Alexander Calder Tapestries
THE BEGINNING OF TAPESTRY WITH AUBUSSON
In 1960, Pierre Baudouin, master cartonnier at the Raymond Picaud workshop in France, asked the painter Léon Gischia if he knew any artists who would like to make tapestries. Gischia didn’t hesitate: Alexander Calder. Best known for his mobiles and public sculptures, Calder had a studio in Saché, not far from Baudouin’s Aubusson base, and soon began developing ink and gouache drawings – black and white at first – to be sent to the studio and made in wool .
‘If you like what you give them, you have to like what you get’
So said Alexander Calder when I asked him what he thought of the way Aubusson weavers interpreted his exuberant tapestry designs. Produced first by Picaud and then by Pinton Frères, the majority of the tapestries were made from Australian wool dyed to Calder’s specifications; each square metre of tapestry took a month to produce.
Calder prepared his tapestry designs on sheets of coloured paper the size of his large gouaches. These functioned as models, mechanically enlarged to the size of the finished tapestry.
Working with textiles was nothing new for Calder. ‘He made his own ties,’ reveals the artist’s grandson, Alexander S. C. Rower. ‘He also drew designs directly onto canvas, which my grandmother then hand-hung onto rugs.’
Calder was one of the artists most involved in tapestry: there were over fifty Calder images translated into Aubusson tapestries.
EXHIBITION OF CALDER’S TAPESTRIES
Calder’s tapestries are closely related to his gouaches, but they are much larger and often more complex in conception. As in all his works, the compositions are deceptively casual and have the same playful element that animates even the most powerful of his abstractions.
Their appearance turned the heads of connoisseurs, and the tapestries soon featured in Calder retrospectives at the Guggenheim in 1964 and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1965, and were the subject of an exhibition at the Whitney in 1971. Two years later, architect Eliot Noyes commissioned a 20-foot-wide masterpiece for IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, New York.
The Calder Aubusson tapestries were included in the 1976 Alexander Calder retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York and are part of its permanent collection. These Calder tapestries are illustrated in ‘Calder’s Universe’, which was published by the Whitney and is considered the ‘official book’ on Calder. The famous Whitney exhibition has also travelled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
After a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in the early 1930s, Calder abandoned figurative sculpture in favour of abstract, geometric constructions, which Jean Arp described as ‘stabiles’. He gradually began to add movement, and these became known as ‘mobiles’, named by Marcel Duchamp. In the 1950s, Calder began to produce sculptures on a monumental scale, and his outdoor work is certainly among the most brilliant public sculptures of our time. He also produced prolific designs for posters, textiles, jewellery and tableware.
Installation view of Celebrating Calder.
Celebrating Calder, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and on view at the Albright-Knox from March 9 to May 5, 1996, was a whimsical exhibition featuring more than 50 sculptures, drawings, jewelry, and tapestries by Alexander Calder.
FIBER TAPESTRIES
In 1972, two days before Christmas, a subsurface earthquake in neighbouring Nicaragua killed 5,000 people and left 250,000 destitute. The devastation drew the grandiose sympathies of Richard Nixon and Pope Paul VI, both of whom made lengthy public orations, but it was Manhattan socialite Kitty Meyer who set her sights on a huge visual arts project as a means of funding reconstruction. Only five artists responded to her written appeals for lithographs, one of them Calder, newly installed in his futuristic studio in Indre-et-Loire in central France. By way of thanks, Meyer, a former Holocaust refugee in Nicaragua, paid him a personal visit with a Masaya hammock as a gift.
Calder was so captivated by the craftsmanship of this Nicaraguan creation that he commissioned 100 local weavers to make a host of new ones based on eight of his own designs, as well as a range of wall hangings. A collection of 14 other limited edition tapestries followed; a whim had turned into a line of distinctive creative touches. In the spirit of Meyer’s altruistic vision, each was financed by paying the workers four times the usual rate. The resulting untitled works retain Calder’s distinctive palette, but assume an unusual robustness in their thick braided weave. A selection of these unconventional but beautiful tapestries is on display in many museums in the United States – all created before the artist’s death in 1976.
Installation view at the Huntington Museum of Art, USA
CALDER RUG BY CUTTOLI
Alexander Calder – Rug / Tapestry
The third technique of Calder tapestries are the rugs/tapestries from the Cuttoli workshop. These are very graphic and people (including Calder himself) hang them on walls, so inevitably they are called tapestries.
In the book, Calder’s Universe, which was published in conjunction with the Calder retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1976, several rugs are shown, some woven and knotted by Louisa Calder, the artist’s wife, others by apparent family friends. These are identified as never being available for sale, only for personal use. Since anyone who knows how to make a rug (including commercial manufacturers who have not heard of the artist’s rights) could make one after a Calder drawing, provenance can play an important role in determining whether a Calder rug is even legal.
There were two or three Calder rugs legitimately created by Marie Cuttoli, a friend of many artists including Picasso. Cuttoli had rugs made from Calder paintings that she owned. Hand-knotted, they were originally sold in galleries in both Europe and the United States, but always at prices well below Aubusson.
Galerie Hadjer: A Unique Collection of Calder Tapestries
Galerie Hadjer is distinguished today by owning one of the world’s largest collections of Calder tapestries. This precious collection bears witness to Calder’s rich artistic legacy and his lasting impact on the textile arts.
ALEXANDER CALDER
Dirty Blues
168 x 245 cm
Circa 1970
Aubusson Tapestry by Pinton workshop
COLLECTION HADJER
