TEA AND CARPETS

The Orient

2008-05-15T02:54:00.000-07:00

(Fiction - By Karel Capek, 1923)

The well-known Czech journalist Karel Capek wrote about buying oriental carpets in Prague at the beginning of the last century. In his short tale 'The Orient,' he describes Old Europe's fascinating world of carpet connoisseurs and carpet sellers – both honest and not so honest.

It can happen that you win the lottery, or that you get married, or that one day it simply strikes you that you want something beautiful at home; whatever the reason, you decide to buy a Persian carpet. But in the process of actually purchasing an oriental rug, your life is going to turn upside down. First of all, you will have to smoke -- a lot -- because smoking is part of the oriental atmosphere. Second, you will have to walk all over mountains of valuable carpets with the air of one who has never set foot upon anything else. You will have to assume the look of a connoisseur, fingering the pile and the back of each rug as you mumble to yourself. There will be a whole array of initiation ceremonies, from special Persian jargon to passionate Turkish haggling, until finally you reduce a carpet seller to tears as he says he feels so close to you that he is ready to give you his rugs almost for free, even at a loss, and simply as a present between equals. There will be, I say, an entire string of extraordinary things but still you will have only reached the threshold of the Orient. And then, thinking you have finished, you will safely choose a modestly priced Kazak and race home with rosy visions of how it will look beside of your bed. In so many ways, a first carpet is like first love.

The next day, someone will ring your doorbell. It is a polite, lively little fellow pushing another, silent, man in front of him. Immediately, he blurts out in the doorway that he is coming to you because you are an exceptional and extraordinary connoisseur of Persian carpets and that he has brought his business partner with him who just arrived yesterday from uh, well uh ... Constantinople ... with some carpets that, truly!, are just for specialists, and he has brought them first to you so that you can just look, nothing more than look, at them, just for the pleasure of it. And already he is opening the door again and shouting, “Vaclav! Come here!” And in comes a delivery boy with a huge pile of carpets on his back. The man from Constantinople really does have a kind of Persian air but he never says anything, and the active little man starts laying out the first carpet with Vaclav. “Now, this is a fine piece, isn’t it? This one is worthy of you ...” You mention it isn’t quite the kind of thing you are looking for. “That’s just what I thought myself!” the vivacious little fellow shouts victoriously. “You, sir, are a marvelous connoisseur; but here I have a Shiraz which is truly perfect for you, only a real specialist can appreciate it!”

This Shiraz seems horrendously pricy and now your lively guest is whispering something to the silent oriental man in a language that might be Persian or might be Turkish. “Also meinetwegen,” the Persian mutters in German, or “fair enough,” and the lively man announces that his friend is giving you the Shiraz simply as a present, almost completely free, because you are you, and just for 40,000 crowns. You fight off the temptation, you will neither accept as a gift a Shirvan, nor a Gendje, nor a Bukhara, nor even a Baluch, not to mention a Kerman and a Senneh and all sorts of prayer carpets; this time you defend yourself against everything, until this obliging fellow asserts that you have truly prodigious taste and that the really valuable rugs he has are still tied up in customs and if you could see those, well, you would cry with joy. Then, he leads out the Persian and Mr. Vaclav, promising to come back later.

So far, so good. But three hours later, a man in a top hat rings your bell. He hands you his visit card and introduces himself as Mr. So and So, an industrialist who is in momentary financial difficulty. He has decided to sell his private rug collection and ... already he is calling down the corridor “Vaclav! Komm hier! ... and Mr. Vaclav is bringing in a new load of carpets on his shoulders. The man in the top hat discreetly speaks of family problems, saying he has to sell at any cost, even way below market price, but only to a real judge, to a true authority, who knows how much a beautiful carpet means. For example, this authentic Hamadan, the man in the top hat breathes, or this fabulous Mosul. To your surprise, each piece in his family collection seems to still have its inventory tag and its customs seal.

You escape from the heavy-hearted monsieur. A day later, a thin man appears who wants to speak to you very privately about things that are “just for four eyes.” Then he tells you that he has … that he has Persian Carpets ... perfect museum pieces ... that he has obtained under rather special circumstances that, well, to be honest, that he personally spirited out of a Sultan’s seraglio, only please don’t speak about it. In short, they are one-of-a-kind pieces for connoisseurs only and staggeringly underpriced. And already Mr. Vaclav is back with a cargo of rugs on his back and on all of them, too, are customs seals and inventory numbers, And, if you don’t make use of this exceptional purchasing opportunity, then there is no reason to worry, because tomorrow a Russian couple will come to you, from a noble family which has had to flee the country and which escaped with nothing but some rare Persian carpets and now, out of the most dire necessity must part with them. Mr. Vaclav is already waiting in the corridor. And, afterwards, you will get a visit from a resplendent Levantine who does a little business with carpets here and there and the other day came across some pieces that he has not shown to anybody, that are only for true enthusiasts. And after him will come a juvenile delinquent who won’t have Mr. Vaclav with him but who knows of a superb Persian carpet that could be sold to a discreet and well informed collector. And then there still will be the solicitor from Vienna, the widow in need, and the Greek who has no money to pay customs and so has to sell at least one precious Persian carpet -- far below its price, of course, and only to an initiate.

In short, if you keep your eyes and ears open, in a little over a week you will learn how to evaluate the weave, material, age, color quality, and finesse of the design of an oriental carpet. You will meet rogues, cognoscenti, eccentrics, entrepreneurs, and small-time crooks; you will make a kind of pilgrimage to the Orient and, doing so, you will discover a strange, wily, ancient, modern form of business that you will never encounter any other way and that is well worth your investment.

(‘The Orient’ was published in the newspaper 'Lidove Noviny' in 1923; Photo of carpet is courtesy of Ali Majdfar/Persian Carpet Museum Photo Gallery.)

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Related Links:

Karel Capek

Barry O'Connell: Notes on Oriental Carpets and Persian Rugs

From Table To Wall To Floor: Oriental Rugs Keep Moving Around European Homes

2008-05-08T22:51:00.001-07:00

PRAGUE, May 9, 2008 -- Oriental carpets are the great nomads of European homes

Over the centuries, few furnishings have moved around as much as they have. Rugs have been put on tables, hung on walls, stretched over sofas, displayed on floors and, finally, tucked under the furniture.

In the process, they have helped express the social values of their owners – from medieval merchants looking for status symbols to modern families looking for creature comforts.

All this makes the history of rugs in Western homes a fascinating study.

Rug experts date the first imports of oriental carpets into Europe to around 1200 – the time of the fourth Crusade – or earlier. The knights leading the crusades were keen observers of Eastern court life and eager to acquire the trappings for themselves.

By 1300, Europe’s court painters began to show some of these acquisitions in their artworks and by 1450 the depictions are so highly detailed they can be cataloged. The carpets – then all from Anatolia with geometric motifs – appeared in many paintings with Christian religious themes and were usually placed at the feet of the Virgin Mary or on the steps of alters. One example is Alessio Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child with Saints, circa 1454.

Giving the carpets such a place of honor in religious paintings may have been a reflection of the awe the oriental rugs inspired in the European public. And it may show how easily the Eastern textiles found a place within Europe’s own tradition of using luxurious tapestries as symbols of power and prestige.

Through the 1400s, carpets began to become sufficiently available to rich Europeans to also appear in portraits of the nobility and wealthy merchants. By 1450, paintings of festivals in cities like Venice and Florence show wealthy merchant families draping their rugs out their windows for all to see.

The public displays seem intended to emphasize the wealth of the merchant families and their growing social status as Europe moved into the Renaissance. And the rugs from distant lands seem a perfect symbol of the cosmopolitan mood that accompanied Europe’s emergence from centuries of feudalism.

By 1550, Persian carpets began to be imported into Europe along with Anatolians. The Persian court pieces, with their curving floral patterns, equally became part of the portraits of the rich and powerful – only now oriental carpets were displayed most frequently on top of tables.

At times, the tables included conference tables, as in a famous portrait of British and Spanish officials concluding a treaty in 1604 over an Anatolian. This painting is The Somerset House Conference, by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz.

Carpets continued to be draped over furniture in European houses through the 1600s and 1700s, but by 1800s they were on the move again.

During the 1800s, the accelerating industrial age made many Europeans and Americans wealthier and they began acquiring the luxury goods of the rich, including oriental carpets. The new owners experimented with putting rugs of many different sizes in many different places in their homes.

The first half of the century saw carpets move onto the walls and, in small formats, onto the floor. They were status symbols to be displayed and, when they were on the floor, other furniture was pushed back to give them pride of place. Different designs became associated with particular rooms. A lady’s boudoir would have a bright and floral Persian rug. A man’s study or smoking room would more likely have a red-and-black Turkmen.

But by the second half of the 1800s, the trend was toward big format carpets covering more and more of the floor. As a result, carpets began to go under furniture. Compared to the earlier taste for putting carpets on top of tables, this was history stood on its head. Yet the practice, and the sense that a carpet – or carpeting – adds comfort to a room but need not be considered as artwork continues today.

Could carpets one day come off the floor again? If they do, there are two directions in which they might go.

One direction is suggested by Europe’s periodic taste for draping colorful carpets over sofas. The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, raised his couch to iconic status partly by covering it with a beautiful nomadic Qashqai rug. He maintained that the mysterious motifs in the carpet helped his patient relax and wander back into their memories more easily.

At times, carpets even have become the upholstery of the furniture itself. Jon Thompson writes in his 1983 textbook 'Oriental Carpets' of a fad in the 1870s and 1880s for cutting up tribal carpets to use them as the covering fabric for armchairs. He credits the destructive practice with saving at least parts of some valuable rugs that might otherwise have been worn out by use on the floor. The fad inspired one German businessman, Carl Wilhelm Koch, to machine-weave furniture fabrics in Turkmen and Qashqai designs.

The other direction is for carpets to go back onto the walls, the usual place for artwork. They have often been there before. The 19th century craze for prayer rugs from across the Islamic world made many homes look like museums. And still today, a small silk rug of almost any design is more likely to be hung than walked upon.

The future is never possible to predict. But it is interesting to think that putting an oriental carpet on the floor – so automatic today – is historically a recent trend in Western interior design. And if history is a guide, it may only be a step on the way to something else.

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Related Links

Oriental carpets in Italian Renaissance paintings: art objects and status symbols

Turkish Rugs In European Paintings

Kilim Sofas

Natural Dyes Return To Oriental Carpets But Without The Famous Insect Reds

2008-05-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

CHAHARMAHAL District, Iran; May 2, 2008 – When Iranian photographer Javid Tafazoli was walking through a weaving village in the mountains of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari province, far to the west of Isfahan, he saw an arresting sight.

It was a cascade of recently dyed red wool hanging from a tree. In a world grown used to garish colors, the mellow brick-red shades looked like a startlingly natural part of the landscape. He snapped the picture and entitled it simply “Red.”

The same picture could be taken in many villages in Iran today, where weavers are increasingly returning to using natural dyes. They hope that going back to traditional materials will raise the quality of rugs and the value people put on them.

But if there is a new desire to derive red from age-old sources such as the root of the Madder plant, which gives hues ranging from pink to rose to scarlet, another ancient group of reds seems certain not to return. They are the once famous insect reds.

For centuries, dyers dried and powdered insects to produce colors ranging from pink-lilac through bright crimson to deep-brown-purple. In many areas where the dyes could not be produced locally, they were prized imports.

The first insect dye to be traded in large commercial quantities was Indian lac, derived from the Caccus lacca bug. The insect, which feeds on ficus trees in India, was also a source for lacquer and shellac used on furniture.

The fame of Indian lac grew so great that it was exported over huge distances. In their authoritative book ‘Oriental Carpets,’ Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III say the dyes have been detected in Safavid and Ottoman court carpets as well as on 19th century Turkmen rugs. That is despite the fact that madder was the standard and abundant source for red from Turkey to Central Asia.

Later, lac gave way to still higher quality reds obtained from the Indian’s bug’s distant cousin, the South American cochineal. The cochineal reds -- traded in the Aztec and Mayan empires and still used in Mexico and Peru (below) -- were discovered by Spanish conquistadors in 1519.

The Europeans considered cochineal to be the perfect red dye because it is stable, easily absorbed by fabrics, and extremely resistant to fading.

The brilliant red comes from the carminic acid in the body of the female cochineal larva, which also makes the bug unpalatable to predators. The Spanish bred the bugs for size and color and created huge ranches of cactus – the bugs’ favorite home. To produce a kilogram of the dye required some 155,000 dried insects and, by 1770, at the peak of the trade, Mexico was exporting some half a million kilos a year.

The global business in cochineal dyes is documented in the 2005 book ‘A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire’ by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Eventually, the Spanish expanded cultivation of the bugs to the Canary Islands and North Africa. But the lucrative business finally came to an end with the invention of chemical dyes in northern Europe in the mid 19th century. Within decades, cochineal red, along with madder, virtually disappeared from use under a tide of synthetic replacements.

Now, in a world saturated with artificial colors, natural dyes are slowly making a comeback. But, in a strange twist for the carpet industry, the once so abundant and highly sought cochineal dyes remain forgotten. The reason is economics.

After they were swept from the textile industry by synthetic dyes, cochineal reds – also known as carmine – found a new and more profitable place in the cosmetics and food coloring industries. Today carmine is a high-priced specialty dye that puts the red in red pistachio nuts, maraschino cherries and Italian aperitifs. Its advantage over man-made red dyes is that it is not toxic or carcinogenic.

That means that making a rug with cochineal dyes today would cost a fortune. The giant cactus farms in Mexico may still exist and the dyes may still be exported, but carpets with insect reds belong to the past.

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Related Links:

Wikipedia: Cochineal

A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, by Amy Butler Greenfield.

Book: The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder And Murex Purple: A World Tour of Textile Dying by Gosta Sandberg

Javid Tafazoli: Photographs

Central Asian Felt Carpets Search For A Role In The Modern World

2008-04-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

BISHKEK, April 25, 2008 – When one imagines the vast steppes of Central Asia, yurts and felt carpets come quickly to mind.

It is from sheets of plain white felt that yurts are built, and it is with colorfully patterned felt that they are decorated inside. The result is a warm and cheerful shelter that served Central Asia’s nomads well for thousands of years.

If you drive along Kyrgyzstan's endless chains of Celestial Mountains (Ala-too in Kyrgyz), you will indeed spot yurts dotting the slopes with flocks of sheep nearby in an idyllic picture of nomadic life.

But, it can be a little disappointing for felt enthusiasts to arrive in modern Bishkek and hardly find a yurt, or even a felt, in sight.

In Kyrgyzstan’s capital city -- population about one million -- yurts today are only set up in the garden of someone’s home when a family member dies. The lady of the house faces the inner wall of the tent each time mourners approach the house and start a dirge. Female newcomers join her in lamenting, while men remain standing outside, facing the wall of the yurt and wailing.

Even in the marketplaces it is hard to find nomadic felt carpets. The carpets for sale are machine-woven imitations of sophisticated Turkmen and Iranian pile carpets.

Janyl Chytyrbaeva, a Kyrgyz journalist, explains why. “Everyone wants a house like you see on TV,” she says. The machine-made carpets from artificial fiber are given as gifts at weddings and funerals and most people’s apartments and houses are covered with them.

Does this mean that felt has disappeared from Kyrgyz life? No. But like so many traditional handicrafts elsewhere, it is endangered and its only protectors are female artisans from poor rural area and artists.

Chytyrbaeva, who herself stitched her own felt dowry rugs as a teenager, says the only place to find it in use in Bishkek is where the poorest migrants from the countryside have settled on the outskirts of the city. There, they cover the floors with plain yet colorful felt mats or with patterned Ala-Kiyiz, which are made by rolling colored felt into a plain felt background. More highly patterned carpets, Shyrdaks (Shirdaks, Shurdoks), are made by sewing together felt of different colors and then stitching them onto a plain felt basecloth.

All these kinds of felt carpets provide warm flooring in a country where the winters are bitterly cold. For additional warmth, laborers’ families will also put sheepskins here and there on top of the felt. Sometimes, the sheepskins are themselves made as kind of mats by stitching together variously dyed pieces in shyrdak patterns.

Still, if these furnishings seem humble, the ancient felt-working tradition of Kyrgyzstan itself is rich. Skilled felt-makers can produce pieces of effortless sophistication and great art just as readily as ordinary villagers make plain felt floor mats.

Highly complicated Shyrdaks are created by cutting the same design into several sheets of brightly colored felt and then switching and refitting the pieces together like jig-saw puzzles.

The flowing and harmonious patterns, filled with symbolism, complement the unstructured texture of the felt. With additional techniques, including appliqué, more detailed designs become possible.

Kyrgyz felts are gradually gaining a place in the Western market, yet they still remain little known compared to the other great textiles of Central Asia: the red pile rugs of Turkmenistan or the Suzani embroideries of Uzbekistan.

A handful of rug importers are scouring the Kyrgyz countryside for artisans but many more Western businesses seem content with just importing Kyrgyz-made felt slippers and hats or, more recently, stuffed toy animals.

That seems modest for a nomadic culture that in many ways was unique. The Kyrgyz, who live in a mountainous country, migrated up and down their slopes with the seasons while most of their steppe neighbors wandered widely across the plains.

Today, they can date their presence in the mountains to thousands of years ago and have many traditions all their own. That includes the design of the national flag. It is the only one in the world that has at its center a stylized representation of the roof of a traditional yurt.

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Related Links

Kyrgyzstyle Company, Kyrgyzstan

FeltRugs Company, Britain

Shirdak Silkroad Textile Company, Netherlands

Photos of Kyrgyzstan: Jonathan Barth

YouTube: How Nomads Make Felt (Mongolia)

Drawing Oriental Carpet Designs Is An Artform Of Its Own

2008-04-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

BAKU and TEHRAN, April 18, 2008 -- Long before most town and city carpets are woven, the design is recorded on paper.

The drawing, or 'cartoon,' is what the weavers follow to create their patterns. And when the designs are complex, preparing the cartoons becomes an art form in itself.

Traditionally, cartoons have been drawn by hand on graph paper. Many producers maintain that system. Their designers use colored pencils or paint to create a portrait of part of the carpet that shows the border and as much of the field as needed to establish the pattern.

Vugar Dadashov, the head of Baku-based Azerbaijanrugs, uses this life-size design of one-quarter of a 1.5 x 2 meter Akstafa rug. It took a designer four days to draw and his weavers have been using the cartoon for three years.

Because this Akstafa design is symmetrical, the weavers can complete the remainder of the rug's pattern themselves – though they have to mentally flip and reverse the cartoon to do so. It is an exercise in abstract thinking for everyone involved, and one that dates back to the very earliest days of the settled carpet trade.

But when carpets are non-symmetrical, or contain surprise elements in some parts of the field but not others, the cartoons have to show more. Then designers may draw a half of the rug or even the full rug. And at that point, drawing a carpet can become as time-consuming as any other form of portrait art.

Hossein Attaran, of Carpet Heritage in Tehran, says it can take a month to hand-draw a full carpet with an all-over design. For that reason, he and many other producers have increasingly turned to digital design systems to speed the work.

Attaran says that a designer can produce this digital image of the full-field pattern of an antique Bidjar in about a week. The image is later printed out on paper sheets that are sent to a village weaver near the town of Bidjar to hang on her home loom as she works part-time on the rug through the course of a year.

But even with software, designing remains a painstaking job and the designer still must make what traditionally are his or her own contributions to the drawing. That is, to give a personal interpretation to the motifs and choice of colors so as to infuse the work with life.

Where do the designers get the training to do this?

In many rug-producing countries, the education was once solely by apprenticeship but today it is increasingly formal.

Dadashov's designer is a professional painter who graduated from the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Art. She works full-time for him and their inspirations come mostly from photos of rare antique Caucasian rugs.

In Iran, universities in many cities now offer courses in rug design. Tehran has two such famous schools. One is the University of Art, which offers a Bachelor of Arts program in carpet design for both men and women. The other is Al Zahra University, which includes studies of carpet design as part of its Bachelor of Arts program for women.

Attaran says the programs include familiarity with the great carpets of the past but focus most of all on the production of the past 50 to 60 years. The students, who must be talented artists to enter, learn the styles of each of Iran's many carpet-producing regions so well that they can draw each one's characteristic 'guls,' or flowers, in their pure form.

That is partly so that the designers can preserve the identity of Persian carpets against ever increasing numbers of would-be imitators abroad.

"I have seen drawings of carpets outside of Iran and they have such a foreign accent, deliberate or not, that they have taken the original character out of the rug entirely," Attaran says. He employs two designers who have graduated from university programs precisely to keep his own production accent-free.

An Iranian designer can make the equivalent of $ 400 to $ 500 a month – a reasonable income in the local market - and has a status comparable to that of a graphic artist in the West. Increasingly, the designers are women, both because there are more women art graduates than men and because of economic reasons.

With Iran’s official inflation rate running around 20 percent, many women welcome a designer’s salary as a supplement to their family income. But many men who are the sole breadwinners for their families say they now must find professions that pay higher salaries than the carpet industry can offer.

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Related Links

Azerbaijanrugs

Carpet Heritage

How Iranians Classify Persian Carpets – with Table

How Iranians Classify Persian Carpets – with Illustrations

Book: Oriental Carpet Design: A Guide to Traditional Motifs, Patterns and Symbols, by P.R.J. Ford

A Carpet Of Stone Honors Hamburg As Heart Of Europe's Oriental Rug Trade

2008-04-11T02:28:00.000-07:00

HAMBURG, April 11, 2008 -- When people think of oriental carpets, they usually don’t think of Germany’s biggest port.

But Hamburg is the major entry point for handwoven carpets into Europe and for trans-shipments to America. One third of the world’s carpets move through here each year, along with many more goods from the East ranging from tea to coffee to computers.

For decades, this was best known only to cognoscenti of the carpet trade. But in recent years, enthusiasts have tried to put Hamburg more openly on the rug map. They have succeeded so well that today anyone visiting Hamburg’s port area can learn a lot about the global carpet business, too.

The place to begin is the port’s storehouse area, a sprawling complex of warehouses built along a maze of canals at the turn of the last century. Called the Speicherstadt (Storehouse City), the district is popular with tour boats which carry visitors up the canals to admire the red-brick architecture of the buildings. But the warehouses themselves, despite their yesteryear gables and turrets, are very much a still-functioning depot area.

In the heart of the warehouse complex is a bridge covered with an oriental carpet. There is a sign at each end that warns any ladies who happen to be walking by in high heels to be careful. The reason is not that they might damage the surface of the carpet, but so that they don’t trip on it.

The carpet is made of stone and is the brainchild of German artist Frank Raendchen. He mobilized scores of sculptors, illustrators, students and photographers in 2004 to join him in sticking 1.5 tons of colored stone to the bridge with synthetic resin to reproduce the design of a Persian carpet.

What are the stone carpet’s dimensions? Length: 37.5 meters. Width: 2.45 meters. “Pile” height: 1 centimeter. It is modeled on a real carpet that Raendchen rented for the project for 70 euros from a dealer.

Raendchen says his goal was to turn the warehouse area “inside-out” to show visitors the exotic things stored inside. He says he focused on carpets because “the oriental rug, besides its economic importance and its decorative value, still possesses some of the magical allure of the great wide world.”

The oriental carpet made of stone is not the only way to appreciate the some 3.6 million square meters worth of handwoven rugs that flood in and out of Speicherstadt each year. There are also several museums that tell the story of the port and its exotic trade.

Among these are the Speicherstadtmuseum, with its hands-on exhibits of bales of rubber and coffee sacks, and the Spice Museum, where visitors can see and smell some 50 spices. Both of them are located in original warehouses.

And there is also one very unexpected museum, squeezed between the Spice Museum and a carpet warehouse. It is the Afghan Museum, with displays of rugs and other artifacts. An Afghan carpet salesman founded it in 1998 to remind himself and other Afghans living in Germany of their homeland. Today, it helps to make ends meet by doubling as a venue for catered parties.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing a carpet lover can see in this sprawling warehouse town is history repeating itself – over and over again.

Despite all the modernization, the warehouse crews still use pulleys to haul pallets of carpets off barges and up to the warehouse windows many stories above the waterline. There the carpets will stay until they are sold to retailers around the Western world, and more rugs arrive to take their place.

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Related Links:

Frank Raendchen's Stone Carpet

Speicherstadtmuseum

Spice Museum, Hamburg

Afghan Museum, Hamburg

Antique-Wash: The Great Game of Making New Oriental Carpets Look Old

2008-04-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

PRAGUE, April 4, 2008 – A Turkmen friend once was visiting his uncle, who owns a rug shop in Peshawar.

As they drank up their strong black tea, the uncle threw what was left in his glass onto the new carpet at his feet.

The visitor was shocked. “What, you don’t like that carpet?” he asked.

“I do,” the uncle replied. “It’s my favorite. But foreigners want carpets that look old and used.”

What the uncle was doing – in a modest way – was ‘antiquing’ his merchandise. The practice has a long and venerable history, from ‘tea-washing’ carpets with herbal extracts, to dousing them in chemicals, to hand-painting shadings into the pile.

The most famous of old rug forgers, the Romanian weaver Theodor Tuduc, who died in 1983, reportedly used river stones to abrade his Transylvanian look-alikes. The rubbing helped make his copies look so genuinely used that some were even collected by museums.

Early European adventure-travelers to the East reported still other antiquing techniques. Eustache de Lory wrote about two in his 1910 article ‘The Persian Bazaars:’

“The wily Persian has discovered the secret of making new carpets look ancient. He smokes them over a fire made with special herbs, and this gives the carpet a used appearance and fades the colors. It is nearly impossible, when this is well done, to distinguish between a genuine antique and a forgery. A commoner way of aging a carpet (very common in the bazaars) is to spread it out on the street, in order that every passer-by and animal may trample on it.”

Of course, de Lory was an Orientalist, a genre of artists that professionally exoticized the East. No-one knows if his notes are any more reliable than paintings by Charles Robertson in the 1880s of Cairo’s alleys filled with Caucasian carpets.

Still, the question remains. Why is the artificial aging of carpets – with or without the buyer’s knowledge – such a persistent part of the rug business?

One reason might be that many Western consumers find Eastern colors too bold. Aging rugs with chemical washes can mute the hues to better fit those buyers' tastes.

But another answer might be found in the way different societies regard time and the value of handcrafted goods.

In the hyper-modern societies of the west, old people often complain they do not get the respect their years deserve. But old things, such as heirlooms, are venerated.

That veneration seems to be doubled when the heirlooms represent traditional handicrafts that were commonplace in Europe until they faced extinction in the machine age. Today, surviving pieces are seen as something genuine, artisanal, and rare and the older they look the more authentic they seem.

Many of these arts and crafts exist today mostly in museum collections. The museums themselves began to appear from the 1750s onwards, becoming more and more numerous and nostalgic as the industrial era proceeded.

By contrast, more traditional societies seem to have a very different view of their traditional objects. Here, time erodes a thing’s value instead of enhancing it. After all, similar objects are still being made by every new generation in more or less the same way. When something wears out, its value passes on to its replacement.

So, perhaps it is no surprise that strange things can happen when modern and traditional worlds meet – things that not only interest businessmen but also some anthropologists. One is Brian Spooner:

“It is in the nature of things that our search for authenticity is constantly frustrated by the people among whom we seek it. The more we reveal our need for authenticity to the Turkmen, the more they frustrate our search by adapting their wares in ways they imagine should please us.”

Spooner made that observation in his article "Weavers and Dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet." It appeared in the 1988 book ‘The Social Life of Things.’

In a footnote, Spooner cites as an example the museum of the University of Pennsylvania once receiving a gift of a genuine Turkmen carpet woven in the design of an American flag. Compared to that, splashing tea over a traditional Turkmen design seems almost like a blessing.

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Related Links

Travelers’ Accounts: Eustache de Lory, The Persian Bazaars

Rugs in Orientalist Paintings, by Filiberto Boncompagni

Brian Spooner in ‘Weavers and Dealers: the authenticity of an oriental carpet”

The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective

Washington’s Textile Museum Explores a Planet of Weavers

2008-03-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 28, 2008 – Washington is a city of embassies, big and little, and at first glance the Textile Museum can easily be taken for one.

The museum is in a small neo-classical mansion from the turn of the last century and stands on a shady downtown street near the legations of Ireland and Myanmar. Just as they do, the building has a flagpole out front and the air of discreet charm that diplomats so prize.

But once inside, it is clear that if the Textile Museum is an embassy it represents the entire planet. On display any given month may be classical Persian carpet fragments, or textiles from the highlands of Bolivia, or even a collection of fabrics with nothing in common except that they were all dyed indigo blue in different parts of the world. And that is not to mention periodic exhibits ranging from Central Asian tentbands to fabrics in all shades of red.

Just how devoted to textiles is this place? Even the tiled, Georgian-era washroom on the ground floor offers a surprise. Stenciled in graceful letters around the circumference of the room are the words MORDANT, LOOM, BATIK, PILE, IKAT, and more.

The museum does have a serious side: it is an international center for scholars and collectors with an inventory of some 15,000 textiles and rugs from both the eastern and western hemispheres. It was the first textile-conservation laboratory in the United States and, since 1962 has published the now temporarily suspended research revue ‘The Textile Museum Journal.’

But the museum also very much reflects the personality of its founder and the personal joy he took in discovering, and celebrating, mankind’s fascination with weaving.

The founder is George Hewitt Myers, who was born in 1875. He came of age when the West’s fascination with oriental carpets was at its peak, with demand so great that production soared in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus. Like many young gentlemen at the time, he bought his first rugs when he went to university -- in his case, an 18th or 19th century Ghiordes prayer rug to help furnish his rooms at Yale. Later, he found the rug was a fraud. But instead of extinguishing his interest in carpets, the forgery only stimulated it.

Myers learned his first lesson in carpets this way: “The first sight of a (genuine) tattered old Ghiordes threw the spotlight of authenticity upon two of three of my earliest purchases,” he said. He discovered his own much more recently made prayer rug had acquired its antique look through “an effective application of pumice stone and elbow grease."

Myers was heir to a sizable share of the Bristol-Myers Pharmaceutical firm, a graduate in forestry management, and a talented businessman. But he decided to make a lifetime achievement out of collecting fabrics. After he moved to Washington, he filled his home with them and involved his guests and scholars in debates over the textiles' origins. His interests soon sent him spinning back through time in search of earlier and earlier pieces.

“When I first bought a few rugs in the 1890s, I had no thought of buying several hundred," he said. "When I first bought textiles in 1910, I had even less thought of buying several thousand. But one thing led to another and the underlying thought, if any, was to find out what went before a certain piece to make it as it was. This of course led back to earlier and earlier forms, somewhat logically.”

By 1925, the year Myers turned 50, conversations with guests were no longer enough. He opened part of his mansion as the Textile Museum. And despite his own active business life, he promoted the museum's steady growth. He spent generously, including paying $18,000 in 1928 to purchase a Lotto carpet fragment even though he already had a palace-sized Lotto in his collection. He recognized that the fragment preserved a better quality of drawing than did the full carpet.

When Myers died at age 82 in 1957, he left his Textile Museum with one fourth of his fortune and his belief that to study textiles is to learn about the world. Today, the institution is considered to be the foremost museum in the western hemisphere devoted to the preservation, study and exhibition of handmade textiles. Its popularity has grown enough that the museum plans to expand next year into an additional display space near the Washington Mall, where most of the capital’s museums are located.

But if the museum is enlarging, its spirit remains the same. That can be seen most Saturdays, when crowds gather for a weekly “Rug and Textile Appreciation Morning.”

The number of enthusiasts varies from 30 to 40 and discussion topics are as wide-ranging as South Persian bagfaces, Turkmen main carpets and camel trappings, and American quilts. In homage to Myers, the groups meet in the same walnut-paneled drawing room where he and his wife Louise once entertained their friends with discussions of the same subjects.

(Sources for this article include "One Man's Romance with Fiber Created the Textile Museum" by Martha McWilliam in 'Smithsonian Magazine,' and "Legacy of George Hewitt Myers" by Carol Bier in 'Arts of Asia.' Photos courtesy of Textile Museum.)

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Related Links

A Rug & Textle Appreciation Morning at the Textile Museum

The Textile Museum: homepage

Article: Myers as a Collector

Oriental Carpet Books Sell In Strange Ways

2008-03-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

LONDON, March 21, 2008 -- Books about rugs may seem like a no-surprise part of the Oriental Carpet trade. But when it comes to how the books are sold, the business is very much a world of its own.

There may be thousands of carpet retailers spread across the globe. Yet there is only a handful of dealers who specialize in rug books and stock enough of a variety to interest collectors.

One of those retailers is Ed Stott, who operates Oxianna Books from his home base near London. Indeed, his base is his home because, as for most of the specialist booksellers, the business does not generate enough profit to warrant shop space.

Stott says ‘the bread and butter’ of the trade are specialty books for connoisseurs.

“People who have just spent serious money for a carpet, rug, or bagface will want to buy the book if the piece is published, if only to show friends,” he says.

After all, a book full of rare rugs including something similar to one’s own goes a long way toward authenticating a piece to any doubters in the crowd. And perhaps it can even help ease relatives’ shock over a rug’s sticker price.

One of the most highly sought-after books among collectors is the catalogue for an exhibition of Turkmen weavings held at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C in 1980. The catalogue, ‘Turkmen’ by J. Thompson and L. Mackey, has sold an estimated 5,000 copies, something Stott believes is a record for a specialist book.

Some other books -- like rare rugs themselves -- appreciate in value over time. One is ‘Rugs of the Peasants and Nomads of Anatolia’ by W. Bruggemann and H. Bohmer. It was originally published in 1983 with just 500 copies in German and 500 copies in English at the price of 60 British pounds a copy. Today, Stott says, a first-edition copy is fetching 400 pounds.

But if collectors are ready to pay high prices for specialist books, they appear to have mixed emotions about another source of information on rugs: auction catelogues.

Stott says a few auction catelogues are highly sought after because they are the stock of a single collector or dealer and may offer more information than appears in general-audience carpet books.

But most catelogues are considered to have only modest value because the pictures are post-card sized and, Stott says, the digital process can enhance the colors. After all, the intention of the catalogues is to sell carpets in auctions and advertising is advertising.

The world of carpet books is still a new one, with the earliest dating back only to around the 1900s. Stott says there were a few early German authors at that time but that it was really not until after World War II that books started to appear regularly.

At first, authors tended to be academic in their writing. But by the 1970s they also began aiming at more general readers. One of the pioneers was ‘Woven Gardens, Nomad and Village Rugs of the Fars Province of Southern Persia,’ by D. Black and J. Loveless. It caught, and expanded, the wave of interest in nomadic and village carpets at the time.

How does someone get into the business of dealing in specialist rug books?

In Stott's case, it was quite by accident. Ten years ago, his job as computer expert at British Gas was made redundant. But opportunity presented itself in the form of a friend who was going through a divorce and needed to dispose of a whole collection of books about carpets, travel, and related subjects.

Stott combined the collection with the rise of e-commerce and his mail-order Oxianna Books was born.

But it is not an easy business to be in, particularly today.

As a dealer based in Europe, Oxianna is hard-hit by the exchange rate when it does business with American customers. The weak dollar has made merchandise priced in British pounds or euros more expensive than before.

And compared to a few years ago -- when many new carpets books were published – today’s trend is toward fewer and ever pricier tomes. That is because color reproduction of photographs is very costly -- so much so that publishing a top-quality book now often requires having a carpet club or other sponsor subsidize the project.

Perhaps that is why many specialist bookstore owners engage in their business only part-time and without giving up other professions they may have. The business has to be as much for the love of carpets as for the hope of rewards.

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Related Links:

Rugbooks

Oxianna Books

The Rug Book Shop

Books on Rugs and Textiles

A Rare Oushak Carpet In A Czech Castle Catches The Rug World’s Eye

2008-03-13T03:38:00.001-07:00

PRAGUE, March 14, 2008 – The Czech Republic’s economic rebound has brought more than the restoration of historic buildings whose beauty was long hidden under sooty and cracking plaster.

It also has seen an upsurge of interest in the country’s many art treasures, including – for oriental carpet lovers – the valuable rugs held in state and private collections.

One of these treasures can be seen in the most recent edition (Winter 2007) of ‘Hali,’ the leading international magazine covering the world of carpets, textiles and Islamic art. The carpet, an Ottoman from the second half of the 16th century, is the oldest one in the Czech Republic and its magazine debut marks the first time it can widely be seen in color.

The historic carpet hangs in a castle in the south of the country that is associated with the wealthy Schwarzenberg family. It was woven in the Turkish city of Oushak, famous in Ottoman times for its fine rugs.

The Schwarzenberg piece is one of the renown “white oushaks,” which were named for their white background and were much prized in renaissance Europe. This one is decorated with mysterious symbols known as “chintamani” that appear as triangles of dots above two wavy lines. The Turkic symbols are believed to harken back to Buddhist times in Central Asia.

The appearance of the carpet in ‘Hali’ is the latest sign of a revival of interest both outside and inside the Czech Republic in the country’s rug collections.

The same carpet, which rarely leaves Hluboka Castle, also recently appeared in a major domestic exhibition of pieces held by Czech museums and private collectors. The exhibit in Brno this winter followed similar showings in Prague and Plzen that have drawn sizeable crowds over the past few years.

The visitors to the exhibits are curious to rediscover oriental carpets after they have been an almost forgotten item in Czech households for many decades. How they became so forgotten is a curious tale from the communist era, when many traditional status symbols were turned upside down.

Miroslav Jungr tells the story in his 2005 book “Oriental Carpets,” itself the first Czech-language collectors’ handbook to be published since before World War II. Born in 1942, he writes from personal experience.

Jungr notes that until World War II, oriental carpets were a standard part of any successful family’s décor. That maintained the values of turn-of-the-century Europe and America and, sometimes, went still further.

“My grandmother, who had four daughters, bought oriental carpets as part of the dowries that they would take into their marriages,” he recalls. The carpets came from a selection of high-quality carpet shops in Prague which at the time did good business.

But with the communist coup in 1948, oriental carpets were branded capitalist luxuries. The retail shops disappeared and were replaced by something unique to the communist era: state-owned antiquity shops.

The “Antikva” shops were always full of rugs, porcelain, and other collectibles. The stock came from formerly successful families which had to sell their valuables to pay a “millionaire’s tax” that was passed just before the communists seized power and nationalized most private property. With no businesses or other such holdings to liquidate to pay the tax, there was nothing for these families to do but liquidate their personal possessions at the antique shops.

In effect the antique stores were pawn shops and their purpose was to earn hard currency for the party. Their staffs were usually the wives of party officials and they sold only to foreign diplomats and touring groups.

The effect on Eastern Europe’s heirlooms was like that of a vacuum cleaner moving them West at absurdly low prices. Jungr says the shop staffs often had only the crudest ideas of the collectibles’ value and priced them to sell quickly.

As oriental carpets were devalued in communist Czechoslovakia, they were replaced as status symbols by what was truly hard to get: modern Western-grade home furnishings.

Most in demand was plain wall-to-wall carpeting. Such carpeting was produced domestically by the long-famous commercial carpet factories in northern Bohemia. But the product was almost entirely destined for export.

Jungr says that people, including himself, would go to any lengths to find a friend-of-a-friend who had some contact with the factories or with the rare state shop stocking their goods. A bribe was absolutely necessary to bring home the prize.

In his apartment in Prague, Jungr still has one room covered in white wall-to-wall from that era. It represents a trophy hard to give up even now. The choice for those who didn’t go to such lengths was shabby wall-to-wall carpeting produced for the socialist and third world markets in gaudy patterns.

Today, oriental carpets cost in Prague about what they cost anywhere else in Europe. A number of mid-range shops do consistent business but an early attempt at a higher-end collectors’ shop failed after several years due to lack of buyers.

That raises a question for Jungr and other rug enthusiasts in the country. Is the loss of habit for oriental carpets in home furnishings permanent, especially given today’s global trend toward minimalist decors?

Or, will the rediscovery of the lost family heirlooms – now so frequently on exhibit -- rekindle interest?

It is a question only time, and fashion, will answer.

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Turkish Carpets and Showmanship Go Hand-in-Hand in Anatolia

2008-03-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

ISTANBUL, March 8, 2008 -- In Istanbul, the saying goes, you will see the world.

But if you are speaking about the carpet business -- and how showrooms use every idea imaginable to sell to tour groups – the phrase could cover Kusadasi, Cappadocia, and many other places in Turkey as well.

Some tourists say the way Turkish carpets and kilims are sold is too aggressive. Some say it is highly entertaining. But just about everyone agrees it is unforgettable.

Perhaps that is why there are so many videos on the Internet about buying rugs in Turkey.

The videos range from very low-quality recordings to highly professional documentaries. What they have in common is a fascination with how Turkey's carpet sellers manage to make buying a rug almost a requirement for anyone visiting the country.

A Japanese blogger nicknamed Shinjushinju has put a video on YouTube called "Turkish Flying Carpets.” It offers a glimpse of how some showrooms are combining carpets with cabaret to create a rapport with tour groups:

The video shows the carpet sellers working up the crowd's appetite by spinning carpets over their heads. The effect is a bit like pizza-makers spinning dough into the air in Italian restaurants – only more novel.

Often, the showrooms offer other bits of entertainment as well. One is to pretend that there really is a “flying” carpet in the seller’s collection and to coax a member of the tour group to sit on it.

The willing participant is blindfolded and there are magical incantations from the showmen. Does the carpet rise in the air? No, until four strong salesmen each grab a corner and lift it up – with the carpet rider on top.

But what seems to most fascinate Japanese and European visitors is the show that still remains at the heart of any stop in a carpet shop – haggling over prices.

Journeyman Pictures, a London distributor of short documentaries, has put a video on YouTube called "The Carpet Sellers – Turkey." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F34Btbq1qc). It looks at the haggling process from both sides – buyer’s and seller’s.

One carpet salesman in the film says he adjusts his strategy according to the provenance of the customer. In the mass tour business, that seems to be more important in determining prices than the provenance of a carpet.

The toughest Western customers, he says, are Australians. Unlike most Americans and Europeans, they are prepared to put a seller through a long examination of his merchandise and of the art of carpets in general. These buyers want to be educated consumers, even if it requires drinking oceans of apple tea to do it.

Do people generally feel they get their money’s worth when they buy in Turkey? The answer varies with the individual.

Some people in tour groups complain that the carpet business is so strong that it interferes with their sightseeing. Tour guides sometimes cut short visits to historic sites like Ephesus in order to deliver their groups more quickly to salesmen.

Other people find that when they buy a carpet in Turkey, the carpet business follows them home – literally. That can happen when customers choose to have a large carpet shipped to their home countries rather than carry it themselves.

The carpet will be delivered but their name and address may also be passed on to itinerant rug sellers, for example, in America, who will phone them at home months later.

“Do you remember my uncle who sold you a carpet in Istanbul?” the voice may ask. If the buying experience in Turkey was positive – and often the past looks rosiest from a distance – the call may lead to a door-to-door visit.

And then, in the surprising setting of one’s own home, the unforgettable experience of buying a carpet in Turkey may begin all over again.

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Related Links

Barry O’Connell: A Guide To Turkish Rugs

Barry O’Connell: A Guide To Turkish Prayer Rugs

Jozan: Articles On Turkish Rugs

Can Caucasian Rugs Make A Comeback In The Caucasus?

2008-03-01T05:07:00.000-08:00

BAKU, March 1, 2008 -- It is ironic that so many countries copy Caucasian designs but to find a carpet that is actually woven in the Caucasus today is rare.

After all, it is a simple rule of economics that if there is a market there is a product. By that logic, weavers in the Caucasus should be at least as active as their imitators.

But weavers in Azerbaijan say that there are many reasons they produce and export so few carpets today compared to their rivals.

For one, the country is in the middle of an oil boom that is noticeably dislocating traditional life and livelihoods as people seek a part of it.

The city at the center of the boom is Baku, which has swollen in size to the extent that half the country’s population now lives there. Everyone wants a share of the new money but not everybody gets it, creating huge new disparities of income.

Amid the influx of people there are many village women – Azerbaijan’s traditional weaving base. They have long given up weaving at home for family purposes but are ready to work in commercial weaving because it pays an average wage and they have few other employment opportunities. Yet what they produce for Azerbaijan’s commercial weaving companies is mostly inexpensive carpeting indistinguishable from that produced anywhere else.

Vugar Dadashov is one of a handful of entrepreneurs who is trying to revive high-quality, artistic weaving in the country. He employs some 70 to 75 weavers in the outskirts of Baku and in the Shirvan, Kuba, and Kazak regions and produces 550 to 600 carpets a year.

Dadashov says the biggest challenge is to recreate the traditional knowledge base of Azeri weavers. The grandmothers and great grandmothers of the present generation had that base, but much has been lost and now must be relearned.

Fortunately, the country has long had scholars who have studied the technical structures of all the antique Caucasian rugs, so these are well known. And the designs are well recorded by museums and in art books. So, the weavers’ knowledge can be regained.

Dadashov says a key part of his revival strategy is to encourage his weavers to go back to working at home, the traditional Azeri workplace. He keeps production from his formal workshop, just outside Baku, to a maximum of 10 to 15 percent of his total output.

Other high quality operations are also focusing on small workshop and independent weaving to recreate the high-quality handwork of the past.

Anther firm, Aygun, has 35 weavers and 15 apprentices. It is located near Kuba -- a region from which more than 30 distinct carpet patterns originate -- and produces around 140 carpets a year.

But if these ‘revivalists’ are to turn back the hands of time, they have much ground to recover. That is because so much of the uniqueness of Azerbaijan’s carpet-making art was destroyed during the country’s time under the Russian and then Soviet empires.

Russia entered the Caucasus in the 18th century and spent the next century integrating the region into its economy. To spur carpet production as a profitable export item, Tsarist officials introduced the Kustar (Russian for ‘Artisan’) program in the 1860s, providing home weavers with patterns and wool while taking care of sales. Twenty years later, the newly opened Russian-built railroad was taking tons of carpets to Black Sea ports for export.

All that time, quality continuously declined. Cheap synthetic dyes were introduced wholesale. And producers introduced non-traditional designs of all kinds. R.E. Wright and J.T. Wertime note in their book ‘Caucasian Carpets and Covers’ that the new design elements included European floral sprays inspired by patterns on wallpaper or soap wrappers.

Roya Taghiyeva, director of Baku’s carpet museum, says things only got worse during the Soviet period.

“The main purpose was simply for more carpets to be woven, as it was an export product,” she says. “It brought currency, but our different schools of weaving lost their classic distinguishing features. Shirvan-style carpets were woven in Kazak, and Kazak carpets in Shirvan. No attention was paid to specific features.”

She adds: “When it got orders from foreign countries, the Azeri Carpet Union would tell producers the designs, where to produce them, in what quantity, and with what wool.”

Lost were such traditional distinctions as weaving different types of carpets in different geographical areas, with distinguishably different color values and wools. Those were the nuances which once made Caucasian carpets so prized by collectors.

As for independent carpet producers, the Soviets simply put them out of business. Dadashov, whose great grandfather was a very successful rug merchant, tells a story of how his uncle once found a fortune stashed away in the family’s old house.

The uncle, then a boy of six, put a hole in one of the rooms’ walls while playing with a stick. Crammed into the wall were sacks tightly stuffed with useless Tsarist-era rubles. It was great grandfather’s capital from his shop that the Bolsheviks closed in 1920. Communist officials later seized the discovered sacks of money and burned them in a bonfire in the Old City district of Baku.

Now Dadashov is trying to revive his family business generations later by focusing on a return to natural colors and high quality wools. He and the other revivalist producers have also returned to hand-spinning their wool and using the different grades traditionally associated with carpets of a specific provenance.

But Azeri officials continue to lay a heavy hand on the carpet industry, which the government still regards as an important source of tax revenue.

For each exported rug, producers must buy a license from the Chamber of Commerce that costs $ 113. Then they must pay customs fees.

But perhaps even more importantly, the government provides no encouragement in the form of subsidies that have become common in other carpet-producing countries.

“If a carpet exporter makes more than $ 100,000 annually in Iran, the government gives special premiums to the exporter,” Dadashov says. “In Turkey, the tax that you pay to the government is paid back to you after a while. That does not happen here.”

All this, along with the higher salaries paid to weavers in Azerbaijan than in Iran or the subcontinent, puts producers at a disadvantage on the world market. When imitators in Pakistan and Afghanistan can produce their own ‘Kazaks’ with the general outlines of the famous Caucasus design – but at a fraction of the cost – the competition is tough indeed.

The future of the Azerbaijan’s carpet industry could depend as much upon how Azeris themselves view their traditional art form as upon how the market does.

As Azerbaijan gets wealthier, two trends are noticeable.

One is a marked preference in the country for modern, machine made floor covering of the kind common in the West.

The other is a predilection among the very wealthy to give expensive hand-woven carpets as high-status gifts and the continuing custom – at all levels of society – of wrapping deceased loved ones in carpets for burial.

It is to early to predict which of these opposing pulls will prove strongest. But at Baku’s carpet museum, Taghiyeva sees part of her job as educating young Azeris about their own rich art heritage.

The museum, which moved into the former Lenin Museum when Azerbaijan became independent in 1991, stores many masterpieces of the past. But she says looking is not enough.

“Our museum was engaged in preserving and researching our carpets. But in connection with the market economy, we have changed our function,” she says.

“Today, we want this museum to be an educational and entertainment center. We have programs for children, wedding programs, we show the carpets’ important role in these events. There are a number of moments in our wedding traditions that are connected with carpets. The carpets were not only laid on the ground, they reflected the owner’s world outlook.”

Now, she says, her aim is to keep carpets as part of the identity of future generations of Azeris as well.

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Related Links

Caucasian Carpets
Barry O'Connell: Caucasian Rugs and Carpets

Vugar Dadashov
Vugar Dadashov's AzerbaijanRugs.com

Roya Taghiyeva
Article: Azerbaijan's Traditional Art Not Recognized By International Museums

Next ICOC Conference Site Likely Paris Or Stockholm

2008-02-25T00:38:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK, February 25, 2008 -- The International Conference On Oriental Carpets has chosen Paris and Stockholm as the principal candidates for hosting its next conference – ICOC 12.

The dates have yet to be set but will be in either 2010 or 2011.

The chairman of the ICOC’s international committee, Professor Walter B. Denny, has sent a ‘request for proposal’ package to representatives in each city. They are to submit their detailed replies by April this year.

After the proposals are considered, there will be a vote on the final host city and the announcement of the result. Updates are available on the ICOC’s website: http://www.icoc-orientalrugs.org/.

The ICOC’s last conference was in Istanbul on April 19 - 22, 2007.

The official Istanbul ICOC exhibitions catalogue, Weaving Heritage of Anatolia, may be ordered from Dennis Marquand at http://www.rugbooks.com/.

The 2-volume boxed set has hundreds of color plates and chronicles the remarkable early carpets in the Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi exhibition, as well as private collections of previously unpublished kilims, rugs and yastiks.

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Selling Persian Carpets On Italian TV Is A Passion

2008-02-22T03:55:00.000-08:00

ROME, February 22, 2008 -- Germany and the United States are the countries that buy the most Persian rugs, each year taking about 50 percent of Iran’s exports.

But it is Italy, the third biggest consumer, which seems to love them the most.

It is only in Italy that Persian carpets appear night after night on their own television shows, sometimes on two channels at once.

The shows are for telemarketing but, because carpets are beautiful and because Italians are unabashedly public in their adoration of beauty, the shows have become national institutions. On the air for decades, they have their own recognizable stars whose one-man performances attract not only carpet buyers but just-lookers of all sorts.

The king of this commercial theater is Alessandro Orlando, whose full name composed of two first names is enough to be memorable by itself. He appears on the Telemarket Green Elephant satellite channel, which also sells everything from porcelain to paintings to antique furniture. Alessandro sells those, too, but he reserves his most passionate performances for carpets in general and Persian carpets in particular.

As the show begins, he is sitting or standing alone in a cocoon of carpets. They are hung on the walls beside and behind him. They cover the floor beneath him. He is pensive.

“Over the past 100 years, there have been only five names of master Persian carpet makers known the world over,” he begins. “Mohtashem, Hadji Jalili, Habibian …”

“The most famous of them is Usted Fatollah Habibian. So famous that three years ago Iran, recognizing his work as part of its national patrimony, forbid removing any remaining Habibians from the country.”

Now, Alessandro looks directly at the camera and the pace quickens.

“But tonight, we have something extraordinary. No museum, no gallery in Europe has ever assembled the kind of collection of Habibians we have here, on these walls. There are only two Habibians in London’s V&A, a couple in Tehran’s carpet museum …”

Then, just when the camera pulls back and begins showing the carpets on display, Alessandro does what makes his show – and Italian telemarketing – so sui generis. He doesn’t begin selling, but pauses instead to launch into a full 15-minute homage to Habibian, his career, and his art.

That includes: Habibian’s birth around 1900, his early years aspiring to be a musician in Nain, the city’s rich tradition of weaving that shifted his attention to design, and finally his discovery of a new way of wrapping six strands of silk into a single fiber which, Alessandro says triumphantly, makes his carpets “as absolutely indestructible as they are beautiful.”

There are photos of Habibian on screen, sitting in a room of carpets. Alessandro has become his voice. “A true master can only produce 500 carpets in his lifetime because he is a perfectionist," he says. "We live in a world of false artists, false because they imitate the masters. They are good but they are ‘copyists’ … you will never find two Habibians that are the same, any more than two Picassos.”

When the selling finally does begin, the mood becomes much more businesslike. But Alessandro has set the stage so well that the prices of the goods on sale raise doubts only among collectors. For the rest, the tag of just 5,250 Euros for a six-square-meter designer carpet is a dream come true.

Alessandro's superlatives ring out and, in the background, so do the phones.

“A white diamond to put in your salon!”

“An enchanted garden!”

“A palace constructed from a carpet!”

“Mama … a Habibian!”

By the time it is over – a full hour later – Alessandro has sold enough to put noticeable gaps in the wall of carpets behind him. Muscular arms that briefly appear on camera pull the sold pieces down and take them away.

Alessandro himself is exhausted. He has walked the equivalent of several kilometers within his small studio, knelt on carpets, draped ones he likes over one knee, draped ones he likes even more over one shoulder, and generally proven that the church of art in Italy is every bit as impassioned as evangelist churches in America.

What does Alessandro look like? He is simply the man you would find standing beside you at the counter of an espresso bar, with a rumpled suit and no briefcase. His most prominent features are his black hair, which contrasts vividly with his graying temples, and his black eyebrows which rapidly change expression. He is Everyman.

There are lesser stars of Italian telemarketing, which runs 24 hours a day. But no others rise above their on-screen roles. There is a more intellectual type who whispers footnotes of art history, there is a more physical type who comes on strong like a boxer, and there is a hypnotic type who intones over and over: “with this investment you will never lose.”

There is even a man who dresses in a brocaded jacket like a yacht captain, but he sells antique dressers and commodes, not textiles.

The telemarket programs have been on the air so long that thousands of people have circulated through them as off-screen prompters whispering carpet dimensions and prices to the showmen or as delivery boys taking the goods to customers.

Hadi Dadashian, an Iranian-American who lives in San Francisco, worked with a telemarketer while he was a student in Rome decades ago. He still remembers a delivery to Gina Lollobrigida.

“When we got to her apartment it was very late at night,” he says. “She was all alone and she opened the door herself.”

He recalls that the actress lived in a fabulous setting but looked sad and was watching all-night TV. She gazed for a long time at the carpet she had ordered and several times ran a red toe nailed foot over it to check its softness. Then she accepted it, like a bouquet of flowers she had bought to cheer herself up.

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Related Links

Alessandro Orlando

Alessandro Orlando: “Meravigliosa!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEfU1I3gKBQ&feature=related

Alessandro Orlando: Too Busy To Speak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95PQ3NBGuPU&feature=related

Fatollah Habibian

Barry O’Connell: Habibian Nain Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/em9653.htm

A Trove Of Turkish Kilims In A Small Prague Museum

2008-02-18T04:53:00.000-08:00

PRAGUE, February 18, 2008 -- The pretty baroque capital of the Czech Republic may not seem a likely place to find a museum collection of antique village and prayer rugs from the remotest corners of Turkey.

But the rugs – 1,265 of them – are stored in vaults for the city’s small ethnographic museum, the Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures located in the heart of the ‘old town’ district. Bequeathed to the museum in 1994, they are still awaiting a complete cataloguing and a permanent display space.

Dagmar Pospisilova, head of the museum’s Asian Department, says the collection is the largest of its kind outside of Turkey. It ranges from simple and complex kilims to sophisticated pile carpets produced in workshops. The rugs come from villages and towns in both western and eastern Anatolia and offer a rich illustration of Anatolian folk traditions.

Dr. Pospisilova shows as an example a 19th century pile carpet woven by nomads as a sleeping mat in Central or Eastern Anatolia.

How the collection came to Prague is a story almost as fascinating as the pieces themselves.

The owner was the late Rainer Kreissl, an antiques dealer who specialized in many different forms of art, from European to Asia. But he had a special personal attachment to two things in particular: African statuary and Anatolian weavings.

He began his collecting during the 1960’s, at a time when rare finds were still possible in Turkey as well as Africa. And he had the money and contacts to pursue the best.

Born in 1924, in then Czechoslovakia, Kreissl originally was expected to follow his father’s profession as a hops farmer. But an early childhood success selling a mosaic he made of discarded bits of porcelain to an aunt convinced him to follow his artistic instincts instead.

Fate, however, often disrupted his plans. His mixed Czech-German family was spared the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after the second world war. But the communist rule that came next was far from favorable for a professional art dealer.

Kreissl’s eye for collectibles attracted members of the foreign diplomatic corps and, with them, the attention of the Czechoslovak intelligence service. The police wanted him to be an informer. Knowing the consequences of refusing, he fled to Germany in 1963.

There, he arrived penniless. But he soon joined a prominent auction house for fine arts, later becoming the head of its Munich branch. Later still, he spent six years as an independent dealer in San Francisco.

His wide travels took him to Turkey at a time when most museums were still interested in acquiring Ottoman carpets and most collectors were looking for West Anatolian prayer rugs from Gordes or Milas. He was among those just beginning to turn instead to village rugs that offered other expressions of traditional Anatolian weaving.

As he told an interviewer once: “I went to workshops, to homes, to mosques, and I began to get a reputation as an eccentric, who would buy any old tattered rag. Later, people began bringing things to me themselves.”

Just how the antique rugs found their way to Kreissl’s home over the succeeding years remains one of the enduring mysteries around his collection. It is generally believed they came with the tide of Turkish guest workers into Germany. The workers smuggled in valuable pieces obtained from mosques -- legally or illegally— to sell for extra income. Kreissl would have been well placed in Munich to buy them.

Murray L. Eiland Jr. and Murray Eiland III, in their textbook ‘Oriental Carpets,’ note this sudden outflow of valuable pieces from Turkey’s mosques.

“By the 1990’s,” they observe, “collectors began to take an interest in early Anatolian pieces that were often fragmentary and had apparently migrated from Turkish mosques and other repositories to Western collections in little over a decade.”

As for Kreissl, he kept his trade secrets secret. But he was always ready to buy to a good piece, whether or not he had the money on hand.

“Once I didn’t have enough cash, so I paid with a new luxury car,” he recalled.

As he became an expert on Anatolian village rugs, and wrote about them, he urged Westerners to stop regarding eastern weavings as ‘oriental,’ that is, outside of their own art history. Instead, he argued, Turkish motifs draw on many pre-Islamic sources, including Western and Christian traditions.

Among the evidence he cited were similarities between some rug motifs and the patterns found in Hellenistic art or in the painted markings on columns in Cappadocia’s underground churches.

Kreissl’s death in 2005 at the age of 81 leaves his argument unresolved. But his donation of his entire collection, intact, to a single Prague museum puts it within the reach of other rug scholars should they want to try to prove, or disprove his thesis.

Several years before Kreissl died, a journalist asked Kreissl him to identify the most consistent source of joy in his life.

“When I discover something,” he replied. “I don’t have to actually own it. I am simply happy that I discovered something beautiful that otherwise people would overlook.”

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Related Links

Museum:

Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures: Anatolian Carpets
http://www.aconet.cz/npm/extras/asia_anatol_carpets/eindex.html

Books:

Internetboekhandel:Art As Tradition (by Rainer Kreissl 1995)
http://www.nnbh.com/nurpage.cgi?nur=645&sort=alfa&find=3777468207#3777468207

Amazon: Gates To Heaven (by Rainer Kreissl 1998)
http://www.amazon.de/Himmelspforten-Rainer-Kreissl/dp/377748170X

Amazon: Infinite Variety (by Rainer Kreissl 2000)
http://www.amazon.de/Unendliche-Vielfalt-Anatolien-Rainer-Kreissl/dp/3777487201