Renewal and Reconstruction in Hannah Ryggen’s Transcultural Tapestries

Abstract

The tapestries of Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) offer perhaps one of the most striking bodies of politically charged textile art of the twentieth century. In her work, Ryggen combines a modernist visual language with folk art traditions and contemporaneous images of war and corruptions; she uses the traditional craft of weaving to create a radical response to the chaos and violence of modernity. This article analyses the ways that, in the creation of her formally disruptive tapestries, Ryggen pioneers a modern, avant-grade feminist art practice that challenges society’s capitalist, patriarchal and imperialist frameworks. It will consider tapestries created across her four-decade long career, exploring the development from the anti-fascist pieces she created in the 1930s and 1940s, including Ethiopia and October 6, 1942, to later work in which she imagines a transformation of the world based on her communist and feminist principles. The article argues that, through her use of both natural materials and an ethical approach that is as equally attentive to the nonhuman as to the human, Ryggen’s artwork weaves together the domestic and the political, the local and the global, and nature and culture. Yet despite highlighting the man-made horrors of modern society, Ryggen’s methods and materials offer the hope of renewal and reconstruction through a feminist, ecologically grounded engagement with the world and one another.

Keywords:

• Hannah Ryggen
• textile art
• modernism
• ecofeminism

Notes

1 However, Albers did learn dyeing techniques at the Bauhaus. Also, when teaching at the Black Mountain College, she encouraged her students to make use of ‘the stuff the world is made of’, such as grass, paper, and corn. see Minera (2018).

2 Kandinsky’s Composition IV and Alexei von Jawlensky’s use of colour made a particular impression in the press; for more information on the exhibition, see Margareta Tillberg, ‘Kandinsky in Sweden – Malmö 1914 and Stockholm 1916’, in Hubert van den Berg et al. (eds), A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, Amsterdam and New York Rodopi, 2012, pp. 325–36.

3 In her autobiography We Flew Over the Bridge, Ringgold discusses the reaction to her first series of painted quilts: ‘They didn’t seem to realise they were looking at paintings on canvas – there were no wooden frames and no stretchers. I didn’t like being accused of doing crafts. Being black and a woman were enough. Did I need to be further eliminated on the grounds that I was doing crafts instead of “fine art”?’. See: Faith Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, New York: Little Brown and Company, 1995.

4 For more on this issue, see: Gisela Kaplan, Contemporary Western European Feminism, London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Unmarried Mother (1937) is another example of Ryggen’s early feminist work.

5 In addition to post-war work that fuses Ryggen’s feminism with her anti-capitalist, environmentalist worldview, 1937’s Unmarried Mother offers another example of a more straightforwardly feminist tapestry: in this triptych, Ryggen celebrates the mother, seen sewing a blanket for her baby in the central scene, with men representing infidelity and deceit at either side of her.

6 See, for example, the use of expressionist colours in Fishing in a Sea of Debt (1933).

7 Van Hens notes (citing the work of José Marí Cabrera and Maria del Carmen Garrido) that Guernica’s canvas was ‘comprised of a rough jute primed in a deliberately antiquated way in order to create luminosity’.

8 Although the vivid red of the roses here suggests violence, a similar colour scheme recurs in Mother’s Heart (1947), a warm work created in honour of Ryggen’s daughter. In this tapestry, the rich pinks and reds evoke a womb-like space; hearts, roses, a naked woman, and circular shapes suggest the joy and strength of motherhood. This vibrant palette can also be seen in less cheerful works: Grini (1945), an image of an imprisoned Hans dreaming of their daughter, and Liselotte Herrmann (1938), which commemorates Herrmann’s death at the hands of the Nazis. Despite the grim tone, both pieces champion the power of love and family over fascism (in the latter case, Herrmann is shown tending to her baby son).

9 Federici notes that

more [women] were executed for infanticide in sixteenth and seveenth century Europe than for any other crime, except for witchcraft, a charge that also centred on the killing of children and other violations of reproductive norms. Significantly, in the case of both infanticide and witchcraft, the statutes limiting women’s legal responsibility were lifted. (Federici 2004, 88–9)