19th and 20th centuries
Most 19th-century tapestries reproduced paintings or previously woven designs. The influence of the Industrial Revolution was inescapable, of course, not only in tools, materials, and dyes but in the new middle-class market and its demands. Machine-made tapestry, although an achievement in mechanical weaving, became a threat to the survival of the original handicraft.
The necessity for the revitalization and purification of the tapestry art was first recognized by the artists associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement in late 19th-century England. Decrying the loss of individual creativity, they revived the ideals of medieval craftsmanship in an attempt to counter the effects of industrialization on the decorative or applied arts. The leader and most important figure of the movement was the artist William Morris (1834–96), who established a tapestry factory at Merton Abbey in Surrey near London. For about 15 years he and his associates had been designing not only for looms but also for pictorial wall decorations and stained-glass windows. They were well prepared professionally, therefore, to design tapestries. Morris and the painter-illustrator Walter Crane (1845–1915) contributed cartoon sketches, but most Merton tapestries were designed by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98). More venturesome than any of the Merton Abbey products were the tapestry designs made in the 1880s by the artist and architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942), who in 1882 founded the Century Guild, the first of many groups of artists-craftsmen-designers to follow the teachings of William Morris. This tradition, influenced by the tapestry revival in mid-20th-century France, has continued in Scotland. The most ambitious 20th-century tapestry designed by a British artist, Graham Sutherland’s (1903–80) enormous Christ in Glory (1962) for Coventry Cathedral, was, however, woven on looms in Felletin, France. This is the largest tapestry ever to have been made there (78 feet 1 inch by 38 feet 1 inch; 23.8 by 11.6 metres).
In Europe during the late 19th century there was a resurgence of tapestry based on folk traditions. This trend was already apparent in Norway shortly after 1890, when special efforts were made to base a modern tapestry art on native medieval weavings. The leaders were Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929), a well-known painter, and Frida Hansen (1855–1931), a weaver who studied the peasant craftsmanship of Norway and evolved an individual, light, and open weave. Somewhat later developments in Scandinavia occurred in Sweden and Finland. Märta Måås-Fjetterström (1873–1941) became the best-known Swedish tapestry artist, and her atelier continued to produce excellent works. In Finland a freer, more colourful art, more delicately scaled, has been practiced by many; among the best known are Martta Taipale, Laila Karttunen, and, for damask tapestry, Dora Jung. In Norway and to a lesser degree in Denmark, similar work has been done. The church in the Scandinavian countries has been unusually receptive to this art. Traditional folk weaving was also behind the revival of tapestry making in several other countries after World War I, including Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Poland produced especially original designs executed in a remarkably free technique. Following the tradition of heavy-grained native weaving, mid-20th-century Polish designer-weavers such as Magdalena Abakanowicz and Wojciech Sadley used unconventional materials such as jute, sisal, horsehair, and raffia in abstract tapestries that emphasize the nature of the material, tactile stimulation, plasticity, or surface relief.
Germany, emulating Scandinavia, also began a revival of tapestry weaving around the turn of the 20th century. In the state of Schleswig-Holstein a small tapestry industry was set up from 1896 to 1903 at Scherrebek, followed by similar enterprises at nearby Kiel and Meldorf. The most significant development, however, occurred at the design school of the Bauhaus, where tapestry was created during the 1920s and early 1930s. Abstract in composition, the Bauhaus designs were deeply rooted in the theory that the technology of the craft should be revealed in the work and in expressing the nature of the materials used, especially by the exploitation of heavy fibres as strong textural elements. Anni Albers, wife of the painter and Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers, became the chief practitioner of this kind of tapestry. Like most modern tapestry weavers, she also designed for the textile industry. After World War II, tapestry works were established in Munich and Nürnberg, and individual weavers worked throughout Germany and in Vienna. Among the Germans, unlike the French, stained glass rather than tapestry generated greater enthusiasm as a revived craft in the post-World War II period. A few individual designers worked on their own looms in the United States and Canada, where most large-scale tapestries continued to be imported from Europe. The Latin American revival of indigenous folkcrafts aroused interest in tapestry making in Mexico and Panama. South American centres of tapestry art developed in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia.
Modern tapestry design was hindered during the greater part of the 19th century in France by the academic administration of the state factories, although progressive artists began to be affected by the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 1880s. The painters Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Émile Bernard (1868–1941) were among those who took an interest in tapestry weaving, though they did not actually do tapestry cartoons as did Aristide Maillol (1861–1944). It was not until after World War I that France initiated and led the 20th-century revitalization of tapestry as an art. Many of the great modern artists of the school of Paris—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Georges Braque (1882–1962), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Georges Rouault (1871–1958), and Joan Miró (1893–1983), among others—permitted their works to be reproduced in 1932. These reproductions were done with extraordinary fidelity under the supervision of Marie Cuttoli, a Paris connoisseur and promoter of exceptional taste. The Aubusson factory, chosen for this important weaving, became once again a great centre for tapestry. The direct translation of painting into tapestry, however, left little scope for the weaver, and it is the trend begun simultaneously by Jean Lurçat (1892–1966) that may be said to have truly inaugurated the 20th-century tapestry renaissance. Although he began experimenting in 1916, Lurçat’s art did not become definitive until the 1930s, when under the influence of Gothic tapestry, particularly the 14th-century Angers Apocalypse, and in collaboration with François Tabard, master weaver at Aubusson, he formulated the principles that were to make tapestry once again a joint creation between artist and weaver—an art in its own right. No longer merely an imitation painting, tapestry once again exploited the coarser texture and the bolder but more limited range of colours that characterized medieval hangings.
In 1947 Lurçat founded the important Association des Peintures-Cartonniers de Tapisserie (Association of Cartoon Painters of Tapestry). Also active in this organization were the important French tapestry designers Marc Saint-Saëns and Jean Picart Le Doux, who were Lurçat’s foremost disciples. Lurçat was held in great esteem by Dom Robert, a Benedictine monk whose tapestries of poetic fantasy were largely inspired by Persian and medieval European manuscript illumination. Other major French designers of representational compositions were the artists Marcel Gromaire (1892–1971) and Henri Matisse and the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965).
In the 1950s tapestry designs became increasingly abstract. Among the most notable pieces were those designed by the sculptor and printmaker Henri-Georges Adam (1904–67). Using only black and white, his tapestries are monumental tonal abstractions that reflect his work as an engraver. The sculptor Jean Arp (1887–1966) and the painter Victor Vasarely are other abstract designers of postwar tapestries.
After World War II the Belgians, influenced by the weaving activity in France during the 1930s, revived their tapestry industry. In 1945 the Forces Murales movement was organized in Tournai by cartoon painters including Louis Deltour, Edmond Dubrunfaut, and Roger Somville, who became the leading designers of Belgian tapestries. This was followed in 1947 by the organization in Tournai of a collective tapestry workshop, the Centre de Rénovation de la Tapisserie, active until 1951. Small workshops continued to flourish in Belgium, especially in the cities of Tournai, Brussels, and Malines.
The renewed international interest in tapestry is clearly related to the austerity of modern architecture. Suitable settings for large-scale wall hangings are provided by the often vast expanses of bare wall surface in contemporary buildings. Le Corbusier not only used tapestries to decorate his architectural interiors but designed them. He frequently referred to tapestries as nomadic murals, recognizing their importance as movable and interchangeable decoration.