11 May 1998 IKAT
COMES TO WASHINGTON
(Textiles from Islamic world on exhibit at Sackler Gallery) (1030)
Washington -- This is the year for textiles in the United States. Art
lovers and collectors alike are buying and selling them and are
flocking to exceptionally fine showings of the splendid art that
captivated Marco Polo and other travelers to the Mongol Empire.
In New York, an exhibition of 8-15th century silk tapestries,
embroideries, and brocades drawn from collections of the Metropolitan
Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art is currently on view at the
Metropolitan.
Now the Sackler Gallery in Washington has opened its first-ever
exhibition of textiles from the Islamic world.
on April 26, an exhibition of 66 brilliantly colored textiles on loan
from the American Foundation for Textile Art, Inc., opened to the
public. The show is titled "Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia from
the Guido Goldman Collection." The intricately dyed and woven 19th
century silk textiles from the area now known as Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan range in size from small, mounted panels to large hangings
5-to-6-feet wide by 7-to-8-feet long.
Collector Dr. Guido Goldman grew up in a home filled with art and was
drawn to ikat textiles because of his lifelong love of color. "It was
not my intention at the outset to build an important collection," he
told reporters at the opening of the Washington show. "In fact, I was
late for an appointment when I first spotted an ikat in the window of
the Textile Gallery in New York back in the 1970's. I bounded upstairs
to the second-floor gallery of Gail Martin, who ultimately ended up
becoming curator of the collection," he explained. "Gail explained to
me how an ikat was made and where in Central Asia this particular
piece had been produced."
That day Goldman acquired his first ikat.
Then he decided to get another. "When I found out more about ikats, I
discovered it was hard to get them," he said. "That intrigued me
because if they had been very plentiful, I probably would have gotten
a few to put on my walls and that would have been that."
Goldman admitted that he had never been to Istanbul and Afghanistan
and knew little of those cultures until recent years. "As I purchased
more ikats," he explained, "I had no well-formed purpose in mind other
than the desire to acquire pieces that moved me. It was color and
design, and to some degree condition, that determined what I bought."
Goldman's acquisitions contain no chemically dyed ikats. Instead, he
seeks out multicolored artworks with relatively complex designs, which
generally belong to earlier periods.
The term "ikat" is a Malay-Indonesian word, which defines both the
boldly colored textiles with softly blurred edges and the intricate
cloth-making process. The ancient method of resist-dye weaving that
produced them is practiced in many parts of the world -- from Japan
and Indonesia to India, Africa and the Americas.
The pattern is prepared before the textile is woven, by binding and
dyeing one or both sets of threads. In all their visual variety, ikat
textiles played an important role in bringing together weavers and
dyers from the many cultures of Asia. Tajiks, for example, specialized
in dyeing reds and yellows; Jews controlled the trade and use of
indigo dye, which came from India; and Uzbeks, wove the "adras," or
ikats made of silk and cotton in a cloud-like design.
Although ikats have been produced in many parts of the world, those
created in Central Asia during the nineteenth century are unrivaled in
their vibrant colors and explosive patterns. Ikat wall hangings and
robes brought the brilliant color of blooming gardens to a stark,
desert region.
Spectacular ikat coats in silk and velvet sometimes were worn in
multiple layers with as many as ten coats upon one another, to
establish the social status of men and women. Ikat hangings, such as
those in the exhibition, are also referred to as abr, or "cloud" and
were used to embellish mud-plastered walls, covered niches and doors,
and to construct outdoor pavilions for ceremonial occasions.
The entire Guido Goldman Collection of more than 200 ikat
wall-hangings and robes was assembled over a twenty-year period and is
almost entirely made up of ikats from the first half of the nineteenth
century. The remainder falls into the middle period of production in
the third quarter of the century. Goldman's collection of Central
Asian ikats is the largest and most comprehensive in the world,
capturing a glorious but brief moment in the history of art.
According to Massumeh Farhad, associate curator of Near Eastern
Islamic art at the Sackler Gallery and the neighboring Freer of
Gallery of Art, who organized the presentation for Washington, "Ikats
produced in the 19th century in the once-illustrious Central Asian
cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan, as well as
in the towns of the Gerghana Valley in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are
unrivaled for their rich colors and dynamic designs."
By the 1870s, synthetic dyes had been introduced into the ikat-making
process and the Russian occupation of Central Asia began to undermine
the extraordinary, multiethnic cooperation essential to the production
of ikat textiles.
"Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia from the Guido Goldman
Collection" opened in 1977 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was
displayed subsequently at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San
Francisco.
Following the Sackler showing, which closes September 7, the
exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Jewish Museum in New York
City (February-April, 1999); the Art Institute of Chicago (September
1999-January 2000), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (spring
2000).
The exhibition is accompanied by two award-winning publications: A
comprehensive catalog of the Guido Goldman Collection (with text by
Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale) features more than 400 color
illustrations; and a soft-cover edition features the text and some 70
color plates. Both books are published by Laurence King (London,
1997).
(Special feature by Joanne L. Nix)
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