Can Europe's Tapestries And Village Rugs Survive The Global Carpet Competition?

HANOVER, February 19, 2009 – No-one is surprised anymore at how many Western consumer items are produced in Asia.

But it can be a shock to see how many Western handcrafts are rapidly going the same way.

All over Europe, there are merchants selling crystal vases and glassware that once were locally made but now are just as likely to be made in China. The same is true for Baroque porcelain figurines, pewter candelabras, and handmade lace. If store owners remove the “made in” sticker, many buyers never notice the difference.

The East's workshops are excellent enough, and low cost enough, that they not only successfully compete with Europe’s traditional artisans, they also are putting many out of business. The news in December that cash-strapped Waterford Wedgwood is ready to sell off its once star acquisition Rosenthal – the famous German porcelain and china maker – is just one example.

A recent walk around Domotex, the carpet world’s largest annual trade show in Hanover, Germany, shows that Europe’s textile heritage is also no stranger to the trend.

The carpet show brings together producers from Turkey, Iran, India, China, Pakistan, and Nepal. For four days, they meet and trade with the wholesalers who supply Europe’s retail stores and boutiques with the whole spectrum of low-cost to luxury-grade oriental carpets. The styles on show range from classical to tribal to contemporary styles, so one expects to see a bit of everything.

But what one does not expect to see is something like a Moldovan village rug – the kind that is filled with memories of Old Europe. And yet here is one hanging on the wall of an Indian carpet-maker's booth with its characteristic design of roses -- the same roses that Moldovan peasant women traditionally weave into their ankle-length skirts and colorful headscarves.

Standing near the Moldovan rug is its producer, R. K. (Raju) Rawat of Manglam Arts, Jaipur. He is an affable man in a checkered sports jacket who looks pleased when a visitor recognizes how much his rug resembles the originals.

Rawat, who produces about 50 Moldovan rugs a month, says he got the idea some five years ago. That was when he saw some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale at an earlier Domotex show.

"I was attracted by Moldovan designs because of their feeling of freshness," he says. "They make you think about roses and gardens, and everyone loves roses."

But the dealer says getting Indian weavers to reproduce them was not easy. "I found one particular village that was interested, and the weavers were very flexible, but it still took a few years because they had just some photos to work from, they didn't have the original piece in their hands."

He pauses and then adds proudly, "but they did it!"

Have the Indian Moldovans been well received? Certainly.

"We brought them to Frankfurt's 'Heimtextil' show where designers and architects come and they really appreciated them. Even people from Moldova come and say this is fantastic!"

Mr. Rawat is a businessman and perfectly within his rights to reproduce any design he likes. But one has to wonder. If distant weavers take over this bit of Europe’s heritage, how long will it be before the rugs’ real origins become first, irrelevant and, then, forgotten?

It is not just a question that interests Europeans. Vast amounts of Persian carpets are hand-woven outside of Iran and almost all Caucasian carpets today are woven outside of the Caucasus.

The foreign producers reformat and simplify the original designs to fit their own concepts of what the global market wants.

In the case of the Caucasian carpets known as Kazaks that are woven in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the market has grown so used to their deliberately harmonized styles that those few weavers still working in the Caucasus get little competitive advantage by sticking to their traditional and much more spontaneous patterns.

Thinking about such things prompts one to walk around the rest of the fair in hopes of finding some genuine Moldovan rugs on sale as Rawat once did. It’s a daunting task. Domotex is a huge trade show, with several aircraft hangar-sized rooms filled with hand-woven carpets.

The carpets sprawl across the floor space in a vast array of knee-high and thigh-high piles, so the vast hangars resemble a giant bazaar. The richest carpet producers have glass enclosures. Others simply sit among their wares.

Everywhere, muscular porters are flipping back carpets as buyers look on with calculators in hand. As sales are made, in lots of dozens of carpets at a time, the porters stack them, bundle them in black plastic, and haul them away.

It is like looking for a needle in a haystack but, amazingly, almost invisible among the mountains of oriental rugs, there is a little stack of Moldovans. They are at the stand of a Turkish dealer, Ozmelek Hali.

How did they get here? One of the salesmen tells what he knows.

Before the trade show, the company went around the Istanbul bazaar collecting them from other dealers because it knows the carpets interest some European retailers. The rugs came to the Grand Bazaar in the suitcases of Moldovan travelers, who sell them cheaply for cash.

The Istanbul salesman, who has the air of a hard-working family man, observes a moment of silence after what he has just said. Moldova is Europe’s poorest nation, with 20 percent of its population working outside the country and sending back money to support the rest. The rugs are as likely to be personal heirlooms as workshop pieces. One of them has an inscription -- the name Iornuvera M. -- and a date, 1964.

It's striking how detailed the original Moldovans are compared to the copies. They are old, many are coarse and with dull colors, but they are definitely interesting.

And, it seems, appealing. Soon, three Norwegian retailers stop by. They circle the stack of old Moldovans with the keen eyes of people who have spotted what they are looking for.

The two women and a man are partners in a small home-furnishings catalog company called 'Home and Cottage' south of Oslo. It’s the kind of company that specializes in supplying rough, unvarnished chairs and dressers that look like they were stored for generations in the family attic.

Kaj Roger, the male partner, says the Moldovan carpets fit well with cottage decors. "We have a lot of cottages in Norway," he confides, "and at the cottage it should be Old Style. It's a place to relax."

Does he mean the Moldovan carpets somehow represent good old days, a grandmother's weavings, memories of lifetimes past?

The three Norwegians, who are entering middle age, do not object to any of these suggestions. One of the ladies pulls out the latest Home and Cottage catalog. She shows a picture of a Moldovan carpet in mellow golden and rust colors spread across a rough wood plank cabin floor. Then she shows another photo of a carpet draped across an ocean steamer trunk. The pictures are contrived but comforting. Old, bygone Europe.

Rawat's fresh and more brightly colored reproductions are not likely to appeal to the customers of Home and Cottage. But there is every reason to believe he will find a market. There are many successful precedents right here at Domotex, and they are not hard to spot.

In the middle of the sea of carpets, there is a small island that serves as a landmark for visitors. It is a restaurant with a terrace of tables ringed by houseplants which manages to look like an outdoor Biergarten. The restaurant competes bravely against the outside caterers who move around the trade show with freezer boxes full of curries and pilafs for the carpet producers.

To have a stand around the restaurant guarantees high visibility, so some of the biggest Persian producers are there. But so is one of the strangest sights of all: a large enclosure full of French Baroque carpets and tapestries.

It is the stand of Renaissance Carpets, a New York-based producer. Inside, one whole wall is covered with a 12 by 24 foot (3.6 x 7.3 meters) tapestry depicting scenes from a 17th century boar hunt. It is amazingly detailed, with all the characters in period costumes.

A young salesman in a department store suit is standing nearby. He has come over from New York because, he says, the company's tapestries and Aubusson and Savonnerie carpets sell equally well in Europe and the United States.

Who buys them?

"People who have houses in a similar style," he says nonchalantly, as if lots of people in the 21st century live in Baroque manor homes.

And where are they made?

"In China."

The boar hunt tapestry, he explains, took three weavers seven months to complete, with a resident French artist overseeing the work. The cost is modest compared to the same piece woven in Europe. Just $ 18,000.

One can't help but admire the quality. If this is a copy, where is the original? In a museum?

"We own the original," the salesman says. The company bought it at an auction for $ 15,000. And with the purchase, it acquired the copyright.

One could ask more questions but suddenly there don't seem to be any left. If a copy can be this good-looking and inexpensive, there is no reason to insist -- except out of vanity -- that your replica French hunting tapestry should be woven in France. Who but an expert can tell if it is woven in China under a French tutor instead?

Or is that really enough? France today still has a viable tapestry industry that continues a rich cultural heritage. But as the market gets used to outsourcing, there is no certainty that it will have one forever.

One leaves Domotex with one's head spinning. Can art, whether it's in Europe, Iran, India, or Africa, be separated from its place of origin and history without simply becoming a commodity? And if it becomes a commodity, what can stop it from inevitably being reworked and simplified to appeal to the widest market, until its meaning and history are all but forgotten?

And, finally, if this is exactly what is happening with globalization, who should come to the rescue? The natural saviors are those who love the original carpets the most -- collectors. But collectors tend to collect carpets from the past, not the present. And doing so, they fail to support today's traditional artisans or guarantee the future.

Perhaps it's time to re-think the business of collecting. If the intention is to preserve carpets as a meaningful cultural patrimony, the efforts being made today may seem a lot less successful tomorrow than they do now.

(The photo at the top of this article is a detail from The Lady And The Unicorn tapestry series in the Cluny Museum, Paris.)

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

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

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

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

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

The conversation flows easily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Mr. Ezzabi is too charming to quibble with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The oil men say it is beautiful."

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

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

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

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

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

And did he sell it?

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

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

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Domotex 2009: Oriental Carpet Producers Brace For Economic Downturn

HANOVER, January 23, 2009 -- This time of year in Hanover, northern Germany, the sun barely appears before 8:30 and is gone by 4 pm. And all day long the North Sea wind hurtles into the city with nothing to stop it but the giant flags flapping over the city's sprawling fairground.

Still, hundreds of carpet producers and importers come here, bringing tons of oriental rugs from every corner of the world. They crowd into the fairground's hangers, employ an army of muscle men to stack the carpets in chest-high piles, and wait for thousands of European wholesalers to buy them.

The vast oriental souk is 'Domotex,' the carpet world's biggest trade show, and lasts for four days. During that time, producers and buyers strike contracts worth millions of euros. And they exchange information about everything from what retail customers want today to what they will buy tomorrow.

The talk is always a lively mix of business hopes and fears. But this year it is mostly about one thing: the economic downturn. All the producers, from Turkey, to Iran, to India are feeling the collapse of the housing market in the West because sales of home furnishings and carpets connect directly to the sales of new homes.

The connection is simple enough. When people buy new homes, they like to decorate them. But now the housing market slump that began in America is reverberating across Europe and people are trying to save or sell properties, not buy new ones.

Many producers predict the economic downturn will further polarize the carpet world into high-end and low-end producers. Mid-range producers, already under the stress of rising labor costs, could find it increasingly difficult to stay in business.

Habib Bayat is one of the partners of the high-end producer Bayat Nomad Gaminchi of Tehran and Los Angeles. He takes a moment to consider the trend as he and his daughter, who is also a carpet designer, show buyers their new collection.

The company’s stand, like those of the other top-quality producers at the fair, is a glass-walled enclosure that affords some refuge from the bazaar-like hubbub around it. Inside, like a showroom, the walls are hung with luxurious carpets in rich natural colors. One of them is already marked sold. It will be packed up by the muscle men and dispatched to a home on the other side of the world: Denver, Colorado.


Bayat says that the market downturn comes as many Iranian producers are struggling to retain weavers. “In the last three years, our pay to weavers has gone up two and-a-half times,” he says.

Even at the best of times, he notes, producers, cannot pass on such a sharp increase to the market. Now, with the economic downturn, the higher volume of sales that producers depend upon to offset higher costs becomes harder to achieve.

Why are weaving costs going up in Iran?

Bayat says there are two reasons.

One is an out-migration of weavers to other jobs, creating a bidding game among producers for the weavers who remain.

“In Iran, young people are influenced by what is on television, so girls don’t want to weave carpets,” he says. Instead, they want jobs in factories or in agriculture. People regard factory work as modern and guaranteeing a future – an image that traditional work does not have.

The second reason for rising costs is inflation. In Iran, inflation is in double digits, consistently cutting into the buying power of the rial.

Bayat, whose smaller rugs sell at $700 a square meter wholesale, serves a luxury niche that is unlikely to flee to lower-cost products. But even his company cannot afford to be passive. It stakes its future on a natural dye plant it built near Shiraz 16 years ago. To date, the plant has developed a palette of 140 vegetable dyes. That means continual R&D costs but gives the carpets a clear competitive advantage as they show off as many as 25 natural colors at once.

Most mid-range Iranian producers have no such strong capabilities to keep customers from looking for lower-cost alternatives. So, they worry, and one glance around Domotex is enough to see why.

All over the trading floor, there is a rising tide of competitors from India and China – weaving powerhouses that are able to make technically sound copies of Persian carpets. They can pass on their own lower domestic labor costs to consumers, and many consumers do not require Persian carpets to be woven in Iran.

At another stand, the Hamburg importer and exporter Djavad Nobari covers the floor with its specialty: over-sized Persian carpets. For two generations, the company has supplied 12-meter square rugs for European dining rooms and living rooms. But now, big rugs are not selling like they used to.

Shahin, one of the younger generation of the family-owned business, gives some statistics. “Four years ago, we brought 60 to 70 12-meter carpets to the trade show,” he says. “Now, we bring just 20 to 30.”

The biggest sizes that sell readily now, he adds, are 9-meter-square rugs. He says that reflects the slowing market – “2006 was the last great year” – and changing lifestyles. More and more European homes have high-gloss laminated floors that look nice with smaller, accent carpets. The days of covering dull, scuffed floors with room-sized rugs are ending.

Shahin, who was born in Germany, is fully in tune with European customers. So much so, that the current market downturn does not worry him as much as a longer-term cultural trend: the fading interest in oriental carpets among young people.

"The biggest problem in the Persian carpet trade is marketing,” he says. “We don't show customers how good a carpet can look in their homes.”

On his computer, he displays what he hopes will be the answer. It is a series of advertisements depicting contemporary living rooms with oriental carpets on the floor. The combinations are striking, including a curvilinear white Nain beside a geometric chrome and black-leather sofa.

It’s no longer enough for retailers to put a picture of a rug in the newspaper with their company logo over it, the dealer says. Carpet sellers have to make owning a carpet desirable -- desirable enough to weather market storms. And the current storm may be just the time to begin.

(Photos courtesy of Domotex and Djavad Nobari)

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Portrait Carpets: From Local Heroes To World Leaders, Every Picture Tells A Story

KABUL, January 9, 2009 -- The Afghan capital may be a good place to look for the sober-colored carpets of Central Asia. But the weavings most obviously on sale are portrait rugs, and they are as brightly tinted as movie posters.

Almost all the portrait rugs depict Ahmed Shah Massoud and they are everywhere – hanging from clotheslines in street bazaars and piled inside the cramped rug shops on Chicken Street.

The fact that the pictures are of Massoud, the famous Afghan-Tajik commander, isn’t surprising. Like every genre, portrait rugs – which deliberately mix art and politics -- have their rules. And Massoud embodies all of them.

The first requirement is to have a story larger than life. Massoud has that. As a mujahideen leader, he fought against the Soviets and later, when Afghanistan plunged into civil war, against many other foes, including the Taliban. Throughout, he kept the Afghan-Tajik heartland in the Panjshir Valley safe from enemies. His nickname was the ‘Lion of Panjshir.’

Massoud also meets a second requirement specific to posthumous portrait rugs. That is to have died an untimely death. He was assassinated by a team of suicide bombers posing as journalists just before 9/11. After 9/11, U.S. airpower enabled Massoud’s and other anti-Taliban forces to finally sweep to victory.

So, where in other countries fallen leaders live on in movies to become the stuff of legend, in Kabul Massoud lives on in weavings.

The Massoud rugs are clearly more about politics than about art. They are loosely made and priced low for the widest distribution. But the same is not true for all portrait carpets, which can be found in varying forms from the Caucasus, to Iran, to China.


In the former Soviet Union, governments and organizations spent and still spend small fortunes to create portrait rugs of astonishing technical skill.

Take this portrait carpet of Lenin, one of the most popular figures for Soviet propaganda carpets. The Turkmen weaving is of museum standard and one can only guess whether it was commissioned for a meeting hall, mausoleum, or the private villa of a powerful party boss.

Another popular face on Soviet portrait carpets is Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth. His rugs were highly popular in Soviet homes at the height of the space craze in the 1960s and 70s.

In Iran, portrait carpets have a long association with the pre-revolutionary dynasties. Common faces during the Shah's era were the Shah himself and, oddly enough, John F. Kennedy.

For that matter, in Iran politicians don't just appear on carpets, carpets also appear in politicians' speeches. Ayatollah Khomeini, the former Supreme Leader, is a case in point.

"None among you is content with his own carpet,” he once complained publicly to other politicians. “Each one among you seeks to stretch his legs on his neighbor's carpet."

Perhaps one of the most unexpected people to ever appear on an Iranian portrait carpet is a young American who taught at the American missionary school in Tabriz early in the 1900s.

The teacher, Howard Baskerville, was a fervent believer in democracy who sympathized with Iran's Constitutional Revolution against the despotic Qajar monarchy. When royalist troops besieged Tabriz in 1909, he joined his students in the fighting. He died at age 24.

"The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference," is how he explained why he was risking his life in Iran’s struggle.

After his death, carpet weavers in Tabriz wove his portrait as a gift to his mother in America. He was buried in the city's Armenian cemetery and today there is still a bronze bust commemorating him in the Tabriz Constitutional House.

How difficult is it to weave a top quality portrait carpet?

Those who do it say it is the most difficult form of carpet making of all.

Kamil Aliyev, the living master of portrait weaving in Azerbaijan, has produced the likenesses of state visitors ranging from Indira Gandhi, to Bill Clinton, to Vladimir Putin.

He told Baku's Azerbaijan International in an interview in 2002 that to get a face right an artist must keep track of dozens of colors on a knot by-knot basis -- as this picture of a weaver at work shows.

He added: "being able to look at thousands and thousands of threads takes an enormous amount of concentration and patience."

Aliyev, who apprenticed under Azerbaijan's carpet expert Latif Karimov, says portrait weaving also takes a tremendous toll on the artists' eyes. And that may be one reason it is losing popularity among younger artists.

"I've enjoyed my life's work but I'm afraid that after me, the tradition of making these portrait carpets will die," he told the magazine. "It seems there is no one in Azerbaijan right now who can carry on my legacy. Today's youth who graduate from the carpet institute aren't trained to draw portraits."

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Unexploded Ordnance: Portrait Rugs

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Azerbaijan International: The Portrait Carpets of Kamil Aliyev

Owen Jones' Grammar Of Ornament And The West's Feelings About Eastern Design

LONDON, Dec. 26, 2008 -- A man and his sketchbook.

Not something that is going to change the world.

Perhaps that is what Owen Jones thought as he set out in 1831 for four years of travel in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt.

After all he was just 22 and lots of young well-bred Englishmen his age were out doing the Grand Tour, with their notebooks or watercolors in hand.

Still, he had some ambitious plans. After six years of apprenticing as an architect, he wanted to earn fame of his own. So, he set out to make the first complete survey of the Alhambra -- the Moorish citadel that overlooks Granada and dates to the 14th century.


Along with a French colleague, Jules Goury, Jones spent months making meticulous drawings of the palace's ornamental details, along with detailed plans of the buildings. Then in the middle of the project Goury died of cholera.

At that point, Jones might have stopped because the job was already more than enough work for two people. But he continued alone and in the process discovered his lifelong passion: cataloging mankind's vast variety of design traditions.

The Alhambra drawings were published in London in 1845 and helped spark a wave of new interest in Eastern design among Jones' fellow architects, commercial artists and interior designers.

By then Jones was already busy on what would become his masterwork: a global survey of architectural ornamentation drawn from the rest of his travel sketches and exhaustive library research.

His masterwork, The Grammar of Ornament published in 1856, included some 100 full-color plates of designs ranging from Greek, to Roman, to Byzantine, to Moorish, to Egyptian, to Persian, to Indian to Chinese.

This plate is one of the many presenting Persian designs.

Jones even included the incised patterns on wooden weapons from the Pacific islands, making his plates easily the most extensive and influential design catalog produced up to his time.

The Grammar was partly so successful because it both caught and advanced the spirit of Jones' own rapidly changing world. It came out just as Britain and other colonial powers were becoming fascinated by the vast variety of lands they ruled and Europeans were hungry for more information about them.

That fascination was perfectly embodied by the fad of Orientalism that created a market for everything from travel literature, to exotic paintings, to archaeological excavations.

This Orientalist painting by Frederic Lewis in 1857, entitled Harem Life in Constantinople, is typical of the genre.

But if Jones' catalog provided a sourcebook of world designs that greatly interested other Western architects and craftsmen, his contemporaries did not always use his reference work as he intended.

Along with the images, the Grammar included Jones' personal guidelines for the proper use of ornamentation in artwork.

One of his propositions was that "the first principle of architecture is to decorate construction, never to construct decoration." Another was that the purpose of all design is to create a sense of repose through proportion and harmony.

But most Victorian-age commercial designers thought just the opposite. They took the most effusive designs in the Grammar' and copied them wholesale as wallpaper, curtains, and furniture covers.

The result was that -- instead of the Eastern designs being integrated into Western ones -- the Victorian era's famously overstuffed parlors became even more wildly overdecorated and disharmonious than before.

Still, Jones did eventually get the chance to try to turn some of his maxims into reality. As a prominent architect and interior decorator, he was named superintendent of works for Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Exhibition was the first World Fair and its centerpiece was the Crystal Palace, a huge iron-and-glass building designed in a vaguely Moorish style. It was filled with artifacts and replicas of artworks from around the world and visitors mobbed it daily.

The six-month exhibition was a huge success. By the time it closed, some 6 million people visited -- equivalent to about half of Britain's population at the time.

And the exotic Moorish design of the Crystal Palace proved such a crowd pleaser that its life did not end with the fair. Instead, it was moved to a permanent London site where it remained as an exhibition hall until it was destroyed by a fire in 1936.

The Crystal Palace probably had a more direct impact on Western architecture than did Jones' Grammar. That is because it helped inspire the construction of a whole string of other vaguely Eastern-looking buildings as entertainment centers.

Shown here is the Regal Theater in Chicago, which originally opened as the Avalon Theater in 1927. Other famous "Eastern" playgrounds include Grauman's Chinese Theater, which has been a Hollywood landmark since 1927.

But in a strange twist of East meets West, the sudden enthusiasm for Eastern styles never spread beyond theaters and music halls.

The reason seems to be that Victorians could associate Eastern designs with pleasure palaces but could never reconcile them with normal workaday life.

Terry Reece Hackford observes in a 1981 thesis for Brown University that Moorish design commonly held "pleasurable and often erotic associations" for the Victorian public in the 1850s and 60s and this quality of association "limited the context in which an Eastern style was appropriate."

Does that mean that Owen Jones was ultimately wrong in thinking Eastern motifs could become a major source of inspiration for Western architects and interior designers?

The answer is both yes and no.

It is true that Eastern designs have had little impact on the way Western homes are constructed, despite some appealing possibilities. Here, for example, is a rare use of Moorish arches to open up a dining room area.

But Jones' catalog did become increasingly influential over time, and helped inject Eastern ornamentation into the Arts and Crafts Movement and, later, the Art Nouveau Movement. Both trends combined Eastern and other motifs to explore new looks in the decorative arts.

Today, the Grammar of Ornament remains very well known to professional designers. There is every reason to suspect that, as artists keep looking for new inspirations, Jones' sketchbook will keep producing surprises.

(The plate at the top of this article is of a window in the Alhambra, drawn by Jones and Goury.)

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Wickipedia: Owen Jones, Architect

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Terry Reece Hackford: The Great Exhibition and Moorish Architecture and Design in Great Britain

Owen Jones’ propositions concerning architecture and decorative arts

Plates from The Grammar of Ornament: Giornale Nuovo

Bespoke Carpets And The Fun Of Designing Your Own Oriental Rug

PRAGUE, December 5, 2008 -- One way the Internet is changing the oriental carpet business is by giving rug lovers the chance to directly contact producers.

It has not always been this easy.

Traditionally, customers have been separated from producers by numerous other people. The intermediates include wholesalers and retailers who, for their own good reasons, like to keep the names of producers vague or secret.

After all, who wants to be bypassed?

But now, anyone can find the names of rug production houses by simply doing a word search. A little Googling tells who produces Persian, Turkish, and Caucasian carpets, the subtypes they specialize in, and whether they use machine-spun or hand-spun wool.

And that opens a whole world of possibilities for people to directly commission their own carpets. If a producer agrees, one can even design one's own carpet or, more realistically -- because designing requires considerable experience -- modify an existing design to suit one's taste and fancy.

For those who want to play with designs, the first step is choose a model -- perhaps from a favorite rug book. Here is a Karabagh Tree of Life design taken from "Caucasian Prayer Rugs" by Ralph Kaffel (1998).

Now comes the challenging part. That is, finding a high-quality producer who works with the kind of rug type you like and who is willing to accept a single bespoke order.

Usually, bespoke producers will welcome commissions to produce large-sized rugs, but they are less interested in small-sized ones. And it is the smaller scale pieces that may best suit the individual customer because he is also going to have to pay the shipping and customs fees.

One artisan who is reviving traditional Caucasian carpets in Baku, but who is also willing to entertain single rug requests, is Vugar Dadashov of Azerbaijan Rugs. Like many producers with a sophisticated web page, he has become used to attracting the interest of not just retailers but individual rug lovers, too.

In the case of the Karabagh Tree of Life above, Dadashov saw no reason to refuse even a very unorthodox request. That was to let a child modify the design by choosing her favorite color for the background. The color choice? Yellow.

Yellow, of course, is not a color you usually see a lot in Karabagh rugs. But Dadashov and his designer accepted the whimsy of a child's world and in a few weeks mailed a cartoon of the modified design for inspection.

The cartoon flew airmail in an envelope covered with colorful postage stamps -- something as rare for a child to receive in this day of e-mails as, well, a letter from Azerbaijan.

After that, the project was in the hands of a single weaver. The weaver was just one woman because Dadashov believes reviving Azerbaijan's best rug-making traditions means letting weavers work again from their own homes. That restores individuality and, in the case of the yellow Tree of Life, makes one wonder how many design changes over the years came from women entertaining the whims of their own children and friends.

Weaving always takes months and one's anticipation rises steadily during that time. How much will the paper design change as it is transformed into a three-dimensional, pile rug? How different will the colors of the dyed wool be from those of crayons and colored pencils?

For adults commissioning a rug, these questions are entertaining enough. But for children, they are magical as they open the imagination to distant lands and ancient traditions.

And then, finally, there is a e-mail photograph of the finished rug. It is different from the design in many ways, yet also the same. In the upper-right is one more surprise: the child's name in Arabic letters and the weaving date according to the Hijri calendar.

The remaining step of actually getting the bespoke carpet home offers a quick education in several aspects of international commerce.

That includes the relative per-kilo costs of shipping via a foreign postal system vs. an international courier service. And, more interestingly, it includes learning about customs tariffs and where to collect duty-payable packages -- something that can take you deep into the heart of your own local postal system.

Still, one will emerge wiser and better informed about the rug trade.

One will learn that some imports -- like Afghan goods -- are virtually customs free because of bilateral government agreements to help develop Afghanistan's economy. And this, along with relative labor costs, is another reason why carpets from different countries can vary so greatly in price.

After that, there is only one more decision to make. To follow the trend by ordering more bespoke rugs, or to go back to shopping retail.

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Azerbaijan Rugs

Epic Journey: How A Trio Of 1920s Adventurers Filmed The Bakhtiari Migration

HOLLYWOOD, November 21, 2008 -- The nomadic tribes of southwestern Iran fascinate rug lovers for their great variety of weaving.

But what is less known is how much they once fascinated Western cinema audiences.

Eighty years ago, people crowded into movie theaters to see a silent film about Iran's nomads that has since became a classic of documentary movie-making.

The film is "Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life," released in 1925. It follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe on its seasonal migration to summer pastures. Along the way, it offers an astonishing look at a nomadic way of life which, today, has all but disappeared.

The film was made by three intrepid Western adventurers and begins with their traveling east from Angora (today Ankara), following the caravan routes to Iran. As the trio says at the outset, they are in search of a "Forgotten People" -- the nomads -- whose life is unchanged since primordial times. And they find their subject in the Bakhtiari tribes, which migrate with the rains and grass to survive.

The epic feel of the film comes from the scale of the migration: 50,000 people herding half a million animals on a 500 mile trek. And the drama and suspense grow with the spectacular nature of the terrain. A raging river and a 5,000 meter high mountain range separate the nomads from their goal.

One unforgettable scene is the crossing of the Karun river, which is swollen with Spring snow melt. The tribes have no boats to cross and the racing water is a forbidding sight. But as proof of the age-old ingenuity of man against the elements, they have a solution.

The nomads' answer is to inflate goatskins and use them as floats for rafts to carry across the women, children, and weakest animals. The men paddle across individually, holding onto their own floats like inner-tubes. Whether anybody can swim and, indeed, whether it is even possible to swim in such rough water without drowning, is left to the imagination.

The Karun river, Iran's most voluminous, originates in the high peaks of the Zagros mountain range in Chahrmahal va Bakhtiari Province and flows to the Persian Gulf. The nomads cross it only to face their next and still more daunting challenge -- crossing the mountain range itself.

The difficultly of the task can best be imagined by thinking of the Alps. The crossing point is a snow-covered mountain called Zard Kuh which rises up 4,500 meters, just a few hundred meters short of Mont Blanc's 4,800 meters. There is no visible trail over it and, as the thousands-strong, barefoot tribes march toward it, no hint they will find one.


But, again, there is a solution. The first groups of men unpack shovels and, in the same way one might dig out a driveway, steadily clear a path up the mountain. It is unimaginable work, made possible only by the sheer numbers of men available. And over a period of days, the hordes of humans, goats, and mules zig-zag their way up the slopes and over the range.

Such scenes cannot be seen today on anything like this scale. All over the world, nomads have been steadily settled by governments determined to end the land disputes that arise from herders moving freely over vast territories. And, indeed, as this 1925 movie makes clear, past generations of nomads moved like small armies. The thousands of tribesmen have rifles slung over their shoulders and could both hunt game and fight the authorities with them.

But for anyone who might think that the nomads, once settled, simply become like everyone else, the film is a welcome reminder of just how extraordinarily different the nomads' experience is. And the images can only increase one's interest in the mysterious symbols that even settled nomads continue to weave into their carpets -- the echoes of primal hopes, fears, and strengths.

Who made "Grass," and why?

That story is almost as interesting as the film itself.

The co-directors -- who doubled as cameramen -- are two American soldiers who remained in Europe after World War I. As Central Europe fell into a power vacuum with the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the civil war in Russia, they joined the fight to carve out an independent Polish state.

One of the pair, Merian C. Cooper, was a volunteer pilot in the fledgling Polish air force and flew numerous missions against Russian troops until he was shot down in Ukraine. Taken prisoner, he escaped again eight months later. (He is shown here in Polish Air Force uniform).

The other, Ernest B. Schoedsack, worked with the Polish war relief.

The third member of the team, who appears on camera chronicling the migration, is Marguerite Harrison. She was an American journalist with the Associated Press who also spied for Washington in Russia and Japan. She was imprisoned for ten weeks in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison.

The three, who all met in Poland, decided to film the Bakhtiari migration following the box-office success of one of Hollywood's first documentary and ethnographic films: Nanook of the North (1922). Here they pose in Ankara in 1923 at the start of their journey. Their own highly adventurous life imminently qualified them for their work, which included nearly freezing to death with their subjects.

"Grass," was commercially successful and launched Cooper and Schoedsack on lifelong careers as filmmakers. The two went on to make a documentary in Thailand ("Chang" in 1927) and later teamed up again to make the 1933 classic "King Kong."

Harrison, who wrote several books about Russia and Asia, later co-founded the Women's Society of Geographers and the Children's Hospital of Baltimore.

The lives of southwestern Iran's nomads have continued to fascinate film-makers ever since "Grass."

The story of the Bakhtiari migration was retold in "People of the Wind" (1976), which followed the migration in reverse.

And the nomadic Qashqai were recently featured in "Gabbeh" (1996) by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

All of the films are currently available on DVD.

The whole of "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life" also can be viewed on the Internet: CLICK HERE

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Related Links

Wikipedia: The Bakhtiari

Wikipedia: "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life"

Wikipedia: Merian C. Cooper

Wikipedia: Ernest B. Schoedsack

Wikipedia: Marguerite Harrison

Wikipedia: The Polish-Soviet War (1919 - 1921)

Wikipedia: Greater Poland Uprising (1918 - 1919)

Ryszard Antolak: Iran, King Kong, and Paradise Lost