CONTENTSISSUE 160 SUMMER 2009
36‘The Ottoman Rugs of Bistrit¸a’: the lost rugs of a parish
110 ‘Dance of Fire’: Iznik Ceramics at the Sadberk Hanım Museum
100‘Navajo Weaving’ at University
of Colorado
FRONTLINES LETTERSWhy not Wangden; the positive and negative of Baluch; Victoria Payne remembered 19 NEWS A woven Guernicaat London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the new eGallery – HALI’s online marketplace; suzanis at the Volkmantreffen; auction announcements 21 POSTCARDJonathan Hope achieves a lifelong ambition to visit Cirebon on Java 23 BENCHMARKSChristopher Legge on a southwest Persian khorjin; John Wertime on a sumakh bag face; Duncan Clarke on an Ashanti cloth 27 PROFILEDr Mickhail Piotrovsky of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg 33 FORUM Stefano Ionescu tells the story of a displaced collection of Transylvanian rugs 36 MASTERPIECE Heidi King on a Pre-Columbian feather tabard from the Met’s collection 38 SPECIAL REPORT Joe Loux and Katie Suckling investigate how African textiles fit into the market in African art and their appeal to textile connoisseurs 41
FEATURES WAYWARD USHAKS
MARTHA H. HENZE The author’s discovery of a cache of classical Ushak carpets in a monastery in rural Ethiopia
58
WAVES OF COLOUR
Lahariyaturbans of Rajasthan
JAYNE GRAHAM The dying art of tie-die: exemplary turban cloths created as prestige garments in India
62
THE MARK OF MOHTASHAM
66
SIAWOSCH ULRICH AZADI A re-examination of the provenance and dating of the rugs from the famous Kashan workshop
LET ANGELS REJOICE UWE BAUER
The 16th century embroidered Kloster Lüne Easter Carpet revealed
BOHÇA UNCOVERED
Ottoman Patchwork Wrapping Cloths PAUL HEPWORTH & HÜLYA TEZCAN A group of rare cloths discovered in the Topkapı Palace Museum and shown at the city’s ICOC XI
YAH-NA-PAH’S ‘CEREMONIAL’ WEAVINGS
REBECCA M. VALETTE A Navajo weaver’s entire corpus of four exceptional rugs that flaunted convention
FROM BLANKETS TO RUGS
Reinventing Navajo weaving for the Anglo-American Market DIANE BOUCHER How Navajo tribal weavings developed into rugs favoured for Arts & Crafts interiors
74
76
80
84
THE PENNSYLVANIA CONNECTION
BRANT MACKLEY Guest Curator of a Lancaster exhibition describes the impact of Germantown yarn on the Navajo
88
CONTEXT EXHIBITIONSJoe Ben Wheat’s Navajo rugs in Boulder; Tudor and Stuart embroi dery at the Bard; Thomas Wardle’s silks in Manchester; Indonesian tapisat the Hood Museum in Dartmouth; David Black’s tapestries; Iznik at the Sadberk Hanım; oriental art at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern; Anatolian rugs and Jaf Kurds in Milan; Chinese minority textiles in Antwerp; ARTS and Sartirana previews 100 CALENDAR Auctions, exhibitions, fairs and conferences worldwide 120 AUCTION PRICE GUIDE Recent sales in NY, London and Wiesbaden 125 BOOKSFranses Pritchard on 3,500 years of textile art; Michael Buddeberg on Essie Sakhai’s Persian Rugs and Carpets; and something different– Artist’s Tapestries from Australia 1976 - 2005 132 PARTING SHOTS Budapest, Montreal, New York, Copenhagen, London and Milan 142 FIRST VIEW The Motions of the Universe – an exceptional Flemish tapestry in Florence 144
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