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 225
with Frankenthaler’s model. In 1966 Frankenthaler signed contracts with Ross to make
hooked-wool wall hangings after three extant works, one of which, Point Lookout (1966),
was woven in an edition of five (Figs. 4.4.-4.5).
67
The painting’s slight overlaps along the
edges of the color blocks are translated in the tapestry into jagged lines of interlocking
threads, suggesting a similar sense of spreading color and fluctuating borders. Moreover,
the fuzzy texture of the hooked wool provides variations in the tone of each color that
exhibit a similar play between opacity and transparency as in the painting’s swaths of
acrylic pigment.
However, it is in Ross’s later flat-woven tapestries manufactured in Europe that
Frankenthaler’s stain technique is most successfully represented. In 1973 Frankenthaler
was commissioned to design a tapestry for the lobby of the new headquarters of the
Fourth National Bank & Trust in Wichita, Kansas, which was designed by Skidmore,
Owings, and Merrill and won an Architectural Award of Excellence in 1975. The
enormous tapestry that resulted, nine and half feet high and more than 42 feet long, was
woven in France by the Pinton workshop (Fig. 4.6).
68
Although the translation of
Frankenthaler’s stain technique into areas of graduated color was here far more subtle
and successful, the need to imitate Frankenthaler’s manipulation of a single painted
pigment by employing various threads dyed with different pigments remains the same,
and speaks to the differences between the two media. At the same time, however, we can
also see how the tapestry exists as a single, hanging textile in which color and ground are
one, and how in this sense it manifests the apparent aim of Color Field painting, the
fusion of color with its support.

67
Hedlund, Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry, 158.
68
Ibid., 164.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 226
This becomes particularly clear in the tapestries of Paul Jenkins, a second-
generation Abstract Expressionist artist whose work took on a more fluid, Color Field
quality in the 1960s. In the 1970s Jenkins collaborated with Ross on two tapestry projects,
both modeled on extant watercolors by the artist. The use of such models recalls
Greenberg’s description of Louis as adapting the watercolor technique to painting, and
indicates the permeability between watercolor, painting, and weaving in the oeuvres of
Color Field artists. Jenkins’s first tapestry was based on Phenomena Peal of Bells Cross,
a watercolor from 1972 (Fig. 4.7), and was woven from 1973 to 1979 in an edition of
seven at the Pinton workshop in Felletin, France (Fig. 4.8). The second tapestry, after
Phenomena Mandala Spectrum Turn, was modeled on a watercolor from 1971 and
woven from 1978 to 1981, in the workshop of Micheline Henry and Patrice Sully-
Matégot in Aubusson, France, in an edition of six (Fig. 4.9).
69
Both tapestries manifest
the radical fusion of color with ground that Color Field painting, or, in this case,
watercolor, emulated. The jagged outlines and feathering in these tapestries suggest the
seeping of pigment into canvas or paper, and the action of the fiber support in wicking
such pigment away. The outward fanning of color in the Phenomena Peal of Bells Cross
tapestry and the sense of swirling, flowing blots in the Phenomena Mandala Spectrum
Turn tapestry both allude to a fluidity of color, the movement of dye across a surface. We
can read these effects as the false imitation of a prior model, a highly skilled effort to
reproduce the impact of an entirely different medium. But at the same time these effects
demonstrate what tapestry is capable of achieving as a medium, and they speak to an
aspect of tapestry that many artists and critics considered definitive of modernist painting,

69
Ibid., 334.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 227
a flatness so exacting that it produces the complete fusion of color with its support, so
that figure and ground truly exist on a single, interwoven plane.
Considering the close formal and conceptual similarities between the tapestries
and paintings of artists such as Jenkins and Frankenthaler, one could argue that the
classification of these works into two different media is arbitrary. For the technical
distinction rests only on whether the cloth is dyed after it is woven, as when Color Field
painters apply pigment to cotton duck canvas, or before it is woven, as with tapestry
weaving. The ambiguity between the two media is clearly expressed in an exchange
between Gloria Ross and Archie Brennan, the director of the Dovecot Studios in
Edinburgh, Scotland, that wove many tapestries for Ross. She wrote him in 1972 to
inquire about the possibility of making “a painted tapestry,” that is, weaving a very
simple, perhaps monochromatic, tapestry that would then be painted on by an artist. Ross
had Joan Miró in mind for such a project, but wrote that if he were not interested “I could
ask Helen [Frankenthaler] to experiment with us.” Brennan was surprisingly amenable to
the idea, writing “I have no feelings in principle against this. I’ve always thought that
there are 2 kinds of tapestries—good ones, bad ones and ‘how’ alone will never dictate
this. […] I cannot see much point, however, in weaving an absolutely plain ground in
tapestry for subsequent spraying/painting, when a simple cloth could be obtained from a
power loom at much less cost.”
70
For Brennan there was no essential difference between
a machine woven canvas and a hand woven tapestry if both are monochromatic grounds
for a painter’s embellishment. This slippage between the woven tapestry and the woven
canvas demonstrates the extent to which art producers of the time were willing to view

70
Ibid., 83.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 228
the two media on a single continuum, a willingness that is also indicated by Greenberg’s
criticism and his repeated comparisons between painting and weaving.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that Greenberg was not only aware of, but even
encouraged, modern tapestry comes from a letter written by the dealer André Emmerich
to Marcella Brenner, the widow of Morris Louis who managed the Morris Louis Estate
together with Emmerich and with Greenberg, who had been named an adviser to the
Estate. Emmerich’s letter, written in 1969, seven years after the artist’s death, informed
Brenner that Gloria Ross had approached him again “about the project of making a
tapestry based on a Morris Louis painting.” Emmerich continued: “Clem Greenberg
dropped in just after Gloria telephoned, so I discussed the possibility with him to see
what his thoughts would be about the advisability of doing it. I thought you would like to
know he was distinctly favorable to the idea.” Emmerich cautioned that “my own feelings
about tapestries have changed a little since we were originally approached by Gloria
because of the rise in Louis prices and the growing gap between what tapestries would
sell for and the price of the paintings.” But he demurred that “any decision would have to
be yours and your advisor’s,” that is, Greenberg’s. Something of Brenner’s response to
this letter can be gleaned by her handwritten note at the bottom of the page: “I have no
objections—but permission is not mine to give. It is different if a living artist.”
71
Such
scruples differ markedly from the attitudes of many other artists’ heirs, as discussed in
chapter 2, who authorized tapestries after extant works in order to produce more visibility
for the artist’s work and more income from his estate.

71
André Emmerich to Marcella Brenner, 30 June 1969, Morris Louis Estate Papers, Microfilm
Reel #4991, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, District of Columbia.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 229
Whether it was Emmerich’s concerns over the economics of tapestry or Brenner’s
reservations over authorizing such a project, the Estate did not go ahead with the Morris
Louis tapestry. Instead, Ross approached a couple in Washington, DC who had bought
Equator (1962), one of eight paintings shown at the Emmerich Gallery shortly before
Louis’s death
72
(Fig. 4.10). In 1970 they authorized Ross to produce an edition of 5
hooked wall hangings after the painting,
73
and in June 1971 Ross sent the artist’s proof,
number 0/5, to Marcella Brenner (Fig. 4.11). Gifting one tapestry from the edition was a
traditional way of paying the artist for his or her design, but Brenner refused this payment,
insisting in a very politely worded note that “I could not possibly accept such a gift. I
have done nothing whatsoever to make such generosity to me in any way appropriate.
So—if that was your thought, I thank you for the thought—sincerely—and ask you to let
it rest there.”
74
Ross was delighted with this development, and wrote Brenner in response
to inform her “with many thanks to you, I will ‘re-number’” the tapestry “and place it for
sale.” She also wrote: “I am pleased that you approve of it,”
75
although Brenner indicated
no such approval of the tapestry in her letter, only thanking Ross for “the privilege of a
private viewing.”
76
Brenner may have been reluctant to lend this tapestry the weight of
official approval from the Morris Louis Estate in the absence of the artist, but, if so, her

72
Hedlund, Gloria F. Ross and Modern Tapestry, 198.
73
The copyright to authorize reproductions did not belong to the owners of the painting but to the
author of the work, in this case to the artist’s estate. However, during this period many tapestry
producers misinterpreted copyright law to mean that an owner of an artwork also owned the right
to copy that work. For example, Nelson Rockefeller, as discussed in chapter 2, routinely sought
permission to reproduce Picasso paintings from the museums and collectors who owned those
paintings, and he thought he owned the copyright to works in his own art collection.
74
Marcella Brenner to Gloria Ross, 8 July 1971, Microfilm Reel #4990, Morris Louis Estate
Papers.
75
Gloria Ross to Marcella Brenner, 17 July 1971, Microfilm Reel #4990, Morris Louis Estate
Papers.
76
Marcella Brenner to Gloria Ross, 8 July 1971, Microfilm Reel #4990, Morris Louis Estate
Papers.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 230
attitude seems to have contrasted markedly with that of Greenberg. Moreover, we should
note that Greenberg was an advisor to the Estate who received a share of the Louis
paintings released for sale and who had staked his professional reputation on Louis’s
significance as an artist. Greenberg thus had no less of a personal and financial interest
than the artist’s widow in preserving, and increasing, the prestige and value of Morris
Louis’s work. Greenberg’s willingness to recommend authorizing a tapestry after Louis’s
painting thus strongly suggests that he viewed the medium positively and felt that the
project would add to, or at least not detract from, the artist’s standing.
Of course, Greenberg had already described Louis’s work as a kind of tapestry or
woven fabric, and he was not alone in doing so. He and Emmerich, and others familiar
with Louis’s oeuvre, developed a typology that categorized Louis’s mature work into
three kinds of paintings, the “veils,” the “unfurleds,” and the “stripes” (Figs. 4.12-4.14).
The first two categories clearly imply the flowing, billowing quality of fabrics, and
although stripes are patterns that can be used on various objects and surfaces, they also
commonly appear on textiles. The use of the term “stripes” in conjunction with “veils”
and “unfurleds” locates all three labels in a vocabulary of textiles that consistently likens
Louis’s paintings to woven fabrics. The frequent use of this vocabulary again
demonstrates how difficult it was for the immediate interpreters of modernist painting to
conceptualize these works in completely medium-specific ways. Indeed, it seems that
Louis and his circle relished the association of his work with textiles. One of the largest
works in Louis’s 1960 exhibition at French & Co., which was curated by Greenberg, was
titled Loom, as though to suggest that it was fabricated through the interweaving of color
and ground. J. Patrick Lannan, an early patron of Louis’s, wrote the artist in 1958 to say
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 231
that he had bought two of his paintings through Greenberg, one of which “is in very
bright colors that cross the painting horizontally, like a new modern flag or banner of an
atomic regiment,”
77
using the comparison with textiles to imbue the work with heroic and
monumental qualities. Comments such as these, in conjunction with the textile
vocabulary employed by Greenberg, Emmerich, and others, support the suggestion that
weaving or textiles were privileged as points of comparison and even models for
modernist painting.
Michael Fried, who wrote the first monograph on Morris Louis in 1971, went so
far as to imply that Louis’s primary medium or working material was less painting than
the canvas itself. “The emphasis Louis places on the bare canvas in the unfurleds” Fried
wrote, “the sheer primacy he gives it, has no equivalent in the work of any other painter.”
Although this emphasis on the canvas was clearest in the unfurleds, Fried argued that it
had also been implied by the earlier veil paintings: “It is as though what throughout the
veils had been Louis’s deep but ultimately private involvement with the canvas on
which—more accurately, with which—he painted is in the unfurleds made fully manifest
for the first time.”
78
Fried developed this idea that Louis worked with rather than on
canvas in his description of Louis’s working methods. He explained that Louis often
placed the canvas not on the floor or the wall but on a kind of scaffolding that could be
tilted to manipulate the flow of the paint across the canvas. He speculated that Louis
“may have clipped folds together to make a series of pleats, into which the paint was
allowed to flow and which were removed after it had dried.” And because Louis created
paintings that were larger than the room in which he worked, he folded up the loose,

77
J. Patrick Lannan to Morris Louis, 15 July 1958, Microfilm reel #4988, Morris Louis Papers.
78
Michael Fried, “Morris Louis” (1971), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago
and London: the University of Chicago Press, 1998), 120.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 232
unstretched canvas to work on the painting in sections, all of this suggesting that Louis
exploited the flexibility of the woven fabric support and “seems to have needed nothing
more, but nothing less, than the resistance of the canvas itself” (emphasis original).
79
For
Fried, something of this flexible billowing of the canvas was expressed in the finished
unfurleds:
The slight but reiterated undulations of the banked rivulets of color are experienced as a
kind of billowing, not just of the rivulets, and not of the entire canvas exactly—the latter
is not seen as other than taut and flat (indeed, that the canvas is not just flat but stretched
taut becomes meaningful in a new way)—but of the breadth and depth of everything, or
of the nothing, the blank canvas opens onto. It is as though in the unfurleds tautness and
flatness themselves billow in a wind whose source and nature remain wholly mysterious.
This is, I want to claim, the vision of the unfurleds, one which, for all its metaphysical
reach and power, Louis achieved only on the strength of, only within, his ongoing
involvement with canvas and its various properties and qualities. In this sense the
billowing I have remarked is at bottom that of canvas as such, Louis’s canvas as such.
[emphasis original]
80

This passionate enthusiasm for “ongoing involvement with canvas and its various
properties and qualities,” not only raises the question of when modernist experimentation
with the specificity of painting bleeds into experimentation with the specificity of textiles.
It also demonstrates the extent to which “canvas as such”—that is, fabric—could be
understood as the source of painting’s specificity and thus of its “metaphysical reach and
power.”

On the Limits of Medium Specificity
This slippage between the painting and the canvas, the lack of certainty over
which medium was becoming purified by modernist experimentation, further dramatizes
the impossibility of a purely medium-specific modernism. But this critique of modernism
as not fully medium specific should not be understood as a contemporary, post-

79
Ibid., 114-115.
80
Ibid., 120-121.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 233
postmodern insight. Rather, what the vocabulary of textiles demonstrates is the extent to
which modernists on the ground acknowledged the limits of medium specificity, and that
they were less interested in arriving at a pure, medium-specific art than they were in
making sense of the modern art already around them. Greenberg himself repeatedly
emphasized that medium specificity was a goal and an aim of modern art, but not
something that could ever be fully achieved. In his 1958 essay “Sculpture in Our Time,”
he explained once again “that a modernist work of art must try, in principle, to avoid
communication with any order of experience not inherent in the most literally and
essentially construed nature of its medium” leading to, among other things “renouncing
illusion and explicit subject matter.” The goal of such modernist experimentation was
that “the arts are to achieve concreteness, ‘purity,’ by dealing solely with their respective
selves—that is, by become ‘abstract’ or nonfigurative.” But, Greenberg emphasized, “of
course, ‘purity’ is an unattainable ideal. Outside music, no attempt at a ‘pure’ work of art
has even succeeded in being more than an approximation and a compromise (least of all
in literature).” For Greenberg, no painting could be purely abstract, completely free of
allusions to other media or experience, “but this does not diminish the crucial importance
of ‘purity’ or concrete ‘abstractness’ as an orientation and aim.”
81

In another essay on “New Sculpture” from 1949, Greenberg had already
cautioned that “the tendency toward ‘purity’ or absolute abstractness exists only as a
tendency, an aim, not as a realization.”
82
And in his 1956 review of The Art of Sculpture
by Herbert Read, Greenberg took the author to task for treating medium specificity as an
a priori system for establishing the value of works of art. Read’s “conclusion that

81
Greenberg, “Sculpture in Our Time” (1958), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 56.
82
Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1949), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, 315.
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 234
sculpture, when it attains it ‘highest values,’ states clearly its ‘preference’ for ‘tactile
sensations’” was, according to Greenberg, “deduced from a definition of the medium
rather than from actual experience of works of sculpture.”
83
For Greenberg then, the
qualities that are specific to each medium could not be decided in advance or in a vacuum,
but only through examining the artworks of an already existing avant-garde. Medium
specificity, decorative flatness, abstraction—all of these ideas of Greenberg’s were less a
prescription for the future than the diagnosis of an existing artistic condition. And
Greenberg’s commitment to empirical experience of actual works of art as the basis for
art criticism made him open to acknowledging that criteria of value can change, and had
changed, throughout the history of modernism. As he concluded in “The Later Monet”—
“Above all, the Water Lilies tell us once again that all canons of excellence are
provisional.”
84

Greenberg understood medium specificity as a historically embedded process, one
that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century with the painting of Courbet and Manet
85

and had continued to develop until his present moment, reaching a climax in the
monumental works of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters. If we likewise
understand medium specificity as a historical phenomenon with a beginning, middle, and
end, then one of its limits exists at its point of origin, where it should be possible to
distinguish medium specificity from what came before. I have argued here that this first
limit, this point of origin, exists not only in the avant-garde painting of mid-nineteenth
century Paris, but also in the contemporary efforts of design reformers who emphasized

83
Greenberg, “Roundness Isn’t All: Review of The Art of Sculpture by Herbert Read” (1956), in
The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, 271.
84
Greenberg, “The Later Monet,” 11.
85
Greenberg emphasizes Courbet in “Towards a Newer Laocoön” and Manet in “Modernist
Painting.”
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 235
material-based artistic training and techniques, truth to materials in the design of
everyday objects, and the need to reform the aesthetic status quo through greater rigor
and method, greater structure, decorative unity, and design. The intersection of design
reform, avant-garde painting, and modern art criticism is perhaps best epitomized by
Roger Fry, who introduced the Post-Impressionists to English audiences, pioneered a
medium-specific formalist art criticism, and opened a utopian arts-and-crafts design
workshop, the Omega Workshops, with artists of the Bloomsbury group. The variety of
Fry’s interests indicates the complexity of the context out of which modern art and
criticism developed and shows that the formalism associated with Fry and other modern
critics was not necessarily divorced from a wider concern with everyday objects and the
future of artistic production. Linking medium specificity to design reform allows us to
consider how this core theory of modernism may have been rooted in broader social
issues and deeper intellectual currents that had developed over the course of the
nineteenth century.
A second limit of medium specificity lies in critics’ ability to conceptualize and
describe modernist painting. Critics could often only explain what was novel about
modernist painting through metaphors and allusions to other media, especially the
practice of weaving, suggesting that weaving existed as a privileged model for the all-
over-ness and flatness, the interweaving of brushstrokes and the fusion of color with its
support that modernist painting exhibited. This vocabulary of textiles that compared
modernist painting with weaving permeates the criticism of Fénéon, Fry, Fried, and
especially Greenberg, and can be found in writings from throughout the historical period
of modernism. It demonstrates the impossibility of understanding medium-specific
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 236
painting in truly medium-specific terms, suggesting that, if an entirely “pure” medium-
specific painting could exist, it could not be conceived as such by its interpreters or
described without recourse to the terminology of other media. Perhaps the most dramatic
slippage in the interpretation of modernist painting lies in the conflation of the painting
with its support, the canvas. As the textility and weave of the canvas rose to greater
prominence in Color Field painting—and as modern tapestries rose in visibility—art
critics such as Michael Fried began to raise the question of which medium, textiles or
paintings, was now the subject of modernist experimentation. If the medium specificity of
modernist painting was taken to its ultimate limit, Greenberg repeatedly speculated, the
result would no longer be a painting at all but a textile, a canvas, hanging on the wall.
The final limit of medium specificity lies in its own expectations, or rather, the
expectations that modernists had for the achievability of medium specificity. As
Greenberg repeatedly made clear, medium specificity was a goal and an aim for
modernist painting, but never one that could be fully achieved. It was a limit that could
not be crossed. Understanding medium specificity as a limit rather than an expectation, as
an explanation of already existing artworks rather than a prescription for art of the future,
offers a more historically responsible view of Greenberg himself. It allows us to see this
critic not as a plotter of modernist hegemony but rather as someone who was part of an
ever-shifting dialogue with his intellectual and visual environment. That environment
included—no doubt among a variety of other largely overlooked elements—modern
tapestry. What I have called “Greenberg’s tapestries” were not only the hand woven
works he saw in New York galleries or envisioned for his favored artists, but also the
modernist paintings he championed by describing them with a vocabulary borrowed from
Chapter 4 Greenberg’s Vocabulary of Textiles Wells 237
textiles. These two sets of “tapestries” were both part of Greenberg’s context and the
modernism he formulated. While there were clearly differences between woven tapestries
and painted canvases, the relationship between them should not be understood as
oppositional. Rather, they formed a continuum in which each medium could serve as a
model for the other.
238
CHAPTER FIVE
REVIVAL REDUX: THE DEMISE OF MODERN TAPESTRY

The previous chapters have established that modern tapestry and painting were
understood in surprisingly similar ways during the decades after World War II. Both were
situated in historical lineages that nonetheless emphasized the novelty of modern artistic
expression. Both were used to explore the multiplicity, seriality, and reproduction of
modern art. Both were understood as autonomous works that could nevertheless function
as decorative dressing for modern architecture. Moreover, each could serve as a
conceptual model for the flatness, abstraction, and textile quality of the other. Yet if these
similarities between painting and tapestry were so strong during the postwar period, why
do they strike the present art historian as surprising? Why did tapestry not become an
established presence within subsequent histories of postwar modernism?
In trying to answer those questions, it is instructive to consider another art
historian’s earlier effort to articulate the strong relationship between modernist painting
and textiles. Joseph Masheck published an intriguing essay titled “The Carpet Paradigm
Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness” in Arts magazine in 1976, just before
Masheck began a three-year term as editor in chief of the rival journal Artforum.
Although “Carpet Paradigm” has recently been republished and translated into French,
when it first appeared it did not receive the attention it deserved, considering the
importance of its claims. For Masheck boldly proposed that a “carpet paradigm” had
stimulated the modernist turn to formalism, medium specificity, and flatness in painting.
His essay implicitly suggested that artists and critics could only understand painting in
formalist and medium-specific terms by making recourse to another type of work, the
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 239
oriental carpet. Moreover, Masheck explicitly argued that the modernist doctrine of
medium specificity grew out of nineteenth-century design reform. As Masheck made
clear in his preface to the 2010 reprinting of “The Carpet Paradigm,” one of his
objectives was to demonstrate that Clement Greenberg’s theories of modernist painting
did not arise in a vacuum but rather drew on earlier precedents.
1
For Masheck, the carpet
paradigm was the silver bullet that explained how modernist criticism had developed,
because it was a tool that crucial earlier figures—from little known writers such as D.R.
Hay
2
to such canonical art historical figures as Gottfried Semper, Alois Reigl, Maurice
Denis, and Henri Matisse—had used to understand painting in newly formalist ways, to
stress ornamental over pictorial values, and to privilege artificiality and self-conscious,
deliberate design rather than the “passive” recording of the outside world.
3

Yet Masheck is important not only for his insights into early modernism but also
for his blind spots regarding postwar modernism. Although Masheck considered
Greenberg to be an heir to the carpet paradigm, he felt that Greenberg had so successfully
institutionalized flatness that the carpet paradigm employed by earlier critics was no
longer necessary. “The flatness stressed by the carpet paradigm” had become “so widely
comprehended” and such a “highly self-conscious concern among artists and critics,” that

1
Joseph Masheck, preface to The Carpet Paradigm: Integral Flatness from Decorative to Fine
Art, 9-16 (New York and Turin: Edgewise, 2010). In a subsequent essay, Masheck states that he
also wanted to provide a theoretical framework for the then emerging Pattern and Decoration
movement. Masheck, “‘Le paradigm du tapis’ revisité” in Decorum” Tapis et Tapisseries
d’Artistes, 95-102 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Skira Flammarion,
2013). Glenn Adamson has discussed the relationship between modernism and the Pattern and
Decoration movement in Thinking Through Craft (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 28-32.
2
Author of The Laws of Harmonious Colouring Adapted House Painting (Edinburgh: Printed for
D. Lizars by Ballantyne & Co., 1828), which was subsequently reprinted many times throughout
the nineteenth century.
3
Joseph Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness,” Arts
51, no. 1 (September 1976): 86, 88.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 240
it no longer needed to be stated through verbal comparisons between modernist painting
and textiles.
4
Masheck pointed to contemporary reiterations of the carpet paradigm,
including Carl Andre’s metal floor sculptures, Ed Moses’s resin paintings inspired by
Navajo weavings (which Moses referred to as tapestries),
5
and Kenneth Noland’s Seventh
Night, a 1972 tapestry produced by Gloria F. Ross and sold through the Pace Editions
gallery (Fig. 5.1). For Masheck, this last example of the modern tapestry so precisely
encapsulated the carpet paradigm it was “mistaken,” an example of “pedantry.”
6
Masheck
thus presented Noland’s tapestry as an extreme instance of modernism’s embrace of
textiles rather than a typical one, and he did not acknowledge that many additional artists
discussed in his essay—including Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Denis, Matisse, and
Pablo Picasso—designed tapestries and rugs.
This dismissal of modern tapestry seems to anticipate and reinforce the relative
silence regarding Masheck’s own essay, the lack of attention it has garnered in the
academy even by those scholars who have addressed modernism’s relationship to
tapestry.
7
While the inclusion of a Noland tapestry among Masheck’s illustrations
suggests that such textiles were part of the modern art world in which the author saw the
carpet paradigm operating, he did not value the literal carpets modernists produced as
much as he valued the metaphorical ones that modernists used to explain their painting.
And Masheck was similarly blind to the continuing comparisons between modernist

4
Ibid., 103.
5
In a 1970 show with Billy Al Bengston, “Teatables and Tapestries,” at the Mizuno Gallery.
Melinda Terbell, “Los Angeles,” Arts Magazine 45 (February 1971): 45; Peter Plagens, Artforum
9 (February 1971): 90-91.
6
Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm,” 103.
7
It is not cited, for example, by either Romy Golan in Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall
Painting, Europe 1927-1957 (New Haven and London: 2009); or by Mark Wigley in White
Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1995).
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 241
painting and textiles in the writing of Greenberg and later writers. While Greenberg
continued to rely on the materiality of textiles to elucidate the supposedly medium-
specific qualities of modernist painting, Masheck felt that Greenberg’s writings had made
the verbal articulation of a carpet paradigm obsolete.
How can we account for this combination of commemoration and repudiation, in
which Masheck is clearly aware of modern tapestries yet declines to value them despite
his interest in the relationship between modernist painting and textiles? This chapter will
explore economic and political developments during the 1970s and early 1980s that
contributed to the demise of modern tapestry and its near erasure from the critical and
historical literature. These include the increasingly corporate context of tapestry
production and its competition with a rival form of art reproduction, the print renaissance;
the feminist art movement and its reclamation of textiles as formerly marginalized
women’s art; and the rise of postmodernism, which critiqued and often oversimplified
modernism—especially Greenberg’s version of modernism—in order to emphasize the
importance of the postmodernist intervention. Feminism and postmodernism, much like
the tapestry revival that preceded them, took part in a revivalist logic that helped reshape
the historical record. These movements rejected Greenbergian modernism as a period of
relative decline or orthodoxy and advocated a return to the plurality and political
engagement of earlier eras. While I will not claim that feminist artists and postmodernist
critics conspired to obscure the visibility of modern tapestry, what I would like to suggest
is that it was not in these figures’ best interests to include tapestry as part of a multivalent
history of modernism. This inclination to deemphasize modernism’s complexity and
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 242
inclusiveness combined with modern artists’ own resistance to the economics of tapestry
production to minimize the visibility of modern tapestry in the following decades.

Corporate Tapestry v. the Print Renaissance
The increasingly corporate character of tapestry production and distribution
during the 1970s and early 1980s can be traced in the correspondence of Robert
Motherwell, who became increasingly frustrated with the tapestry industry and the small
returns he received from tapestry reproductions of his work. Motherwell collaborated
with Gloria Ross, who was his sister-in-law while he was married to Helen Frankenthaler
from 1958 to 1971, and with a more commercial tapestry producer, Modern Master
Tapestries Inc., which had been founded by Charles E. Slatkin. In 1965 Slatkin began
circulating an exhibition of modern French tapestries, most of which were designed by
European artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Miró. Mildred Constantine, then Associate
Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote an essay for the catalogue and
encouraged Slatkin to invite American artists to provide models for a subsequent
collection of tapestries.
8
Constantine may have written to Motherwell as well, and the
artist responded directly to her rather than to Slatkin, writing: “I find the proposal for a
tapestry most interesting but I would like to know more about the details, particularly

8
In doing so, Constantine echoed the attitude of Alfred Barr in the 1940s, when MoMA
commissioned American artists—Stuart Davis, John Ferron, A.E. Gallatin, Arshile Gorky,
Charles Howard, E. McKnight Kauffer, Loren MacIver, George L.K. Morris, I. Rice Pereira, and
Margueritte Zorach—to design rugs for an exhibition entitled New Rugs by American Artists
(June 30-August 9, 1942). In both cases, MoMA’s objective was to encourage American artists to
follow the example of European artists in applying modernist aesthetics to the decorative arts. See
Exhibition Files, Exhibition #188: New Rugs by American Artists, MoMA Archives. Davis’s rug
from this project, Flying Carpet, was acquired by the Seagram Building. See Phyllis Lambert,
Building Seagram, foreword Barry Bergdoll (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2013), 169.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 243
who would make it, how many there would be in the edition, and what the financial
arrangement is—this last I need to know because of my arrangement with [the art gallery]
Marlborough-Gerson.”
9
While Motherwell tried to deflect his interest in the financial
arrangements of the tapestry venture as the concerns of his dealer rather than himself, his
questions show his familiarity with tapestry as a reproductive medium, woven in editions,
that could yield profits. This familiarity stemmed from the fact that both Motherwell and
his wife Frankenthaler had been collaborating with Ross on tapestry projects for the past
four years.
Motherwell’s familiarity with art prints also inflected his understanding of the
business of tapestry. When Slatkin sent him a contract for the tapestry commission, it
stated that “the artist agrees to consult with the Slatkin Galleries in connection with any
samples or models of both weaving and color dyes but final discretion with regard to
exhibition and sales will be left to the Slatkin Galleries.” Motherwell responded “I will
not agree to ‘final discretion,’ etc., being left to the Slatkin Galleries […]. In any case, I
must see the tapestries.”
10
In a subsequent letter, Motherwell clarified his objection
through a comparison with art prints: “if I’m making a lithograph and am not satisfied
with the result when it’s finally printed, I won’t let it go out into the world. I realize that
you don’t particularly want to have a tapestry made that I might reject. On the other hand
I can’t say to you, you go ahead and make it and exhibit it whether I like the final product
or not. And I must say that I have very strong feelings about the inner integrity of a
medium.”
11
Slatkin’s assistant, Robert Littman, responded that Motherwell had

9
Robert Motherwell (RM) to Mildred Constantine, 8 May 1967, Robert Motherwell Papers,
Dedalus Foundation, New York, NY.
10
RM to Robert R. Littman (RRL), 24 Sept 1967, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
11
RM to Charles E. Slatkin (CES), 18 October 1967, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 244
misunderstood the term “final discretion,” which referred “not to the artistic merit of the
tapestry, but to the proper method of presenting it to the public. Of course, we would not
want to show the tapestry until you are completely satisfied with it.”
12
The exchange
points to how tenuous yet crucial the idea of authorship was for these reproductive
ventures. Motherwell was clearly familiar with having his work reproduced by others and
comfortable with limiting his authorial role to the almost Duchampian act of approving
the final product after it had already been made. But curtailing his authorship in this way
made Motherwell more insistent on protecting his right to approve or reject the finished
tapestry at his own “final” discretion. To conceive authorship as the act of saying yes or
no imbued that act with greater significance and made tampering with it a greater threat
to the artist’s standing.
As Motherwell’s business relationship with Modern Master Tapestries continued,
he began to feel that he was not being adequately compensated. Motherwell’s payment
was made in the form of one copy of each tapestry plus ten percent of the sales of the
additional copies. In 1974, when it became clear to him that Slatkin was producing up to
20 tapestries in each edition, Motherwell wrote to his lawyer that receiving only one copy
of these tapestries “seems little in relation to the size of the edition. [The] agreement must
go back 5 years or so, before tapestries became popular.”
13
Although Motherwell’s
characterization of the tapestry boom as occurring only in the past five years is amusing,
given its growth since the late 1940s, it also suggests that Motherwell saw tapestry as a
growing, profitable enterprise whose producers, such as Modern Master Tapestries could
afford to give artists more compensation. Motherwell’s lawyer, Lee Eastman, negotiated

12
RRL to RM, 4 November 1967, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
13
Dominique Mazeaud (DM) to RM, 22 November 1974, forwarded to Lee V. Eastman (LVE)
with handwritten note from RM, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 245
for Motherwell to receive an additional copy of the first two tapestry designs and then
interestingly went on to encourage his client to pursue the reproduction of his work
further in both tapestry and prints. Eastman argued that Motherwell should be able to
negotiate a guaranteed minimum annual royalty payment from tapestry producers just as
he was able to do with art print publishers, encouraging Motherwell to realize that the
way to make more money from tapestry was to become more involved with the industry
rather than less.
14

Around the same time that Motherwell argued his compensation from Modern
Master Tapestries was too small, he also wrote to Gloria Ross with similar complaints.
Ross sent a letter to Motherwell asking for his approval on various things, such as
changing the location of his monogram on the tapestries and the sizes of the works, and
in response Motherwell wrote: “To be brusque, which has nothing to do with you, but
being swamped with projects and the correspondence related, what I basically feel is that
I hear a lot about you and your weaving problems, but I never see a tapestry of mine that
I really like, nor for several years have I received one nor do I ever see any money. And
all of this in relation to translation of my work that I am not sure that I approve of
anyhow.” He went on to say that that he had only allowed Ross to make tapestries of his
work because he did not view her as engaging in a business enterprise. “But if it is indeed
a business as it seems to be, then I have a suspicion that I would never take what appears
to be a seventh of the proceeds from any dealer. I generally take from 67 to 75% of the
total proceeds, or if manufacturing costs are involved, 50% of the selling price.”
Motherwell argued that Ross’s tapestries were eating into his profits further because they
might actually be wooing buyers away from his paintings: “the truth is that the market for

14
LVE to RM, 30 June 1975, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 246
any individual artist is relatively limited, and therefore it is foolish for him to put himself
in competition with himself—in this case in regard to huge works, when he gains nothing
but a souvenir [i.e. the artist’s copy of the tapestry] from it.”
15
Ross’s response to his
barrage of criticism was to point out that Motherwell had always been well aware that she
was engaged in a business, since she sent him contracts and royalties, and that the
“souvenir” he received as part of his payment was “worth some $10,000 today and is
growing in value constantly, because it is a Motherwell image and because it is made by
an outstanding atelier with very limited production.” But she also suggested raising his
royalty fee to fifteen percent, and revealed in the process something of her own profits:
“Without knowing the exact costs or selling price involved, the arithmetic will be
something like this: Selling Price $10,000; My overall cost including gallery commission
$5,750; 15% for artist $1,500. Because of the traditionally high (and constantly rising)
cost of tapestry and with a ceiling to a selling price for a ‘multiple,’ you can see the
figures you had in mind are not feasible. Would 15% of the selling price be
satisfactory?”
16
Although Ross’s wording suggests that her own profits are minimal, the
example she outlines of a $10,000 tapestry would make her own share $2,750, which is
significantly more than she proposed to pay Motherwell. This contrasts with the French
model recorded in Le Corbusier’s accounts (discussed in chapter 2), in which the dealer
and the artist each received an equal 25% of the selling price. But Mothwerwell was
mollified by Ross’s response, and wrote back in apology: “Not only was I feeling rotten,
but someone had just shown me rotten trial proofs of ‘Elegies’ in lithography and I
realized that from my standpoint I made a terrible error in ever allowing that image to be

15
RM to Gloria F. Ross (GFR), 31 June 1974, folder V.138, Robert Motherwell Papers.
16
GFR to RM, 13 August 1974, folder V.138, Robert Motherwell Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 247
reproduced.”
17
This confirms that Motherwell saw art printing and tapestry as twin modes
of reproducing his work, and moreover demonstrates that Motherwell’s attitudes towards
one medium could affect his reactions to the other. For now, however, the crisis had
passed. Motherwell’s frustration with tapestry eased for a time, and he remained an active
correspondent with both Ross and Modern Master Tapestries through the late 1970s.
In the early 1980s, however, Motherwell insisted on a complete break with both
producers, and again compared tapestry with art printing in order to justify his decision.
To Ross, Motherwell had his curator Joan Banach write a letter stating only that “he feels
generally unsatisfied with the tapestries he has done and does not feel that the medium
can translate or handle his images authentically enough,”
18
but, to Modern Master
Tapestries, he made his displeasure with the economics of tapestry more explicit.
“Frankly I find the financial arrangements with Modern Master Tapestries absurd. My
etchings sell for the same price as your tapestries and I receive 50%, whereas on a net
sale of $2,580.00 on your part, I am receiving the extravagant sum of $387.00.
Moreover, the etchings are in much larger editions than your tapestries.” Motherwell was
not the only artist who ultimately repudiated Modern Master Tapestries after being
initially enthusiastic. Frank Stella was one of the earliest artists to sign on with the
company but then declined to do any further business and even considered legal action
against them. In 1983 he hired a lawyer to demand that the company halt production on
the three Stella tapestries in their collection.
19
Like Mothwerwell, Stella considered the
royalty payments “ridiculously advantageous” for Modern Master Tapestries
20
and came

17
RM to GFR, 25 August 1974, folder V. 138, Robert Motherwell Papers.
18
Joan Banach to GFR, 28 April 1982, folder V.138, Robert Motherwell Papers.
19
Singerli Variations I, Singerli Variations II, and River of Ponds.
20
Gilbert S. Edelson to Neale M. Albert, 28 April 1983, Frank Stella Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 248
to see the company as practicing financial arrangements that were exploitative of the
artists upon whose names and talent the company relied.
In breaking off his ties with Modern Master Tapestries, Motherwell also claimed
that someone else had approached him about a commission for a unique tapestry that
would not be woven in an edition, and offered him a fee of $60,000. “Such disparity in
figures is a kind of madness,” he wrote, and he concluded his letter: “I am sorry to be so
brusque, but given the figures, the situation between us is as surreal as Lewis Carroll.”
21

Motherwell’s letter seems to indicate that the value of tapestries had declined compared
to that of art prints, if his etchings were now selling for the same price. But the allusion to
a client willing to pay an artist $60,000 for a single tapestry contradicts that interpretation
and suggests that original tapestries, woven as unique exemplaires after new designs
commissioned directly from the artist, continued to be sought-after objects despite being
made by craftspeople other than the artist himself. Motherwell’s letter thus implies a
growing disparity between original tapestry and reproductive tapestry and a situation in
which commercial tapestry producers like Modern Master Tapestries could not compete
with the rising values and lower production costs of art prints.
Modern Master Tapestries, Inc. was a more obviously commercial venture than
the independent weaving workshops of such figures as Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach.
While she personally hand wove tapestries in editions of three, Modern Master Tapestries
commissioned pile tapestries in larger editions of 20 copies from a workshop in India.
Although the tapestries were still woven by hand, they were much cheaper to produce
than the more prestigious flat-woven tapestries made in France. A Modern Master
Tapestries price list from 1973 shows that their tapestries ranged from $1,750 for

21
RM to DM, 24 November 1982, folder V.067, Robert Motherwell Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 249
Leonard Baskin’s Condorbird to $5,000 for Lichtenstein’s Modern Tapestry; the average
price was only $2,865, nearly ten times less than de la Baume-Dürrbach was receiving at
the time from Nelson Rockefeller. In addition to making tapestries less expensive,
Modern Master Tapestries also made them more accessible by building up a stock from
which customers could order the works readymade. In this way the company better fit
Americans’ expectations about how they could acquire tapestries, expectations which
often did not correspond to the way French tapestry makers did business.
The correspondence of the Tabard workshop, for example, includes letters from
American dealers asking to see brochures or photographs of whatever tapestries they
have available for sale, as though they expected that Tabard had an extensive stock from
which buyers could order. In fact, as the staff at Tabard explained over and over again,
they worked only on commission and it was up to the dealers to provide artists’ tapestry
designs to them, the weavers. Remarkably, Tabard received these misplaced requests
even from American dealers claiming to specialize in tapestry, such as Adele Siegel,
director of the Arras Gallery in New York (named after the town in northern France that
had historically been a center of tapestry production), or Carl Zapffe, director of the
Carlsan Gallery of Fine Art in Chicago, who claimed: “We are the first and the only art
gallery in the United States that specialized exclusively in hand-woven contemporary
tapestries, practically all of which are hand-woven in Aubusson.”
22
Modern Master
Tapestries provided the “brochures” that these and other dealers requested, producing
profusely illustrated catalogs that demystified tapestry acquisition for American
audiences. The catalogs offered explicit instructions on how to order tapestries on

22
Carl Zapffe to FT, 4 Sept 1970; FT to Adele Siegel, 16 October 1972, folder 30 J 293, Atelier
Tabard Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 250
approval, and they provided various “facts” about how tapestries were made and their
advantages, including familiar points such as “Tapestries provide insulation. They
improve acoustics” or “Tapestries are very reasonably priced. A painting by the same
artist, in the same size as a tapestry, would cost much, much more.”
23

The Modern Master Tapestries catalogs also emphasized the artistry of the
tapestries by describing their manufacture as a small-scale, artisanal process in which
artists were directly involved. The 1981 catalog claims “Edition sizes are so small the
integrity of the work and the artist’s vision are maintained,” and described the works as
“individually woven by hand by a small group of artisans in India or France.” The catalog
also explains: “The artist is involved throughout the process of production. He chooses
the materials, selects the weaving technique and approves each tapestry in an edition
before it can be offered for sale.”
24
Admittedly, all this was true. The works were hand
woven in much smaller editions than machine made rugs and they were the result of
“involvement” by artists, who provided models, sometimes conferred on the choice of
colors or other production details, and generally approved the final results. But the
reiteration of this familiar narrative of artist-weaver collaboration does little to mask the
far more commercial nature of the Modern Master Tapestries enterprise. If Gloria Ross
turned her name into a tapestry brand that obscured the various weavers with whom she
collaborated, then Modern Master Tapestries, Inc. projected a self-consciously corporate
identity as an anonymous purveyor of tapestries designed by named artists but made by
anonymous weavers. The “Inc.” of Modern Master Tapestries and its generalizing name
suggest the ease with which other corporations and individual buyers would be able to

23
Modern Master Tapestries Inc. catalog, 1981. Roy Lichtenstein Papers, Roy Lichtenstein
Foundation, New York, NY.
24
Modern Master Tapestries Inc. catalog, 1981. Roy Lichtenstein Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 251
acquire tapestries without the rituals of visiting a traditional art gallery, or the extensive
correspondence that Nelson Rockefeller’s commissions of Picasso tapestries from de la
Baume-Dürrbach required.
Among the artists who embraced the serial quality of tapestry, it is notable that
several Pop artists, including Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy
Warhol, provided tapestry models to Modern Master Tapestries, Lichtenstein apparently
provided original designs for all four tapestries he made with the company, and his
correspondence, unlike that of Motherwell and Stella, registers no complaints about the
enterprise. The first work, which Lichtenstein fittingly titled Modern Tapestry, was
woven in 1968 (Fig. 5.2) and the last, Amerind Landscape, was produced in 1982.
Lichtenstein’s willingness to work with Modern Master Tapestries into the early 1980s,
at a time when other artists were aggressively distancing themselves from the company,
is suggestive. There could be many practical reasons why Lichtenstein enjoyed a better
working relationship with the tapestry maker, including the fact that his dealer, Leo
Castelli, took an active role in negotiating Lichtenstein’s contracts with Modern Master
Tapestries and selling the works that resulted—the correspondence reveals numerous
instances in which Castelli exhibited a Lichtenstein tapestry at his gallery or bought one,
presumably for resale.
25
Yet it is also tempting to consider Lichtenstein as having a very
different attitude towards the multiplication of his work in tapestry because of his self-
identification as a Pop artist. Pop art has been theorized as a radical break from the
conventions of modernism in part because it manifests a very different relationship to

25
Castelli also bought Frank Stella tapestries from Modern Master Tapestries, also presumably
for resale, but does not appear to have had a role in negotiating agreements between Stella and the
company. See Frank Stella Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 252
reproduction.
26
The Pop artist distances himself from the modernist myth of the original
artist by employing such mechanical techniques as silkscreen or Ben-Day dots, by
embracing a deadpan representative style rather than gestural, expressive abstraction, and
by reproducing readymade imagery culled from comic books, newspapers, and shopping
malls.
The question this raises is whether we can read Lichtenstein’s willingness to
create new designs for the tapestry medium, his declarative titling of the first work as
Modern Tapestry, his collaboration with Castelli on the enterprise, and his lack of
frustration with Modern Master Tapestries as evidence that he viewed the medium as an
integral part of his artistic practice, just as much a piece of Pop art as his Ben-Day dot
paintings or murals. It is seductive to think of tapestry as a kind of Pop art avant la lettre,
an art in which artists turn away from painting towards something more akin to printing,
allowing their work to be reproduced in multiple through a collaborative process that
compromises the artist’s authorial role. Warhol’s tapestries for Modern Master Tapestries
were copies of his Flowers and Marilyn works, suggesting a kind of parity or parallel
between his silkscreens and his tapestries of the same subject. As with the work of Josef
Albers or Henri Matisse, we can productively view an artist’s tapestries along with his
other works as part of the same series, part of the same exploration of certain imagery, or
as part of the same exploration of seriality itself.
The Modern Master Tapestries catalog presents the tapestries of Pop artists and
modernists side by side, a single page juxtaposing Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Picasso,
Calder, Dine, and Milton Avery (Fig. 5.3). The presentation of these works as part of the

26
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966” (1989), in Andy
Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 1-46.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 253
same context to the same market suggests we have to rethink the division between Pop
art and the modernism it supposedly rejected, and to consider the ways in which
modernists likewise embraced reproduction, multiplicity, and indirect or impersonal
authorship.
27
At the same time, however, the contrast in attitude between Lichtenstein on
the one hand and Motherwell and Stella on the other, suggests that self-proclaimed
modernists did have more anxieties about tapestry. Although it is unwise to draw firm
conclusions from such a small pool of examples, it is notable that both Motherwell and
Stella raised questions about the status of their authorship, the number of copies being
produced of their works, and the amount of money to which they were entitled that seem
not to have bothered Lichtenstein. Their correspondence demonstrates that modern artists
often had conflicting attitudes towards tapestry over the course of their careers, and that
they had to negotiate their desire to make tapestries or reproduce their work, on the one
hand, with, on the other hand, the desire to be above the commercial fray.
The late career of Anni Albers reveals another way in which the modern artist
could become frustrated with textile art, as well as the shifting status of tapestries versus
art prints. In 1963, Anni accompanied her husband Joseph Albers when he was invited to
collaborate with the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. As Anni Albers
described in a 1985 interview, “I, as a useless wife, was hanging around, until June
Wayne, head of the workshop, asked me to try lithography myself.” Albers enjoyed how
lithography allowed her to continue her exploration of threads but in a higher status

27
For example, Krauss emphasizes a rupture between modernism and postmodernism by
attributing the disruption of singular authorship and originality to the latter: “In deconstructing
the sister notions of origin and originality, postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and
the conceptual domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf that in turn
establishes a historical divide.” Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 254
medium: “I found that in this medium the image of threads could project a freedom I
never suspected […] I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a
craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” Prints also allowed Albers to secure her
authorship over works made in multiple by other technicians, thus increasing her
visibility and recognition: “The multiplication and exactness of the process of
printmaking allow for broader exhibition and ownership of work. As a result, recognition
comes more easily and happily, the longed-for pat on the shoulder.”
28
Albers thus viewed
reproduction much as other artists and their heirs did, as a way to disseminate her art by
creating multiple copies of works that could all be attributed to her authorship.
In 1970, Albers allegedly gave up her weaving practice in favor of printmaking “I
could not stand the idea anymore of all the yarns and looms,” she said in 1989, “It took
too long and it always produced just one piece.”
29
But in fact, she continued to design
tapestries that were woven by others, first by authorizing Modern Master Tapestries to
weave an edition of Red Lines on Blue in 1978,
30
and then through an art-consulting firm,
Vesti Corporation. In 1983, Vesti commissioned Albers to design four tapestries for the
new AT&T headquarters in New York designed by Philip Johnson. Albers sent six extant
prints as possible models, and Vesti in consultation with ATT chose to create maquettes
based on her Floating and Orchestra prints.
31
Through these projects, Albers was able to

28
Interview by Richard Polsky, Orange, CT, 11 Jan 1985, “American Craftspeople Project,” Oral
Research Office, Columbia Univeristy, New York; as quoted in Nicholas Fox Weber and Pandora
Tabatabai Ashaghi, Anni Albers (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1999), 176.
29
Interview by Schnell, 16 Dec 1989, as quoted in Weber and Ashaghi, 177.
30
Woven in an edition of 14, 1978-1981. See folder 32, box 9, Anni Albers Papers, Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT.
31
The resulting tapestries are not mentioned by title in the correspondence, but two appear to
have been based on a single Floating print that Albers supplied, while the other two were based
on Albers’s Orchestra series. Albers sent Vesti Orchestra I, Orchestra II, and Orchestra III,
along with Floating, Letter, and Triangulated Intaglio. See “Anni Albers prints loaned to
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 255
return to tapestry production without the labor of weaving. Moreover, the ATT
commission satisfied Albers’s desire to create a true French tapestry, a “flat Aubusson
tapestry” as she described it. She first expressed this wish to Modern Master Tapestries,
but the company responded that they would only be able to create hand-woven pile
carpets, made by their workshop in India, because the Aubusson tapestries were too
expensive to produce.
32
The Vesti commission was the kind of higher-end project that
Motherwell claimed he had been offered, a direct commission to design singular
tapestries for a larger fee (Albers was paid $15,000).
33
Although the market for modern
tapestry may have become smaller, it nevertheless could be an attractive medium to
artists because it allowed them to avoid the labor of making individual works by hand
and thus, if Albers’s concerns with artistic hierarchies are any indication, to avoid the
imputation of craft. That is, what Albers’s late prints and tapestries share is a method of
production in which the artist supplies the design but not the hand labor required to create
the final works. Although Albers may have been attracted to this kind of laborsaving
production because she was approaching her 80s at the time, it also allowed her to be
understood as an artist rather than a craftsperson.
June Wayne, who founded the Tamarind lithography workshop and initiated
Albers’s turn to prints, also designed tapestries herself. Embracing the serial nature of
both media, Wayne designed thirteen tapestries that were woven in France from 1971 to
1976. Most of these tapestries were based on lithographs that Wayne had already
executed. She took the proofs of prints she thought would work well as tapestries, made

Stephanie Berk of Vesti Corporation, 37 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 on August 17,
1983,” folder 3, box 15, Anni Albers Papers.
32
Anni Albers to Bill Weber, 5 May 1978; and Bill Weber to Anni Albers, 9 May 1978; folder
32, box 9, Anni Albers Papers.
33
See “Art Commission Contract,” 6 Feb 1984, folder 3, box 15, Anni Albers Papers.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 256
some changes to them and then enlarged them photographically to create a full-scale
cartoon to which she could make further changes. By developing each lithographic model
into a tapestry cartoon herself, Wayne followed the French model of the peintre-
cartonnier [painter-cartooner] to become a kind of “lithographer-cartooner.” In her 1974
essay, “The Tradition of Narrative Tapestry,” she classed tapestry with lithography as “a
graphic medium,”
34
and linked the two practices through their modes of production, in
which creation is shared between artists and master craftsman who, all too often, “never
saw each other’s faces.”
35
Yet although Wayne brought European lithography practices to
Los Angeles, she did not similarly work to set up a French-style tapestry workshop in the
US. Instead, Wayne seems to have subscribed to the popular notion that tapestry was an
essential part of French cultural heritage that somehow belonged to, and in, France. She
became familiar with tapestry when she reviewed the landmark 1947 exhibition
Masterpieces of French Tapestry: Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, Lent by the
Cathedrals, Museums, and Collectors of France, through the French Government at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she made her contacts with French tapestry makers
through Madeleine Jarry, an inspector at the Manufacture des Gobelins who wrote
extensively on modern tapestry in both English and French and traveled repeatedly to the
US to lecture on the subject. Wayne’s friendship with Jarry, an official in the French
government tapestry complex, may have encouraged her to think of tapestry as a French
national treasure. Certainly, Wayne emphasized the Frenchness of her tapestries by
giving most of them French titles, often simply translating the original titles of her

34
As quoted in Bernard Kester, “The Tapestries of June Wayne,” Craft Horizons 34, no. 6
(December 1974): 80.
35
June Wayne, “The Tradition of Narrative Tapestry,” Craft Horizons 34, no. 4 (August 1974):
49.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 257
lithographs into French to designate the new work in tapestry.
36
But she also encouraged
comparisons between her American lithographs and her French tapestries by exhibiting
them together on several occasions in both California and Paris.
37

While Wayne emphasized commonalities between tapestry and prints, the
economic differences between the two media ultimately favored art prints as a lower cost
form of the multiple that offered higher returns to the artist. The economics of tapestry
production clarify why the medium became increasingly unappealing to modern artists,
but they cannot fully account for how modernism came to be seen as disavowing its
relationship to the decorative arts. This assumption that postwar modernism had
undertaken a problematic, anti-decorative stance underpins initial attempts to account for
modernism’s relationship to textiles. For example, in his articulation of the carpet
paradigm, Masheck presented his work as an oppositional intervention that revealed what
modernists themselves might not want to admit, the close relationship between modernist
painting and the decorative carpet. Examining how the feminist art movement both
constructed and critiqued this anti-decorative attitude can elucidate how Masheck could
have taken such a view despite the surrounding evidence that modern artists were
actively and deliberately engaged in the production of tapestries.

36
Wayne’s tapestries are: La Cible, 1971; At Last a Thousand, 1971; La journée des Lemmings,
1971; Cinquième Vague, 1971; Lame de Choc, 1971; Onde en Folie, 1972; On Verra, 1972; Visa,
1971; Col Noir, 1972; White Visa, 1973; Verdict, 1973; Grande Vague (Bleu), 1976; Grande
Vague (Noire), 1976.
37
June Wayne: an exhibition of paintings, tapestries, lithographs. Los Angles Municipal Art
Gallery, Barnsdall Park, November 1 through December 2, 1973; La Demeure, 6 Place St.
Sulpice, Paris, France, December 1 through 31, 1974. June Wayne: An exhibition of lithographs
and tapestries. August 21 through October 6, 1974. Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Cultural
Groups Foundation of Northern Orange County, Fullerton, California. June Wayne: paintings,
tapestries, lithographs. Montgomery Art Galleries, Pomona Colleges, Claremont, November 5-
December 17, 1978; University Art Collections, Matthews Center, Arizona State University,
Tempe AZ, January 14-February 11, 1979.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 258
Feminism and Fiber Art
Among the many productive transformations wrought by feminist artists and
scholars during the 1970s and 1980s, their successful rewriting of the history of art
rescued women artists and various marginalized art practices from obscurity. Such
landmark exhibitions as Women Artists, organized by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland
Harris at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, and the two Subversive Stitch
circulating exhibitions of 1988, inspired by Rozsika Parker’s groundbreaking 1984 book
of the same name, provided a historical lineage for contemporary women artists.
38
As
Parker’s book Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, suggests,
textiles seemed a particularly rich area for feminist intervention. Yet by insisting that
textiles had previously been unduly marginalized as women’s art, feminists also obscured
the fact that some forms of textile art enjoyed far more prestige and were pursued by
male as well as female artists.
It is thus important to recognize that feminist artists were appropriating textiles at
a time when textiles of various kinds, from modern pictorial tapestry to sculptural fiber
work, were newly prominent in the high art world. This second type of high art textile,
fiber art, had emerged to prominence through the Biennale Internationale de la
Tapisserie, discussed in chapter 1. The Western European press understood fiber art as a
dangerous Eastern-European rival to the tradition of French tapestry, and, in formalist
terms, fiber art does represent a radical challenge to, even an undoing of, the tapestry
medium. Yet a closer look at the exhibition of modern tapestry and fiber art shows that

38
Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists, 1550-1950 (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976); Rozsika Parker, Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the
Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984); The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery in
Women’s Lives, 1300-1900; Women and Textiles Today (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery,
1988).
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 259
the two continued to coexist well into the 1970s, and that each had an impact on how
feminists artists approached textiles as women’s art. If we turn to one of the centers of the
feminist art movement, Los Angeles, we can see how the modern tapestry revival, the
fiber art movement, and the feminist art movement, overlapped one another in time and
space and shared exhibition venues, materials, and content. Examining these overlaps
suggests how feminists exploited the rise of textile art to make claims for the value of
women’s art while obscuring the accomplishments of non-feminist artists.
The modern tapestry revival arrived in Los Angeles quite soon after the close of
World War II. In 1948, the Associated American Artists gallery in Beverly Hills hosted
an exhibition that was discussed in the press as the “American premiere of modern
French tapestries,”
39
even though modern French tapestries were, in fact, already being
shown in New York and Chicago.
40
The Beverly Hills exhibition of 57 tapestries was
supposed to include works by André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and
Georges Rouault, but it is unclear how many works by these well-known artists actually
arrived.
41
However, the show did feature tapestries by Jean Lurçat, the French artist who
was then being credited with spearheading the modern tapestry revival, and the exhibition
succeeded in promoting the revival’s narrative of tapestry as a rise, fall, and renaissance.
As Arthur Miller, the Los Angeles Times art critic, wrote, tapestries were too often
“reproductions in colored wool of works which were never planned for weaving,” yet
today’s tapestry artists: “worked with tapestry’s best possibilities in mind. By doing so

39
Arthur Miller, “Tapestries Come Into Their Own: French Display Here Reveals Weaving Art
Has Entered New Era,” Los Angeles Times, 18 January 18 1948, D5.
40
The 1946 exhibition, La tapisserie française du Moyen-Âge à nos jours, was organized by the
Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947
and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948.
41
Compare Miller, “Tapestries Come Into Their Own,” D5; to “Gallic Tapestry to be Exhibited,”
Los Angeles Times, 4 January 1948, B4.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 260
they broke a trend which had increasingly vitiated tapestry design for three centuries and
have started a real revival in an art which flourished best during the late middle ages.”
42

Although there seem to have been few if any modern tapestry exhibitions in the
Los Angeles area during the 1950s, there were at least seventeen in the following two
decades.
43
In the 1960s, the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries had a series of exhibitions
showing tapestries woven in Aubusson and designed by contemporary artists in Europe
and America. These exhibitions featured works by Lurçat, Fernand Léger, and eleven
artists from Southern California,
44
and they perpetuated the narrative of the modern
tapestry revival as the culmination of a rise, fall, and renaissance.
45
The Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA) also exhibited modern tapestry in the early 1970s,
organizing a survey exhibition, Tapestry: Tradition and Technique, in 1971 and hosting a

42
Miller, “Tapestries Come Into Their Own,” D5.
43
In addition to those discussed here, the following exhibitions took place. In 1963, the Pasadena
Art Museum exhibited fifty tapestries and rugs by the Finnish weaver Oili Marki; “Finnish
Tapestry to be Shown,” Los Angeles Times, 28 April 1963, SG4. In 1964, modern tapestries were
shown in the Lang Galleries at Scipps College; “Tapestry Talk Scheduled for Fine Arts
Foundation,” Los Angeles Times, 20 October 1964, C8. In 1965, Laguna Beach Art Association
exhibited tapestries woven in Aubusson but designed by local artists; “Tapestries to Be Shown at
Gallery,” Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1965, OC3. In 1974, Otis Art Institute held a
retrospective of Belgian tapestry artist Gaspard de Wit, and the Rio Hondo College Art Gallery
exhibited international contemporary tapestry; William Wilson, “De Wit Tapestries at Otis,” Los
Angeles Times, 1 February 1974, F3; “College Will Hold Exhibit of Tapestry,” Los Angeles
Times, 21 November 1974, SE10.
44
Mark Adams, Jean Ames, Mary Bowling, Russell Cowles, Edgar Ewing, Michael Frary,
Richard Haines, Susan Hertel, Dan Lutz, Buckley MacGurin, and Pierre Sicard were artists from
Southern California whose tapestries were shown in 1961 at an exhibition co-sponsored by
Dalzell Hatfield Galleries and the Otis Art Institute; see Beverly E. Johnson, “Aubusson: the
looms are still busy,” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1961, A22. See also Henry J. Seldis, “Baroque
Splendor Woven into Tapestry Exhibition,” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 1962, C4; and
Constance Perkins, “Craftsmanship Evident in French Tapestry Exhibit,” Los Angeles Times, 23
August 1963, C4.
45
Perkins’ 1963 review reprises this narrative, as does Johnson’s “Tapestries from France,” Los
Angeles Times, 13 August 1961, M13.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 261
retrospective of the celebrated Spanish tapestry artist Joseph Grau-Garriga in 1974.
46
The
local tapestry collector and dealer, J.L. Hurschler, was an active supporter of modern
tapestry who organized exhibitions and gave many lectures on the topic.
47
Tapestry
reproductions of works by celebrated modernists continued to be exhibited in the Los
Angeles area throughout the 1970s, as evidenced, for example, by a 1978 exhibition of
tapestries after paintings by Max Ernst held at the University of California, Irvine Art
Gallery.
48

As with the work of June Wayne, feminist artists also used tapestry to reproduce
already extant work. Judy Chicago, a leader of the feminist art movement in Los Angeles,
created new designs for her tapestries, but she still made use of the traditional division of
labor in tapestry production and outsourced the actual weaving to others. Chicago began
working in tapestry for her iconic 1979 work, The Dinner Party, which commemorates

46
See “Tapestry Exhibit to Open,” Los Angeles Times, 21 March 1971, Q53; Henry J. Seldis,
“Tapestry Show Clothes Museum Walls in History,” Los Angeles Times, 11 April 1971, C46;
“The Craft of a Master Weaver,” Los Angeles Times, 10 February 1974, N62; Henry J. Seldis,
“New Dimension to Tapestry Weaver,” Los Angeles Times, 25 March 1974, D9; Beverly E.
Johnson, “Mystique in Fiber,” Los Angeles Times, 7 April 1974, L60.
47
In 1966-67, an exhibition of Contemporary European Tapestries: The Collection of Mr. and
Mrs. J.L. Hurschler, traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the La Jolla Museum of Art,
and the Municipal Art Gallery of Los Angeles before being shown outside of California. The
Hurschlers lived in Pasadena, and although contemporaries always describe them as collectors,
they seem to have been importing and dealing in modern European tapestry as well. Throughout
the late 1960s and 1970s, their “collection” was repeatedly exhibited and Mr. Hurschler gave
lectures on the tapestry revival. In 1966, J.L. Hurschler lectured on “Modern European
Tapestries” at Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum in Santa Ana; “Tapestry Talk Due,” Los
Angeles Times, 18 October 1966. In 1967 the Laguna Beach Art Gallery exhibited the Hurschler
collection, and the Santa Ana Public Library exhibited the Hurschlers’ collection of tapestries by
French designer Mathieu Mategot; “Tapestry Designs Will Be Exhibited,” Los Angeles Times, 26
October 1967, OC12; “Notable Flowering of an Ancient Art,” Los Angeles Times, 5 November
1967, A20; “Tapestries Displayed,” Los Angeles Times, 10 December 1967, OC20. In 1968 J.L.
Hurschler lectured on contemporary European tapestry in conjunction with an exhibition of his
collection at the Lang Gallery at Scripps College; “Authority of Tapestries to Talk Tuesday,” Los
Angeles Times, 17 November 1968, SG. In 1970, the Newport Harbor Service League’s Coffee
Garden Gallery exhibited the Hurschler collection; “Modern Tapestries Show to Open Monday,”
Los Angeles Times, 13 August 1970, H18. In 1975 the Palos Verdes Art Museum exhibited the
Hurschler collection; “Tapestries on Exhibit,” Los Angeles Times, 16 January 1975, CS2.
48
“UCI Gallery Will Feature Tapestries,” Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1978, OC_C16.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 262
women’s achievements by laying a table for 39 historical and mythical female figures.
Ranging from the “Primordial Goddess” to Georgia O’Keeffe, each figure has her own
elaborate, personalized place setting that pairs a painted china plate with a needlework
table runner. The Dinner Party thus celebrates crafts that feminists argued had been
marginalized because of their association with women. Chicago hung the hallway leading
into this monumental installation with six tapestry banners, which she originally wanted
to have woven by volunteers in her own studio. Probably because these workers had little
formal artistic training, let alone training in the highly skilled craft of low-warp tapestry
weaving, Chicago wound up outsourcing the production of these works to another studio.
On the recommendation of June Wayne,
49
Chicago turned to the San Francisco Tapestry
Workshop (SFTW), which modeled itself on the traditional tapestry workshops in France.
In operation from 1977 to 1988, the SFTW was founded under the auspices of Mark
Adams, who designed its first commission as an exhibition piece for Five Centuries of
Tapestry at the San Francisco Legion of Honor in 1976-77. As one of California’s most
prolific tapestry artists, Adams regularly exhibited at the California Design exhibitions of
the Pasadena Art Museum (Fig. 5.4). His works incorporated the lessons of the modern
tapestry revival—bright color contrasts, lack of perspectival depth or figuration, and
simplified, abstracted forms—and were woven in Aubusson until he began
commissioning the SFTW to execute his designs. The SFTW also wove works for other
artists and for centers of worship, and it became something of an educational institution
that trained new weavers in traditional French techniques before they went on to have
their own artistic careers. The SFTW was committed to maintaining the tapestry revival

49
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City: Anchor Press; New
York: Doubleday, 1979), 44.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 263
that had begun in France, and it wove tapestries designed by Lurçat and its other principle
artists.
50

These traditionally woven tapestry banners are a relatively small element of
Chicago’s monumental installation, but their execution speaks volumes about the
production of The Dinner Party and how that production process was perceived. In her
official account of the project, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, Chicago
acknowledged that the banners were woven offsite but assimilated the SFTW as almost a
part of her studio. A two-page spread depicting Chicago and a collaborator, Ann Isolde,
painting the tapestry cartoons is followed by another two-page spread devoted to the
weaving of the actual tapestries (Figs. 5.5-5.6). These layouts are identical to those
documenting the rest of the project. Black and white photographs of people at work are
surrounded by quotations from the various participants that detail the difficult emotions
they felt in collaborating with Chicago and one another. For example, Isolde narrated
how she had to overcome her hesitations to collaborate with Chicago on the cartoons:
“She didn’t ask me directly at that moment to help her with the drawing, although […] I
knew I had the option to be involved if I wanted. I hesitated at first, and then I knew I had
to get right down there on the paper too. I got the pencils, the markers, the eraser and
went into the drawing with her. It was incredible!”
51
One of the SFTW’s members, Eliane
Ireland, described a demanding environment of seemingly continuous conflict that
nevertheless enabled her to grow as a leader.
Being the fledgling facilitator of the tapestry workshop forced me to jump in and deal
with power, powerlessness, and the illusion of power. In the past, I had usually allowed
myself to let go of my self-esteem, my perseverance, my self-trust when the going got a

50
Joyce Hulbert, “Tapestry: The French Connection,” Tapestry Topics Online 33, no. 1 (Spring
2007): 1, http://www.americantapestryalliance.org/Members/NLv33n1/NLv33n1.html
51
As quoted in Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 240.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 264
little rough. It was hard for me to make demands on others, especially those who resisted
hearing and couldn’t seem to understand why those issues should be addressed and
examined anyway. I needed to share the reasons why one should make demands on
oneself, push oneself, and not wallow in pure bitching or the personal problems that zap
one’s energy for the day. I was interested in getting past those gripes and pains.
52

The frankness of these and other quotations in the book is extraordinary, and points to the
radicalism of the feminist intervention. No publication from the modern tapestry revival,
for example, records the words of individual weavers let alone their difficulties in
working with celebrated modern artists. While weavers in Aubusson were depicted as
silent embodiments of a bygone era and as diligent preservers of a traditional craft,
Chicago presented the SFTW weavers just like all the other contributors to The Dinner
Party as fully individualized, modern subjects who were forced to confront their anxieties
and societal norms in order to exceed their own expectations.
As extraordinary as this vocalization and visualizing of artistic collaboration was
in The Dinner Party: Our Cultural Heritage, the publication nevertheless strongly
suggested that these workers needed a great project like The Dinner Party and a great
artist like Judy Chicago in order to make those individual strides. Thus, these
contributors’ very ability to confront the limitations placed on them by society and
themselves and to reach their full artistic and leadership potential was indirectly credited
back to Chicago herself, the great artist who devised The Dinner Party project and thus
enabled all of these workers to change their lives for the better. This dynamic of
asymmetrical credit was well acknowledged and duly criticized by Chicago’s
contemporaries. As early as 1979, April Kingsley argued in Ms magazine that The Dinner
Party “was completely one woman’s conception, and therefore not typical of feminist

52
As quoted in Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 243.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 265
collaborative projects.”
53
The following year, Lauren Rabinovitz argued more forcefully
in Woman’s Art Journal that “by emphasizing her role as an authority figure and
encouraging ‘volunteerism,’ Chicago emulated the societal and art school practices that
many feminists have fought.”
54
Indeed, the vast majority of Chicago’s workers were
volunteers, so that in order to finish her monumental project, she relied on women
undervaluing their own labor by working for free. Interestingly, however, the SFTW
refused to view The Dinner Party as a charity project. Chicago recorded in her diary,
excerpts of which were also published in The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage,
that negotiations with the SFTW had taken a long time and that Chicago finally had to
sell a cherished work of art in order to pay for the tapestry banners.
55

The criticism leveled against Chicago’s less than fully collaborative project
uncannily echoes that leveled against Jean Lurçat for his despotic ways with weavers in
France. As discussed in chapter 1, Guillaume Janneau criticized Lurçat’s working method
and particularly his use of the carton numéroté for exercising so much control over the
weavers that their creativity and skill at interpreting the artist’s model were eliminated.
56

In the cases of both Chicago and Lurçat, there was a problematic distance between the
artists’ authority and their emphasis on the importance of the weavers, an emphasis that
served specific political ends and raised expectations of collaboration and shared
authorship. That is, by retaining sole authorship over their finished works, both Chicago

53
As quoted in Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing in the Subject (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 104.
54
Lauren Rabinovitz, “Issues of Feminist Aesthetics: Judy Chicago and Joyce Weiland,”
Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1980-Winter 1981): 39.
55
Chicago, diary entry dated 21 October 1977, in The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage,
44.
56
Guillaume Janneau, “The Revival of Tapestry in France,” in French Tapestry, ed. André Lejard
(London: Paul Elek, 1946), 104.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 266
and Lurçat failed to meet the collaborative expectations they had set by celebrating their
numerous workers.
The debate over the collaborative credentials of The Dinner Party speaks to a
central concern of Southern California’s feminist art movement, which was to develop an
alternative to the patriarchal structures of the art world. In contrast to the masculine
model of the autonomous, original, artistic genius, many feminist artists worked to
develop cooperative and separatist institutions for women artists and explored the
possibility of a “woman’s art.” Although “woman’s art” was hardly something on which
all feminist artists agreed, in Southern California it was most closely associated with
imagery that alluded to female anatomy and with crafts that feminist artists saw as
domestic, feminized, and marginalized. While textiles seemed to be a clear example of
such a feminized craft, the notion of “central core imagery,” outlined by Chicago and
Miriam Schapiro in their 1973 essay, “Female Imagery,” is probably the most infamous
example of feminists’ efforts to articulate women’s art.
57
Widely critiqued since for its
essentialism, this essay proposed that women artists throughout history had used vaginal
iconography, sometimes quite subtly, to express their distinctly female perspective. But if
textiles and central core imagery were hallmarks of women’s art, they were by no means
limited to women artists or to feminist artists in Southern California. On the contrary, an
engagement with textiles and vaginal iconography can also be found in works by
international fiber artists, who may have had a profound, yet previously overlooked,
impact on the development of feminist art.

57
Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace 1, no. 3 (Summer 1973):
11-14. Their article was published with a note that it was written in March 1972.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 267
Consider a work such as Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Abakan Red (1969). It is an
ovoid form hanging suspended in the air that is saturated in a bright, rich red, the color of
blood (Fig. 5.7). Its tactile surface is strewn with small curly tufts of fiber. At the center
the form parts slightly, and a gently rounded fold protrudes forward. A small pendulous
shape nestles at the core, protected by the labia surrounding it. As part of the artist’s
series of “Abakans,” the title of this work derives from the artist’s last name,
Abakanowicz, and supports an interpretation of the piece as an allusion to the female
artist’s person, as a monumental vulva floating in the air. Because the work thus seems to
fit the feminist art movement’s calls to embrace central core imagery and textiles as
women’s art, Abakan Red has since entered the feminist canon through inclusion in such
exhibitions as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, held in 2007 at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Although Abakanowicz was an international superstar
of fiber art in the 1960s and 70s, as discussed in chapter 1, she was never identified as a
feminist artist, neither by herself nor by others, during that time. Feminist artists such as
Chicago and Schapiro would certainly have agreed that “woman’s art” was not only
practiced by self-identifying feminist artists—after all one of the goals for such a concept
was to link together women artists who did not have the opportunity to live during the
feminist movement—but the existence of Abakan Red indicates something more. It
suggests that fiber art, which was surprisingly prominent in Southern California in the
early 1970s, may have influenced the development of the region’s feminist art movement.
And this influence in turn suggests how much feminists artists benefited from the relative
visibility of high art textiles during the period. Textiles were thus not a marginalized
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 268
women’s art but a relatively prominent form of art that feminists appropriated as the
rightful property of women artists.
Abakanowicz was a particularly visible fiber artist for residents of Los Angeles.
At the XVIII São Paulo Biennale in 1965, the year when Los Angeles dealer Walter
Hopps curated the exhibition of art from the United State and famously included artists
from both the West and East coasts, the Gold Medal was awarded not to anyone from the
Hopps’s stable at the legendary Ferus Gallery but to Abakanowicz. In 1971, Bernard
Kester, a professor at UCLA, organized an exhibition titled Deliberate Entanglements
that featured sculptural and experimental works of fiber art from and international group
of fiber artists, including Abakonowicz. That same year, she had a solo show at the
Pasadena Art Museum and spoke at a weeklong symposium, “Fiber as Medium,”
organized by Kester in conjunction with both the Pasadena Art Museum and his
exhibition at UCLA. The symposium gathered a number of prominent fiber artists,
including Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buic, Sheila Hicks, and Jack Lenore Larsen. When
Abakanowicz was asked how she felt about being both an artist and a wife, and whether
she could reconcile the two, “she stated that one of her great pleasures was merely to
bake a potato, to have the immediate satisfaction of something successfully completed in
contrast to other gigantic projects.”
58
This comment would hardly have found much favor
in Southern California’s feminist art movement, and together with Abakanowicz’s
international visibility it seems to indicate the position of her work as high, non-feminist
art.

58
Susie Henzie, “Entanglements,” Shuttle; Spindle and Dye-Pot 3, no. 2 (1972): 45. Henzie was a
member of the Board of Directors for the Handweavers Guild of America and the former
president of the Southern California Handweavers Guild.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 269
Art historians who emphasize the modernist abstraction and technique of fiber art
position the movement in a like manner, as art that is formally avant-garde without being
interested in political content. Indeed, most art historians have explained fiber art in
strictly formalist terms.
59
A piece such as Abakan Red, for example, can be interpreted
entirely as a series of departures from traditional tapestry form. In such an interpretation,
the piece has an oval shape because Abakanowicz did not use any tools to push down the
warp threads evenly across the loom. Instead she used only her hands and pushed the
warp down further at the ends of the tapestry than in the middle. When the tapestry is cut
off the loom and hung from its side, it forms a semicircular shape, one edge of the ovoid
seen here. The nubby texture of the surface is likewise attributable to the way
Abakanowicz’s irregular hand weaving varies across the tapestry. The curly tufts of fiber,
likened earlier to pubic hair, are the result of bringing the tapestry away from the wall.
Instead of leaving the unfinished warp threads on the back, where in a wall-hung tapestry
they would not be visible, here the ends of the warp threads are scattered across both
sides of the work. Finally, Abakan Red’s central protrusions and bold monochrome reject
the flatness and multicolored pictorialism of traditional tapestry. Such formalist readings
support the notion that fiber art destroyed and replaced modern tapestry. Yet the form of
Abakan Red is not fully determined by its technical experimentation, and its image of
organic voluptuousness clearly subverts any understanding of fiber art as entirely
abstract.
The formalist reading of fiber art obscures how its participants engaged with
content and subject matter in ways that may have influenced more politically active

59
For example: Auther, String, Felt, Thread; Constantine and Larsen; Irene Waller, Textile
Sculptures (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1977); Ruth Kaufmann, The New
American Tapestry (New York: Reinhold Book Corporation, 1968).
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 270
feminist artists. Tadek Beutlich was a British fiber artist who exhibited two works in
Deliberate Entanglements, his monumental pieces Archangel I from 1971(Fig. 5.8) and
Eruption from 1970 (Fig. 5.9). While Beutlich was a very technically accomplished fiber
artist whose book, The Technique of Woven Tapestry, offers a dizzying array of expert
knowledge,
60
a photograph of Beutlich in front of Archangel I also points to the evocative
imagery of the artist’s work. This piece is a dense mat of large fiber loops that decrease in
size as they approach the top of the work. Each loop also angles towards the center where
long shaggy tufts frame a narrow cavity. Beutlich is dwarfed by the monumentality of his
tapestry and stands slightly turned towards it, as though he might enter its central cleft.
Eruption also consists of fiber loops of varying sizes, larger at the sides and smaller in the
middle, angled towards a central elongated cavity framed by long wisps. In this second
work, fiber also hangs in pendulous loops from the bottom of the piece, giving the whole
a pelvic shape. Beutlich’s title Archangel I suggests that both works could be seen as
representations of spread wings. But one should not forget that they were, like
Abakanowicz’s Abakans, exhibited in Los Angeles just before Chicago and Schapiro
developed their concept of “Female Imagery.”
61
The central cores present in each of these
fiber works evoke those that Chicago and Schapiro argued were distinctive to women’s
art.
The Romanian husband and wife team of Peter and Ritzi Jacobi was also
represented in Deliberate Entanglements with their piece, Dafé (Fig. 5.10). Described as
a “woven tapestry and collage, mixed fibers,”
62
the work incorporates a rather domestic

60
Tadek Beutlich, The Technique of Woven Tapestry (London: Batsford; New York: Watson-
Guptill, 1967).
61
Schapiro and Chicago, “Female Imagery,” 11-14.
62
Kester, Deliberate Entanglements, n.p.n. [21].
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 271
and feminine looking object, a large floral comforter. In these ways Dafé seems to
anticipate Schapiro’s “femmage” works, in which she covered canvases with patches of
paint, swatches of fabric, and various types of needlework. Schapiro devised the term
“femmage,” to suggest that collage was a feminine art form that women had been
practicing for centuries through the crafts of sewing, quilting, and appliqué.
63
While
Schapiro’s femmages use domestic textiles to reinterpret modernist precepts of flatness
and abstraction,
64
in the Jacobis’ Dafé the floral comforter has a far more sculptural
quality, the undulations of its lower edge echoing the intestinal cords of fabric layered
underneath. Yet both the Jacobis’ and Schapiro’s works bring content from the domestic
world into the work of art.
Abakanowicz also seems to have been engaging with the domestic realm when
she created an installation for her show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1971. A
photograph of the installation shows massive ropes suspended from the ceiling in large
knots and a long, lone rope leading to a tangled heap upon a bed (Fig. 5.11). This
dramatically lit bed positioned before a black void gives the installation a surrealist
quality and suggests that Abakanowicz may have been interested in issues of domesticity
and sexuality. Her combination of fibrous strands with a rather Victorian cast-iron
bedframe potentially influenced the development of Womanhouse, a collaborative project
created by the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in the
last three months of 1971. Led by Chicago and Schapiro, the Program’s students

63
Norma Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’: Reflections on the Conflict Between
Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art,” in Feminism and Art History:
Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row,
1982) 320.
64
In addition to Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’,” see Linda Nochlin, “Miriam
Schapiro: Recent Work,” Arts Magazine 48, no. 2 (November 1973): 38-41.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 272
overhauled an abandoned house in downtown Los Angeles, turning each room into an art
installation. The numerous works include a kitchen, where fried eggs attached to the
ceiling morphed into breasts as they traveled lower along the walls, and Robin Schiff’s
“Fright Bathroom,” where a woman made of sand lied vulnerable in a tub. Two of the
spaces particularly recalled Abakanowicz’s Pasadena installation. The Victorian décor of
“Lea’s Room,” a bedroom inspired by Colette’s novel Cheri, included a canopied
mahogany bed strewn with satin pillows, antique dresses, and porcelain water pitchers,
while downstairs Faith Wilding created her “Web Room” installation by crocheting rope
into an irregular grid of oval apertures and crisscrossing lines that forms a hut-like
structure.
65
The contrast of these two spaces within Womanhouse recalls Abakanowicz’s
juxtaposition of fiber and furniture, while both projects work to interpolate domestic
objects with surrealistic sexuality.
Understanding how feminist artists may have been influenced by both male and
female fiber artists is particularly interesting given the feminists’ highly successful effort
to cast textiles as an exclusively women’s art. But the visibility of high art textiles should
not be understood as influencing feminist artists alone. To continue with the Southern
California context, we can see how even mainstream avant-garde artists were influenced
by tapestry. In 1962, before Ron Davis began using resins, he painted an oil-on-canvas
work titled Tapestry,
66
while Ed Moses referred to his resin-backed canvases as
“tapestries” in his 1970 show with Billy Al Bengston, “Teatables and Tapestries,” at the

65
Schapiro, “The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse,” Art Journal 31, no. 3
(Spring 1972): 269.
66
Charles S. Kessler, Ronald Davis, paintings, 1962-1976: the Oakland Museum, Art Special
Gallery, July 13-September 5, 1976 (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1976). My thanks to Sam
Adams for pointing me to this reference.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 273
Mizuno Gallery.
67
Fred Tomaselli is a contemporary artist who grew up in Southern
California’s surfboard culture and uses resin to coat his assemblage works. He recently
exhibited a tapestry After Migrant Fruit Things in the 2010 exhibition Demons, Yarns, &
Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. He
stated in an interview: “my work has always had a relationship to crafts, such as
marquetry or tapestry; I’ve never differentiated between the realms of art and craft,
whether it be customizing cars or doing macramé. And I have always loved tapestries.”
68

The links that these and other artists have made between crafts that are often labeled as
masculine (customizing cars) and those labeled as feminine (macramé), challenges any
polarization of masculine fine art and feminine craft.
69

However, feminist artists and scholars helped construct this polarization in the
name of challenging it, by claiming textiles as women’s art instead of recognizing their
relevance for both male and female artists. The feminist appropriation of textiles as
women’s art also took part in a discourse of revival. This feminist revival discourse
censured the modern period as one in which textiles had become marginalized as
feminine and harkened back to pre-modern periods such as the Middle Ages, when
textiles and the women who made them enjoyed greater status or autonomy.
70
The
feminist effort to revive textiles as women’s art was thus not so dissimilar from the
modern tapestry revival, in that both movements treated the modern period as one of

67
Melinda Terbell, “Los Angeles,” Arts Magazine 45 (February 1971): 45; Peter Plagens,
Artforum 9 (February 1971): 90-91.
68
Sarah Kent, Demons, Yarns, & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists (Bologna: Damiani;
London: In association with Banners of Persuasion, 2008), 38.
69
Carl Andre’s 1973 letter in Artforum also speaks to the masculinity of working-class
craftsmanship. Carl Andre, “Letter to Brenda Miller,” Artforum 11, no. 8 (April 1973): 9.
70
For example, Parker admired the Middle Ages as a period predating a hierarchy between art
and craft in which women artists could depict their feminine heroes with some autonomy. See
Parker, “Eternalising the Feminine,” in Subversive Stitch, 17-39.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 274
decline. Moreover, both movements ignored previous efforts to revive textiles in order to
emphasize the importance of their own intervention. The postwar tapestry revival
obscured prior attempts to revive tapestry during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries by ignoring them outright or dismissing them as misguided, while the feminist
textile revival obscured the modern tapestry revival that had just occurred and, along with
it, the prominence of and male interest in textiles during the previous three decades. The
feminist silence regarding the modern tapestry revival is particularly striking considering
that some of the most visible feminist artists in Los Angeles, including June Wayne and
Judy Chicago, could never have made their tapestries without the workshops that the
modern tapestry revival produced and sustained.
The feminist textile revival must therefore be understood, like all forms of revival,
as radically reshaping the historical record. The feminists’ appropriation of textiles
helped expose the invisibility and marginalization of some crafts, but it also allowed
feminists artists to share in the visibility of more prestigious crafts. We can recognize the
feminists’ effectiveness in successfully branding textiles as women’s art at a time when
they were clearly created by men as well. Yet recognizing the historical importance of
this move does not require us to perpetuate it. Crediting feminist artists alone with
making textile art visible merely exasperates the marginalization of the modern tapestry
and fiber art movements with which feminist artists were engaged.
The feminist art movement arose concurrently with, and in many ways generated,
a self-consciously postmodernist avant-garde.
71
Postmodernism also employed a logic of
revival to the extent that postmodern artists and critics rejected the era of Greenbergian

71
Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), 166-190.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 275
modernism as excessively committed to media purity, abstraction, and formalism, in
favor of prior artistic moments understood as more pluralistic, politically engaged, and
expressive. We can see the revivalist quality of postmodernism most clearly in the
construction of the “neo-avant-garde,” a label that was applied retroactively to a diverse
array of artists from the late 1950s and 1960s who shared no geographic or stylistic
uniformity but who were seen as reviving strategies from the historical avant-garde of the
early-twentieth century.
72
Hal Foster’s representative formulation of the neo-avant-garde
included the “neo-Dada” work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the minimalism
of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, and the institutional critique
of Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke.
In “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” Foster acknowledged these artists’
debts to the period before Greenbergian modernism, but argued that such artistic revivals
or returns to the past are neither inherently radical nor inherently conservative. Foster
insisted that revisiting past works should be understood as part of a challenge to the status
quo. Such temporal returns to the past create space for something new in the present; they
“reconnect with a lost practice in order to disconnent from a present way of working felt
to be outmoded, misguided, or otherwise oppressive.”
73
Foster rejected a historicist view
of the avant-garde that conceives past practices as the causes of later ones, and posited an
alternative model of “temporal exchange” in which contemporary artists reconstruct past
artists as anticipating their own work and thus give those past artists a new significance.

72
The historical avant-garde refers to Peter Bürger’s formulation of Dada, Surrealism, and
Constructivism in Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). The original German edition, Theorie der Avantgarde, was published in
1974.
73
Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-
Garde at the End of the Century, 1-33 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 276
This model of temporal exchange could be applied to a number of moments within
modernism, such as Edouard Manet’s “Spanish” pictures of the 1860s, which looked to
precedents by Diego Velázquez and other painters of Spain’s Golden Age.
74
Foster,
however, used the model to justify the neo-avant-garde as having enacted the project of
the historical avant-garde for the first time and suggested that future avant-gardes could
continue to construct and then fulfill the aims of earlier artists. While Foster was clearly
committed to the ongoing possibility of an avant-garde, the broader impact of his model
of temporal exchange is in pointing to the willfulness of art historical interpretation and
how the meaning of past art is constructed in the service of present artistic practice.
Foster’s model of temporal exchange thus also informs our understanding of the
feminist art movement as one that constructed a prior history of women’s art in the
service of its present practice. Yet it can also inform how even very recent revisionist
scholars continue to oversimplify Greenbergian modernism in order to reinforce the
avant-garde radicality of the artists they examine. This dynamic of treating Greenberg as
a straw man characterizes much scholarship on postmodern art,
75
but we can understand
how it has specifically affected the history of modernism’s relationship to tapestry by
considering two recent examples. The first is Tom Folland’s 2010 Art Bulletin article on
“Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration,” in
which he argues that Rauschenberg’s use of textiles in his combines was entirely novel
and introduced the decorative into postwar modernist art for the first time, creating a

74
Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2003).
75
Caroline Jones, “Postmodernism’s Greenberg,” in Eyesight Alone, 347-388.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 277
newly queer modernism.
76
Folland sees Rauschenberg as outside the dominant
Greenbergian paradigm and views his textiles as representing a feminized decorative
other that contests the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism or postwar modernism more
generally. A second example comes from the work of Elissa Auther, whose 2009 book
String, Felt, Thread, argues that feminist artists had a profound impact on subsequent
artistic production by using textiles to critique and politicize modernism’s hierarchy
between high art and the decorative arts.
While Folland does little to substantiate his presumption that under modernism
the decorative represented the “abject […] domestic, feminine, and debased,”
77
Auther
outlined her evidence for modernism’s alleged hierarchy between high art and the
decorative arts in an earlier 2004 article on “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the
Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Criticism of Clement Greenberg.” Here Auther engages
in close readings of Greenberg’s essays yet willfully misrepresents the critic’s attitudes
towards decorative painting and the decorative arts.
78
While these misreadings of postwar
modernism’s relationship to the decorative are unfortunate, it is important to note that
both Folland and Auther are engaged in revisionist scholarship with important political
stakes. They have drawn our attention to queer modernisms and feminist post-
modernisms in order to contest the very real limitations of postwar American art, yet both
do so by relying on a misleading notion that incorporating or making textiles would be

76
Tom Folland, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and
Decoration,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 348-365.
77
Ibid., 350.
78
For example, in her reading of Greenberg’s 1948 essay, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,”
Auther misquotes the critic, employing ellipses and rearranging passages in the essay to claim
that Greenberg disapproved of the seemingly woven paintings of his favored artists. My own
interpretation of this essay is exactly the opposite, as I discussed in the last chapter. See Elissa
Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Criticism of
Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 348.
Chapter 5 Revival Redux Wells 278
forbidden under the hegemony of Greenbergian modernism. Their work thus indicates the
lingering effects of the postmodernist construction of Greenberg as an enemy to be
overthrown. Folland and Auther, like earlier postmodernist critics, have perpetuated an
overly narrow understanding of Greenbergian modernism that makes the political
interventions of the post-Greenbergian artists they study seem all the more urgent.
While my own contribution to the revisioning of Greenberg uses tapestry and its
discourses to unpack some of the complexity and contradiction of postwar modernism as
it was actually experienced in its historical moment, understanding how modernism
included and accommodated a decorative art like tapestry should not necessarily
undermine the political interventions of later artists or the critics and scholars who
validated them. Rather, it should help us understand how the suppression of modern
tapestry from critical discourse and the historical record allowed artists and critics to raise
the political stakes of their activities. It should help us recognize that their political
interventions, just like those of the modern tapestry revival, reshaped the historical record
to provide only a selective vision of the past.
279
CONCLUSION
TAPESTRY AS MODEL

Art must be quite free of “application”. There are some artists who try to unify pure art
and applied art but they have never created great work. It is mostly done to make a
living. Sometimes I am asked to do a tapestry but I always refuse.
1
–Piet Mondrian

These words may seem surprising, not only because they contradict the general
willingness of many modern artists to design tapestries but also because they are
attributed to Piet Mondrian, an artist strongly associated with the unity of fine and
applied art through his affiliation with De Stijl, his own forays into interiors, and the
subsequent influence of his work on various branches of design.
2
Despite these activities,
Mondrian’s words make clear how committed he remained to the autonomy of “pure art”
from commercialism, how he divorced an artist’s need to “make a living” from an artist’s
“great work.” By citing the example of tapestry as such commercial applied art,
Mondrian demonstrates both the visibility of modern tapestries during his lifetime and his
refusal to have his own work associated with such a marketable medium. It is thus
particularly ironic that nearly thirty years after his death in 1944, Mondrian’s heir Harry
Holtzman earned royalties by authorizing Modern Master Tapestries to produce tapestries
after ten Mondrian paintings.
3

There is, however, another way in which Mondrian’s paintings relate to the
medium of tapestry. Late in his life, the artist began working with colored tapes that he

1
As quoted in Jay Bradley, “Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944. Greatest Dutch Painter of Our
Time,” Knickerbocker Weekly 3, no. 51 (February 14, 1944): 21. My thanks to Nancy Troy for
bringing this quotation to my attention.
2
Nancy J. Troy, “Mondrian’s Designs for the Salon de Madame B…, à Dresden,” The Art
Bulletin 62, no. 4 (1980): 640-647. Carl Blotkamp, “The Content of all Art is One: Neo-Plasticist
Painting and the Other Arts,” in Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, 128-167 (London: Reaktion
Books Ltd, 1994). Nancy J. Troy, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013).
3
Troy, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, 159.
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 280
would stretch across a canvas laid horizontally on a tabletop. The tapes allowed
Mondrian to more quickly refine his composition by picking up and laying down each
colored strip, and to layer the strips over and under each other to create patterns
resembling plaid. After reaching a composition in this way, Mondrian would paint in the
strips of color by hand on the surface of the canvas, creating a painting that extends from
edge to edge in two dimensions while barely receding into three-dimensional space. The
definitive account of Mondrian’s technique in these late works and their significance
comes from Yve-Alain Bois’s essay on the 1942 painting New York City (Fig. II.1). Bois
describes this work as exhibiting a “braided effect,” and an opposition of “woof and
warp.” He argues that Mondrian was “driven to make the weaving of his composition
more complex (to make it a braiding).” Mondrian created a shallow relief that
emphasized the flatness of the support but still seemed to lie on top of the surface and
thus avoided “getting caught up in the woof of the painting.” Bois argues that New York
City confounds painting’s traditional, illusionistic construction of foreground and
background by constructing instead a literal thickness built up from interwoven bands of
color: “Only a literalization of volume (braiding) can destroy spatial illusion.”
4
We could
say that this painting, like a tapestry, has thickness without depth.
These notions of weaving and braiding, color as a kind of indivisible strip or
thread, and painting as less a picture than an object that is both thick and flat, are central
to Bois’s conception of New York City and of Mondrian’s significance to the history of
modernism. So significant is Mondrian to Bois’s account of modernism that the author
chose New York City as the cover image for his important collection of essays Painting as

4
Yve-Alain Bois, “Piet Mondrian, New York City,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1993): 163, 165, 168, 178.
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 281
Model. Yet as I became more and more aware of the surprising visibility of modern
tapestry during the mid-twentieth century, reading Bois’s essay made me wonder what
would happen if we considered “Tapestry as Model” rather than painting. What would it
mean to put tapestry at the center of modern art? To treat Mondrian’s denouncement of
tapestry as commercial applied art as an exception, rather than the rule? Rather than
assuming that tapestry held a marginalized status within modernism, I thus began this
project as a kind of extended thought experiment, an exercise in suspended disbelief. If I
could ignore what I thought I knew about high modernism’s hierarchies of art versus
craft, fine art versus decorative art, or the avant-garde versus kitsch, perhaps I could
arrive at a truer understanding of modern art and open up its relationship to tapestry and
to other allegedly marginalized objects.
In certain crucial ways, the notion that modern art upheld tapestry as a model is
absurd. Mondrian’s words remind us that some artists flatly refused to market their work
through tapestry or other “applied” media. Throughout the twentieth century, tapestries
were never valued as highly as paintings in the modern art market, nor were tapestries
produced or collected in the same numbers as paintings. Yet tapestry shows up in a
surprisingly large number and variety of sites within the world of modern art, including
the artist’s studio and architect’s study, the collector’s mansion, the gallery and museum,
the house of worship, the government building, and the corporate office. Attending to the
historical visibility of tapestry, putting it temporarily at the center of modern art, allows
us to highlight certain qualities of modernism that are obscured when we attend to more
canonical objects. Tapestry illuminates modernists’ interests in historical revival, art
reproduction, decoration, and intermediality in ways that allow us to interrogate the
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 282
concepts of originality and autonomy across a range of fields. Just as Bois uses the
concepts of braiding and weaving to point to the thickness of Mondrian’s allegedly flat
paintings, attending to tapestry shows us the texture of high modernism, its complexity
and contradictions, and its general unwillingness to stick to “pure” art.
While I began this project with the hypothesis that tapestry had been a
surprisingly esteemed and valued part of modern art, what I came to understand is that
tapestry was one of the means through which modern art came to be esteemed and
valued. People made tapestries to market modern art, yes, but, despite Mondrian’s
association of tapestry with earning a living, such marketing was not only a means of
making money. Marketing cannot be reduced to the practice of buying and selling but
includes those of discussing, defending, promoting, and exhibiting. Harrison and Cynthia
White first articulated the intertwined relationship of selling and criticism in their
conception of the nineteenth-century French art market as a “dealer-critic system.” Yet
examining tapestry reveals an even wider network of artists, collectors, curators, and
fabricators, who all helped determine what was made, exhibited, discussed and bought as
modern art. Using this broader, networked understanding of the market to help define
what constituted modern art allows us to account for both the material inclusion and the
conceptual contributions of tapestry, to examine its discourses as well as its sales. This
provides a richer and, I argue, a more accurate view of modern art as it was actually
experienced by its historical participants.
In my own progress through this project, I shifted my emphasis from more
theoretical to more material concerns. I examined both art criticism and the art catalogs
of such ventures as Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc. and Modern Master Tapestries. In
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 283
my effort to show the varied range of modernism’s relationship to tapestry, I have
unfortunately been less able to discuss the materiality of modern tapestries themselves. In
looking at these objects, many might agree with Mondrian that in moving between “pure”
and “applied” art, tapestry artists of the mid-twentieth century failed to create “great
work.” For example, Romy Golan, one of the few historians of modern art to consider
tapestry in any detail, has recently described the work of Jean Lurçat as “disconcerting,”
“woven pyrotechnics,” and “mimicries or spectral doubles of Abstract Expressionist or
Art Informel painting.”
5
Lurçat’s most monumental work is his ten tapestry series Chant
du Monde, completed in 1958, that stretches four meters high and a combined 125 meters
in length. A Cold War paean to humankind’s ability to overcome nuclear war, the series
begins with scenes of death, the atomic bomb, and Hiroshima before turning to the glory
of peace, human intelligence, the conquest of space, and poetry. Looking at individual
tapestries from the series, such as L’eau et le feu [Water and Smoke], one can identify
certain characteristics typical of modern art, such as the studiously flat background, the
lack of consistent scale, the juxtapositions of pure colors to avoid the illusion of shade or
depth, and the collage-like assembly of disparate elements (Fig. II.2). Yet it is difficult to
reconcile this work with established canons of modernist taste. Although we could
discuss Lurçat’s tapestries in relation to the artist’s Surrealist past—they recall the dream
like hallucinations of Salvadore Dalí—their aesthetic seems closer to that of early 1980s
video games, all pulsating lights and epic drama.
Chant du Monde is a work of monumental scale and ambition, and perhaps it is
inevitable that it strikes many as grandiose rather than magnificent. But seeing how

5
Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927-1957 (New Haven and
London: 2009), 210.
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 284
Lurçat installed some of his tapestries in his own home allows for a very different view of
the artist’s work. During the course of my research, I had the good fortune to visit the
Paris residence and studio of Jean Lurçat, which his widow, Simone Lurçat, left to the
Academie des Beaux-Arts on her own death. The building is one of several modern
artists’ houses designed by the architect André Lurçat, Jean Lurçat’s brother, that line a
quiet street named the Villa Seurat on the south side of Paris (Fig. II.3). Not yet regularly
open to the public, the future Fondation Jean Lurçat is a combination house museum and
archive. Here, for the first time, the appeal of Lurçat’s work and of modern tapestries
more generally became intelligible to me. Andre Lurçat’s architecture of white, boxy
volumes was warmed, softened, and vivified by the color and texture of his brother’s
tapestries. Ascending the narrow staircase, the visitor encounters a relatively small
tapestry in which a lush, fanciful sea of blue butterflies, insects, and plants floats against
an inky black ground. The animals seem to accompany you in flight up to the main floor,
where the salon occupies a long narrow space that leads to large corner windows (Fig.
II.4). The entire right-hand wall is dominated by the golden hues of Jean Lurçat’s Le
soleil et le mer [Sun and Sea], in which a central circle containing land, sea, and sky
bursts into a sun radiating out against a yellow ground. Tapestries are also used to
upholster several chairs, including a pair of rosewood side chairs designed by André
Lurçat. These colorful, textured surfaces complement the dramatic red curtains by the
windows, the polished wooden furniture and gleaming green marble tables used
throughout the room, and the scattering of ceramics hand painted by Jean Lurçat. Unlike
these smaller works, the large Le soleil et la mer tapestry becomes the fourth wall of the
room, a bright and animated backdrop that both creates and enlivens the space. But like
Conclusion Tapestry as Model Wells 285
the smaller works, this tapestry can be felt and touched. Jean Lurçat’s tapestries become
part of André Lurçat’s modern architecture much in the way that tapestry more generally
became part of modernism, by receding to the edges. But turning to look closely at those
edges provides not only a wider scope for modern art but a different feeling of
modernism, less grandiose or ascetic and more intimate, sensual, and immersive.

286
ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. I.1 (above) Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm. Madrid, Museo
Reina Sofia. Fig. I. 2 (below) Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Guernica, 1955.
Cotton and wool, 304.8 x 670.6 cm.

Illustrations Wells 287

Fig. I.3 Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach and René Dürrbach working on Fleur du Mexique, a
tapestry by Fernand Léger, at the Atelier Cavalaire, 1952. Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach
Papers, Célérier-Dürrbach Family Archive, Dijon, France.

Illustrations Wells 288

Fig. I.4 (above), Goshka Macuga, Nature of the Beast, 2009-2010. Installation at the
Whitechapel Gallery, London. Fig. I.5 (below), Macuga, Nature of the Beast, 2010. Cotton and
wool, 290 x 560 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.

Illustrations Wells 289

Fig. 1.1 Cover and museum plan from exhibition guidebook, La Tapisserie Française du moyen-
âge à nos jours (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1946). A separate exhibition catalogue was also
published.

Illustrations Wells 290

Fig. 1.2 Lyonel Feiniger, Cathedral for the Future, 1919. Woodcut, 30.5 x 19 cm.
Illustrations Wells 291

Fig. 1.3 The Lady and the Unicorn: A mon seul desire, late fifteenth century. Musée de Cluny,
Paris.

Illustrations Wells 292

Fig. 1.4 (above) Jean Bondol and Nicholas Bataille, Apocalypse, 1377-1382. As currently
installed at the Château d’Angers, Angers, France. Fig. 1.5 (below) Dom Robert, Terribilis, 1946.

Illustrations Wells 293

Fig. 1.6 Detail of a tapestry by Jean Lurçat and the carton numeroté on which it is based. From
Jean Cassou, et. al. La Tapisserie Française et les Peintures Cartonniers (Paris: 1957).

Illustrations Wells 294

Fig. 1.7 Robert Doisneau, “Aubusson,” from Le Point 32, Aubusson et la renaissance de la
tapisserie (1946): 5.

Illustrations Wells 295

Fig. 1.8 Doisneau, Untitled, from Le Point 32 (1946): 22-23.

Illustrations Wells 296

Fig. 1.9 Doisneau, Untitled from Le Point 32 (1946): 15.

Illustrations Wells 297

Fig. 1.10 “Les fils pairs et les fils impairs sont écartés à l’aide de la pédale ou ‘marche.’ […],”
from Naissance d’une Tapisserie (Paris: La Demeure, 1969).
Illustrations Wells 298

Fig. 1.11 Doisneau, “En basse lisse ce sont les jambes de l’exécutant qui séparent les fils pairs
des fils impairs de la chaine,” from Le Point 32 (1946): 21.

Illustrations Wells 299

Fig. 1.12 Untitled from Madeleine Jarry, World Tapestry, from its origins to the present (New
York: Putnam, 1969), 342.
Illustrations Wells 300

Fig. 1.13 “Workshop and Looms” and “Looping the threads to knot the stitch and handling of the
thread-cutter to cut the stitch and form the pile” from André Lejard, ed., French Tapestry
(London: Paul Elek, 1946), 91.

Illustrations Wells 301

Fig. 1.14 “Tracing the pattern and use of comb,” from Lejard, ed., French Tapestry (1946), 43.

Illustrations Wells 302

Fig. 1.15 View of the Court of Justice, High Court Building, Chandigarh. Building and tapestries
designed by Le Corbusier. From Martine Mathias, Le Corbusier: Oeuvre Tissé (Paris: Philippe
Sers, 1987), 80.

Illustrations Wells 303

Fig. 1.16 “The execution of the tapestries for the High Court at Chandigarh, in a large atelier in
Srinagar (Kashmir): 650 m
2
of tapestry made in five months. Photos East India Carpet
Corporation,” from Zodiac 7 (1960): 61-62.

Illustrations Wells 304

Fig. 1.17 View of the weaving workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, c. 1927. Reproduced in “Bauhaus
Deassau, mit verschiedenen Fotografien,” The New York Times, Berlin, c. 1928. Bauhaus Archiv,
Berlin.

Illustrations Wells 305

Fig. 1.18 View of the weaving workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, c. 1927-1929. Photograph no. 6935,
Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.

Illustrations Wells 306

Fig. 1.19 Otti Berger on a loom, Bauhaus Dessau, 1928. Reproduced in Mityiko Yamawaki,
“Bauhuas Weberei,” Kokusai-Kenchiku (Tokyo) 9, no. 6 (1933): 155-158. BH 20, Bauhuas
Archiv, Berlin.

Illustrations Wells 307

Fig. 1.20 Detail of a loom, Weaving Workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, n.d. Photograph no. 9686/2,
Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.

Illustrations Wells 308

Fig. 1.21 (above) Werner Peiner, Le Char des Taureaux [The Chariot of Bulls], 1941. Wool and
silk with gold threads, 370 x 491 cm. Woven at Manufactures des Gobelins, Paris. Commissioned
by Joachim von Ribbentrop. Paris, Musée du Louvre, OAR 608. Fig. 1.22 (below) Jean Lurçat,
Liberté, 1943. Cotton and wool, 283 x 354 cm. Woven at Atelier Picaud, Aubusson. Angers,
Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine.

Illustrations Wells 309

Fig. 1.23 (above) Exhibition Plan, Second International Tapestry Biennial, 1965, Musée Cantonal
des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. Tapestries were grouped by country, with France given
the largest gallery. Cartable 8, Carton 20, CITAM Papers. Fig. 1.24 (below) Installation view of
the Second International Tapestry Biennial, with works by, from left to right: Hans Tisdall,
Archie Brennan (both Great Britain), Jan Groth (Norway), Genaro de Carvalho (Brazil).

Illustrations Wells 310

Fig. 2.1 Picasso, Femmes à leur toilette, 1976. Woven by Louis Bascoulergue and assistants,
Manufacture des Gobelins. Wool, 290 x 432 cm. No. 2/2. Mobilier National de France, GOB
1224.

Illustrations Wells 311

Fig. 2.2 De la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1958. Cotton and wool,
272 x 260 cm.

Illustrations Wells 312

Fig. 2.3 (above) De la Baume-Dürrbach aftter Picasso, Night Fishing at Antibes, 1967. Cotton
and wool, 241 x 393.1 cm. Fig. 2.4 (below) Picasso, Night Fishing at Antibes, 1939. Oil on
canvas, 205.8 x 345.4 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 13.1952.

Illustrations Wells 313

Fig. 2.5 (above) and Fig. 2.6 (below) Carol K. Uht, Diagrams correcting the color
transparencies of Night Fishing at Antibes. Rockefeller Archive Center.

Illustrations Wells 314

Fig. 2.7 (above) and Fig. 2.8 (below) Uht, Diagrams correcting the color transparencies
of Night Fishing at Antibes. Rockefeller Archive Center.

Illustrations Wells 315

Fig. 2.10 De la Baume-Dürrbach after Picasso,
Three Dancers, 1967. Detail showing Picasso’s
signature with the monogram for the Atelier
Cavalaire.

Fig. 2.9 Page 32 from the
1982 catalog of The Nelson
Rockefeller Collection, Inc.,
showing reproductions of
Picasso’s Girl with a
Mandolin and Pitcher and
Bowl of Fruit. Rockefeller
Archive Center.
Illustrations Wells 316

Fig. 2.11 “On the wall hangs a tapestry reproduction of the great painting of 1906/1907, Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon” from Edward Quinn, Picasso at Work (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1964).
Illustrations Wells 317

Fig. 2.12 (above) Helen Rubinstein and Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, c. 1938, in
Rubinstein’s New York apartment at 625 Park Avenue, in front of Pablo Picasso’s Oedipus and
the Sphinx tapestry. Alfred Barr bought another copy of this tapestry on behalf of Nelson
Rockefeller in 1952. Fig. 2.13 (below) Joan Miró, Hirondelle Amour, 1933-34. Oil on canvas,
199.3 x 247.6 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 723.1976.

Illustrations Wells 318

Fig. 2.14 (above) Salon of Marie Cuttoli’s Paris apartment, c. 1947, showing Miró’s Hirondelle
Amour tapestry. Fig. 2.15 (below) Music Room at Kykuit, the Rockefellers’ country house in
Sleepy Hollow, New York, showing a painted copy of Miró’s Hirondelle Amour.

Illustrations Wells 319

Fig. 2.16 (above) Henri Matisse, cartoon for Polynésie: Le Ciel, 1946. Gouache découpé.
Fig. 2.17 (below) Matisse, cartoon for Polynésie: La Mer, 1946. Gouache découpé.

Illustrations Wells 320

Fig. 2.18 (above) Installation of Lydia Delectorskaya’s restorations of Polynésie at the Musée
national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. La Mer is on the left and Le Ciel is on
the right. Both works are gouache découpé over-painted with gouache and affixed to a canvas
backing. Fig. 2.19 (below) Matisse, Le Luth, 1943. Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 79.5 cm.

Illustrations Wells 321

Fig. 2.20 (above) Matisse, cartoon for Le Luth tapestry, 1946. Modified from an enlarged, black-
and-white photograph of the painting. Fig. 2.21 (below) Matisse, Le Luth, 1947-1949. Woven at
the Manufactures des Gobelins.

Illustrations Wells 322

Fig. 2.22 (above) Matisse, variation of Polynésie: Le Ciel, 1949. Gouache découpé on tapestry.
Fig. 2.23 (below) Matisse, variation of Polynésie: La Mer, 1949. Gouache découpé on tapestry.

Illustrations Wells 323

Fig. 3.1 (left) Jean Lurçat, Le Jardin, c. 1930. Pile rug, 240 x 140 cm. Commissioned by Marie
Cuttoli. Armand Deroyan Collection. As illustrated in Paulvé, 34. Fig. 3.2 (right) View of
entrance to Jacques Doucet’s studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Doucet acquired the Lurçat rug from
Cuttoli’s stand at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in
1925. Photograph originally published in L’Illustration (3 May 1930), as illustrated in Paulvé, 35.
Illustrations Wells 324

Fig. 3.3 Interior of Myrbor boutique. Photograph by Thérèse Bonney. As illustrated in Paulvé, 38.

Illustrations Wells 325

Fig. 3.4 Georges Braque, Nature morte au Guéridon, c. 1938. Tapestry, 209 x 110 cm. Woven by
the Atelier Andé Delarbre, Aubusson, France. Originally part of a set for Marie Cuttoli’s dining
room. Puteaux, Fonds national d’art contemporain, on loan to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble.
As illustrated in Paulvé, 82.
Illustrations Wells 326

Fig. 3.5 Braque, Guitar and Still
Life on a Guéridon, 1922. Oil with
sand on canvas, 190.7 x 70.5 cm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1979.481.
Illustrations Wells 327

Fig. 3.6 Advertisement for Galerie Jeanne Bucher-Myrbor, 1935. As illustrated in Paulvé, 86.

Illustrations Wells 328

Fig. 3.7 Raoul Dufy, Monuments de Paris, 1936. Set of dining chairs with scenes of Paris,
commissioned by Marie Cuttoli. As illustrated in Paulvé, 67.

Illustrations Wells 329

Fig. 3.8 Dufy, Paris, 1934. Woven by Atelier André Delarbe, Aubusson. Paris, Musée national
d’art moderne. As illustrated in Paulvé, 66.

Illustrations Wells 330

Fig. 3.9 (above) Dufy,
sofa from Orpheus suite,
1939. As illustrated in
Paulvé, 65.

Fig. 3.10 (left) Dufy,
chairs from Orpheus suite,
1939. As illustrated in
Paulvé, 64.
Illustrations Wells 331

Fig. 3.11 Illustration of Vicara Rug in Anni Albers, Pictorial Weavings, 1959.

Illustrations Wells 332

Fig. 3.12 Installation photographs of tapestries at the Galerie Denise René, Paris.
Illustrations Wells 333

Fig. 3.13 (left) Man Ray, Tapestry, 1911.
Fig. 3.14 (right) Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955.

Illustrations Wells 334
Fig. 3.15 Pablo Picasso, Le Violin, 1914.

Fig. 3.16 Installation of Water Lilies rugs at the Musée des Gobelins, Paris, with surround by
Henri Rapin, 1922.
Illustrations Wells 335

Fig. 3.17 (above) Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond, Clouds, 1915-1926. Oil on canvas,
triptych: each panel 200 x 425 cm. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, 20100. Fig. 3.18 (below) Monet,
The Water-Lily Pond with Willows, Bright Morning with Willows, 1914-1918. Oil on canvas,
triptych: each panel 200 x 425 cm. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, 20106.

Illustrations Wells 336

Fig. 3.19 Interior Air France B707 with tapestry by Alfred Manessier. Archives d’Air France,
Paris.

Illustrations Wells 337

Fig. 3.20 Lurçat, La Conquete de l’Air, 1953. Le Courget, Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace.

Illustrations Wells 338

Fig. 3.21 Interior of Air France B707 with tapestry by Camille Hilaire. Archives d’Air France,
Paris.

Illustrations Wells 339

Fig. 3.22 (above) and 3.23 (below) Photographs of Sheila Hicks weaving tapestry for Air
France. Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs.

Illustrations Wells 340

Fig. 3.24 (above) Photograph of Sheila Hicks with Air France commission in the background.
Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs. Fig. 3.25 (below) Air France publicity photograph of
B747 with Sheila Hicks tapestry. Archives d’Air France, Paris.

Illustrations Wells 341

Fig. 3.26 (above) Lurçat, Apocalypse: The Lady and the Dragon, 1947. Tapestry, 455 x 1210 cm.
Notre Dame de Toute Grâce, Assy, France. Fig. 3.27 (below) Robert Motherwell, lobby mural for
B’Nai Israel synagogue in Millburn, New Jersey. As illustrated in Architectural Forum 99, no. 1
(July 1953): 120.

Illustrations Wells 342

Fig. 3.28 Library of Gordon Bunshaft’s New York apartment, showing Pablo Picasso’s Two
Harlequins tapestry, woven by Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach. Gordon Bunshaft Papers,
Avery Library, New York.

Illustrations Wells 343

Fig. 3.29 (above) Unidentified photograph of Le Corbusier’s Les Mains tapestry, probably in
Gordon Bunshaft’s East Hampton house. Gordon Bunshaft Papers, Avery Library. Fig. 3.30
(below) Lobby of the Marine Midland Bank Building, New York, showing tapestry by Jan
Yoors. Yoors Family Archive, New York.

Illustrations Wells 344

Fig. 3.31 (above) View of Fernand Léger’s L’Homme à la pastèque and Fleur du Mexique
tapestries, woven by Jacqueline de la Baume-Dürrbach, 1951-1952. As installed in the fourth-
floor reception room, Seagram Building. Interior design by Philip Johnson. Photography by Ezra
Stoller, 1991. As illustrated in Lambert, 167. Fig. 3.32 (below) View of Joan Miró’s Femme,
fleur, étoile tapestry, as installed in 52
nd
Street Lobby Staircase of the Four Seasons Restaurant.
Interior design by Philip Johnson. Photograph by Louis Reens, 1959. As illustrated in Lambert,
143.

Illustrations Wells 345

Fig. 3.33 (above) View of Miró’s Hirondelle d’amour tapestry, as installed in the fourth-floor
conference rooms, Seagram Building. Interior design by Philip Johnson. Photograph by Ezra
Stoller, 1958. As illustrated in Lambert, 168. Fig. 3.34 (below) View of Miró’s Composition
tapestry, as installed in the fifth-floor executive reception room, Seagram Building. Interior
design by Philip Johnson. Photograph by Russell Hart, 1979. As illustrated in Lambert, 170.

Illustrations Wells 346
Fig. 3.35 Peter Blake, reconstruction of model for Ideal Museum. As illustrated in Newhouse,
157.

Illustrations Wells 347

Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1950. Fig. 3.36 (above)
Showing, from left to right, Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950; Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950
(unstretched), with four smaller canvases stacked on either side; Number 27, 1950. Fig. 3.37
(below) Showing, from left to right, Number 32, 1950 (unstretched); One: Number 31, 1950
(unstretched); Number 28, 1950; Number 2, 1950.

Illustrations Wells 348

Fig. 3.38 Cecil Beaton, “Short Ball Gown,” from Vogue (March 1951), 158.
Illustrations Wells 349

Fig. 4.1 Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, 1884-1886. Oil on canvas, 207.5
x 308.1 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224.

Illustrations Wells 350

Fig. 4.2 (above) Helen Frankenthaler, The Cape, 1962. Oil on canvas, 134.6 x 177.2 cm.
Clifford Ross Collection. Fig. 4.3 (below) Helen Frankenthaler, after The Cape, 1963, hooked
wall hanging by Gloria F. Ross Workshop. Cotton and wool, 137.2 x 182.9 cm. No. 1/1,
Collection of the Artist.

Illustrations Wells 351

Fig. 4.4 (left) Frankenthaler, Point Lookout, 1966. Acrylic on Canvas, 175.2 x 71.1 cm. Fig. 4.5
(right) Frankenthaler, after Point Lookout, 1966, hooked and sheared wall hanging by the Gloria
F. Ross Workshop. Cotton and wool, 182.9 x 76.2 cm. No. 4/5, Mount Holyoke College Art
Museum, South Hadley, Massachusettes, 1986.10.2, gift of the Storm King Center.
Illustrations Wells 352

Fig. 4.6 (above) Frankenthaler, Untitled (Fourth national Bank and Trust commission, 1975,
low-warp tapestry woven by Pinton S.A., Felletin (France). Cotton and wool, 289.6 x 1,295.4 cm.
No. 1/1, Bank of America Art Program. Fig. 4.7 (below) Paul Jenkins, Phenomena Peal of Bells
Cross, 1972. Watercolor on paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 99.99.4, Gift
of the Estate of Gloria F. Ross.

Illustrations Wells 353

Fig. 4.8 Paul Jenkins, after Phenomena Peel of Bells Cross, 1973-1979. Low-warp tapestry
woven by Pinton S.A., Felletin (France). Cotton and wool, 144.8 x 208.3 cm. No. 00/7,
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 99.99.3, Gift of the Estate of Gloria F. Ross.

Illustrations Wells 354

Fig. 4.9 Paul Jenkins, after Phenomena Mandala Spectrum Turn, 1978-1981. Low-warp tapestry
woven by Micheline Henry and Patrice Sully-Matégot, Aubusson (France). Cotton and wool,
152.4 x 188 cm. No. 0/6, Collection of the Artist.
Illustrations Wells 355

Fig. 4.10 (above) Morris Louis, Equator, 1962. Magna on canvas, 160 x 160 cm. Private
Collection, Washington, DC. Fig. 4.11 (below) Morris Louis, after Equator, hooked by Anna di
Giovanni with the Ruggery, Glen Cove, Long Island. Cotton and wool, 160 x 160 cm. 0/5,
Private Collection.

Illustrations Wells 356

Fig. 4.12 (above) Example of a Louis “veil”: Morris Louis, Tet, 1958. Synthetic polymer on
canvas, 241.3 x 388.6 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, 65.9 Fig. 4.13 Example of a
Louis “unfurled”: Morris Louis, Alpha-Phi, 1961. Acrylic on canvas, 259.1 x 459.7 cm. Tate
Gallery, London, Gift of Marcella Louis Brenner

Illustrations Wells 357

Fig. 4.14 Example of Louis “stripe”: Morris Louis, Number 28, 1961. Acrylic on canvas, 232.1 x
199.1 cm. Walker Art Center, 1964.9, Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation.

Illustrations Wells 358

Fig. 5.1 Kenneth Noland, after Seventh
Night, 1972. High-warp tapestry
woven by Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh
Tapestry Co. (Scotland). Cotton and
wool, 231.1 x 83.8 cm.
Illustrations Wells 359

Fig. 5.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Tapestry, 1968. Cotton and wool, 269.2 x 373.4 cm.

Illustrations Wells 360

Fig. 5.3 Page from Modern Master Tapestries Inc. 1973 catalog.
Illustrations Wells 361

Fig. 5.4 Mark Adams, Great Wing, 1965. Aubusson tapestry, 274.3 x 320 cm. As illustrated in
California Design 9 (1965).

Illustrations Wells 362

Fig. 5.5 (above) Double-page spread of Judy Chicago and Ann Isolde working on The Dinner
Party tapestry cartoons. From Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 240-241.
Fig. 5.6 (below) Double-page spread of the San Francisco Tapestry Workshop working on the
Dinner Party tapestries. From Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 242-243.

Illustrations Wells 363

Fig. 5.7 Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan Red, 1969. As illustrated in WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
2007).
Illustrations Wells 364

Fig. 5.8 Tadek Beutlich,
Archangel I, 1971. Sisal and
mixed fibers, 8’7” x 8’3”.
As illustrated in Constantine
and Larsen, 119.

Fig. 5.9 Tadek Beutlich,
Eruption, 1970. Sisal and
jute, 9’4” x 10’10”. As
illustrated in Constantine and
Larsen, 121.
Illustrations Wells 365

Fig. 5.10 Ritzi and Peter
Jacobi, Dafé, 1971.
Woven tapestry and
collage, 8’ x 10’2”. As
illustrated in Kester,
Deliberate Entanglements,
n.p.n. [20].

Fig. 5.11 Magdalena
Abakanowicz, Installation
at Pasadena Art Museum,
1971. As illustrated in
Constantine and Larsen,
95.
Illustrations Wells 366

Fig. II.2, Jean Lurçat, Chant du Monde: L’eau et le feu, 1956-1958. Tapestry woven by the
Atelier Goubely-Gatien, Aubusson, 461 x 590 cm.
Fig. II.1, Piet Mondrian, New York
City, 1942. Oil on canvas, 119.3 x
114.2 cm. Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris.
Illustrations Wells 367

Fig. II.3, André Lurçat, Fondation Jean Lurçat, Villa Seurat, Paris.

Illustrations Wells 368

Fig. II.4, Françoise Huguier (photographer), Salon, House of Jean and Simone Lurçat, Villa
Seurat, Paris.

369
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