Weaving Modernities

Weaving Modernities traces a century and a half of French tapestry history, from the founding of the Pinton manufacture in Felletin in 1867 to the present day. The book shows how this artisanal craft moved through the major turning points of the 20th century, from the decorator-designers of the 1920s through the postwar years to its contemporary revival.

Artists follow one another across the decades: Lurçat, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Frank Stella and Joseph Albers, through to Claire Tabouret, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Beatriz Milhazes, Glenn Brown and Louise Bonnet today. A chapter by Barbara Jeauffroy-Mairet also tells a more unexpected side of this history: milliner Claude Saint Cyr, who in the 1950s applied Aubusson tapestry to hats, coats and shoes. The book also revisits the major commissions that brought the manufacture international renown: the immense Christ in Majesty woven for Coventry Cathedral, the monumental Vardanank for the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, and the curtains of the Sydney Opera House.

Richly illustrated with tapestries, unpublished archives and artists’ cartoons, the book also features two voices: artist Jean-Luc Moulène and Jacques Bourdeix, cartoonist and colourist at Pinton since 1970.

Text in English and French.