The Looms of France
French Tapestry. Edited by Andre Lejard. (Paul Elec. 36s.)
AT times, when travelling, I have been much impressed by the advantages of ignorance. To see a place first and read it up after- wards is to get a full-blooded and unspoiled impression. The same system seems applicable to some fresh or unexplored branch of art: let the aesthetic impact come first, to be enhanced or explained by subsequent study. On this theory many of the people who have been seen, these last weeks, standing moonstruck but uninformed before the Lady with the Unicorn or the Apocalypse of Angers in the French Tapestry Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, should find their appreciation crystallised by this book. It is an expensive book, and (sad and surprising though it is to admit this of an art- book printed and made in France) its get-up is niggardly. It is is squarish, fashionably flat volume, printed on shiny paper, with a text in double columns and numerous illustrations, most of which do no justice to the works they represent. Tapestry in any case is un- suited to photographic reproduction: while paintings are often flattered by photography, tapestries which depend for their effect upon their size and splendour as well as upon their design, colours and soft unreflecting texture, appear blurred and confused under the camera's eye. The lofty, peopled scenes of the Rheims Life of the Virgin or the stately Gobelins sets of Alexander and The History of the King (which give one that sense of personal insignificance that one experiences in the galleries and parterres of Versailles) are spiritually as well as physically diminished by photography.
The text, composed of translated articles by leading French experts, is comprehensive and crisply informative. Essays upon the tech- nique of tapestry, on mediaeval and renaissance French tapestries, on the history of the Beauvais factory, on the Gobelins, on Aubusson and on the current revival of the art tell you simply and chronologic- ally the facts you ought to know. One constant theme of the historical articles is the vital importance of royal ,patronage in the history of French tapestry—from Mahaut, Countess of Artois, to Francois Premier, from Henri Quatre to Louis Quatorze, from the Regence to Napoleon. Whenever the fortunes of the tapissiers were in eclipse, royal subsidies came to their aid. The article on mediaeval and renaissance tapestries" covers a great deal of ground with skill, begin- ning with the conjectured origin of tapestry itself : an attempt to reproduce in woven material the hangings sprinkled with real flowers and real leaves which had succeeded, at the French court, the use of Byzantine silk wall-coverings by the court of Charlemagne. The nomadic character of the French court throughout the Middle Ages, the heavy sumpter trains travelling from castle to castle, made tapestries a necessity of daily life : for small gay tents of tapestry could be put up on frames within the cold forbidding halls of stone. Not until the reign of Louis Quatorze did each royal residence have its own furnishings and hangings.
All the writers emphasise how strictly the output of the French tapissiers was dictated and limited by the demand. Beginning with the solemn religious hangings—of which the splendid Apocalypse, with its pale hieratic figures upon a dark ground, its almost archi- tectural beauty and its grave devotional intensity, is the finest as well as the earliest extant example—they soon went on to more secular themes as well: groups of noble persons playing with little dogs or birds in flowered gardens. With the inrush of the Italian Renaissance under Francois Premier classical and mythological scenes came into fashion, developing into great heroics of the seventeenth century. The age of Lotus Quinze, with its passion for small light rooms, produced a demand for frivolous and pastoral scenes—the Chinoiseries and the fables of Boucher, Oudry's passages from Moliere.
The sections of the book relating the histories of the Gobelins, Beauvais and Marche factories, as well as that of the beautiful allied art of the Savonnerie, are succinct and orderly. While the Gobelins products were reserved for the royal palaces, the tapestry-makers of Beauvais, although under royal patronage, could accept and execute commissions from elsewhere. The Aubusson factory was in the rather pathetic position of having no good artist appointed as designer of cartoons. Its workers had to content thetnselves with cribbing the masterpieces of Beauvais and Gobelins, and working on discarded, thirty-year-old cartoons. The importance to a factory, by this great period, of a really competent and gifted artist as designer could not be exaggerated. The extensive and powerful influence of Le Brun impregnated the achievements of Gobelins and Beauvais for many years, even after he was ousted by the intrigues of Louvois. Under Le Brun, tapestry remained an art quite separate from that of paint- ing, and it was not until the third decade of the eighteenth century, when Jean-Baptiste Oudry was appointed to Beauvais, that the aim of imitating painting was openly pursued. The general opinion of the writers in this book is that at this point the rot set in. Yet how poetic and how elegant are the Oudry Hunts of Louis Quinze ! The silver- white shading in the distant glades, the slender riding figures and the leashed hounds, the olive and dun forest foliage do not seem so radically removed in spirit from the halcyon mediaeval garden scenes. By the time the Revolution was over, coloured papers had come into vogue. The demand for tapestries as wall-hangings was shrinking. During the later nineteenth century the art of the tapissiers became 'infected with the pretentious bad taste of all other furnishings. It is only in the last few years that it has begun to recuperate. Monsieur Janneau, a former administrator of the Mobilier National, contributes two interesting articles to this volume. In one of these, which may clarify the minds of those who have beeh unduly startled by the livid and garish symbols of Lurcat or repelled by Gromaire's pneumatic harvesters, he discusses the present and the future of French tapestry. Monsieur Janneau does not approve of the school which has made such exquisite copies of pictures by Braque, Rouault and Picasso (these were on show at the Musee d'Art Moderne last summer, but are excluded from the current London version of that exhibition). He does not, on the other hand, seem entirely certain about Lurcat and his revolutionary* colour theories. The technical problems of the modern tapissiers are very well explained. The old vegetable dyes offered the weaver a limited chromatic scale, and so demanded on his part the greatest contrivance and skill. With the new synthetic dyes he has at his disposition a vast range of tones, shades and modulations. To rely on these is a temptation to which most weavers have automatically succumbed, especially if they are trying to reproduce in wool the precise inflections of painting. But the new dyes fade and tarnish within a very brief time—Monsieur Jenneau cites a tapestry woven in 1920 (from a cartoon by Dufy) in which a myriad shades of blue have already dulled to grey and brown. A certain amount of fading has obviously taken place In tapestries at all times–, but it was less swift and less disastrous with the old methods, and allowance was made for it by weavers and designers alike.
There is one question which this book does not answer. Are tilt modern tapestry-makers, like their predecessors, aiming at a definite clientele? What exactly is the place of tapestry in the modern world? There is an assertiv -ts about the contemporary tapestries now on show at the Victori Albert which makes them especially unsuit- able for the day-t• • :y familiarity of life in a small house or flat. When Marie Antoinette first came to France in 1770, the floating pavilion in which she was received on the waters of the Rhine was hung with tapestries telling the story of Medea. Goethe was shocked by this and remonstrated. He was told that neither the princess nor the people of StrasBourg would notice the subject of the tapestries. Could the same be said of a modern pavilion decorated by Lurcat
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