![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay considers women’s tapestry weaving in the Mediterranean Middle East in the 1960s. At once a mode for experimental arts pedagogy, envisioned social uplift, and critical creative inquiry, the medium held possibilities for the expression– and often fusion– of artistic and social concerns. Artists’ negotiations of the tensions demarcating “fine art” from “handicraft” assumed gendered dimensions in art schools and studios, where weaving’s association with the feminine was often reinforced. Women designed and wove tapestries through innovative collaborations and formed a constellation of interconnecting textile and design practices. While dynamic in their confluences and divergences over time, these modernist practices and affiliated artistic networks have been overshadowed by the work of male-dominated lineages. Focusing on the poetics of renewal and “new blood” explored by artists Safia Farhat and Etel Adnan, this essay threads personal and conceptual practices and approaches underlying women’s tapestry production.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I thank Mariam Rosser-Owen for the invitation to contribute to this special issue on Middle Eastern Crafts following our conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018. This essay is based on my presentation, which connected tapestry artists and sites related to my first and second book projects, and represents my current transregional research.
2 For the purpose of clarity, this article will use the term “artistic craft.”
3 See Sadika Keskes, Alain Naduad, and Jean Lancri, Paul Klee et le tapis tunisien: aux portes de l’abstraction (La Marsa Erriadh, Tunisia: Sa’Al Éditions, 2014), Anna M. Schaforth (ed.), Klee, Macke, Moillet: Tunis, 2014 (Tunis: Éditions Cérès, 2014), and letters and clippings in the private archives of Ali Bellagha. Art writings by Nja Mahdaoui include “Transmutation et présence dans l’oeuvre de Paul Klee,” Cahier d’Études Maghrébines, no. 4 (January 1992): 94-99. Zeinab Mohsen quoted Gorgi discussing Klee’s encounter with Tunisian popular art in her article “Abdelaziz Gorgi” in La Presse on February 7, 1967. The École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca devoted space to local handicraft in its curriculum and publications in the 1960s, notably selecting the theme “Popular Art” for the second issue of the journal Maghreb Art in Autumn 1966 and discussing parallels with Bauhaus approaches. For essays on Etel Adnan’s relation to Klee, see Silvia Naef and Nadia Radwan, eds., “The Arab Apocalypse: Art, Abstraction, & Activism in the Middle East,” Manazir 1 (Autumn 2019).
4 See documents in the Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, 1TU/1/V/2080.
5 Wendy M. K. Shaw, “The Islam in Islamic art History: Secularism and Public Discourse,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 6 (June 2012): 1-34, 4.
6 Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).
7 Jessica Gerschultz, “The Turn to Tapestry: Islamic Textiles and Women Artists in Tunis,” in Making Modernity: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century Islamic Mediterranean, Alex Dika Seggerman and Margaret Graves, eds., (2021) and Clara Ilham Álvarez Dopico, “Tradition et rénovation dans la céramique tunisienne d’époque coloniale: le cas d’Elie Blondel, le Bernard Palissy africain (1897-1910)”, in Villes Maghrébines en situations colonials, ed. Charlotte Jelidi (Paris: Karthala; Tunis: IRMC, 2014): 223-49. See also her essay in this volume and Mohamed-Ali Berhouma, “L’Oeuvre de l’Office des arts tunisiens: de l’exposition propagandiste à la muséographie patrimonialisante” in Expositions et Culture Coloniale: Les Arts en Tunisie sous le Protectorat, Laurent Houssais and Dominique Jarrassé, eds., (Bordeaux: Éditions Esthétiques du Divers, 2020).
8 Zeinab Mohsen, “Abdelaziz Gorgi”, La Presse (February 7, 1967).
9 Ibid.
10 For relevant writings, see the journal of the National Union of Tunisian Women, Femme, and the journal Faïza (see n.16).
11 Ahmed Ben Saleh, personal communication, June 2014. Ben Saleh was the former Finance Minister and principle architect of Tunisian socialism in the 1960s who saw women’s handweaving as a vital means for economic and social development. He was imprisoned in 1969 when Bourguiba renounced socialism.
12 In dominant art historical and colonial discourse, the flourishing of “Islamic art” was seen to decline or die out with the advent of modernity, thus reflective of the colonized Muslim societies in which the art was produced. See Finbarr Barry Flood, “From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art,’ in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., (London: Routledge, 2007), 31-53.
13 Paul Sebag, “Les tapis tunisiens et leur rénovation: Entretien avec Jean Lurçat”, Faïza 7 (1960): 22-23. Documents in the private archives of Jean Lurçat in Paris and the Archives départementales de la Creuse in France offer further insight into Lurçat’s consultancy in Tunisia.
14 Farhat established the first women’s journal of postcolonial Tunisia, Faïza, to examine artistic, cultural, and political life in the wake of women’s social and intellectual elevation and educational attainment. See also Aïcha Filali, Safia Farhat: Une Biographie (Tunis: MIM Éditions, 2005).
15 Pierre Berjole and unnamed writer, “Du sang neuf aux beaux-arts: les filles”, Faïza 6 (April 1960): 28-9; 28.
16 Ibid., 29.
17 Etel Adnan, personal communication, July 2019.
18 Undated letter draft in the Ramses Wissa Wassef Personal Papers collection, American University in Cairo (AUC), Rare Books and Special Collections Library. The letter’s content demonstrates that it was part of an ongoing correspondence between Wissa Wassef and administrative officials in or consultants for the Tunisian National Office of Handicraft. After reading an unnamed article that was enclosed in this correspondence, Wissa Wassef adamantly expressed his disagreement with the Tunisian approach. It should be noted that tapestry scholarship places much emphasis on Jean Lurçat’s foundational work in promoting tapestry on an international scale, although his activities outside of Europe (particularly in Africa and the Middle East) are usually neglected. Wissa Wassef’s ideas, professional networks, and promotional activities were similarly extensive and influential but have been marginalized. I am exploring these relationships and circulations in my current book project. For further reading on disciplinary asymmetries concerning fiber art, see my forthcoming chapter on feminist methodologies in the volume Under the Skin: Feminist Art from the Middle East and North Africa Today (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2020).
19 See, for example, “Protégeons l’artisanat”, Images (November 11, 1945): 10; “Le Tissage” in L’Art Spontané chez les Jeunes Égyptiens: Dessin, Sculpture, Tapisserie, 12 au 28 janvier 1950 (Paris: U.N.E.S.C.O. 1950): unpaginated; “Une Tentative d’Art Artisanal” in l’Art Sacré in a special issue devoted to “À propos de l’art Copte” (Sept-Oct, 1956): 18-25.
20 In reality, Ramses Wissa Wassef and Sophie Habib Gorgi supported the girls’ formal schooling to the degree possible in the village; they also hired a teacher who opted to receive additional literacy training at the center.
21 Notes written by Ramses Wissa Wassef for the tapestry exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, undated (circa 1964). Ramses Wissa Wassef Personal Papers collection, American University in Cairo (AUC), Rare Books and Special Collections Library.
22 Sophie Habib Gorgi, personal communication, August 2019.
23 Interviews with Samiha Ahmed, Maryam Dawad, Karima Ali and Naima Mahmoud, Harrania, July 2019. See also the Harrania Women Weavers Oral History Project, conducted by Balsam Saleh and Jessica Gerschultz in August 2019, American University in Cairo (AUC), Rare Books and Special Collections Library.
24 Ibid.
25 A thorough critique of the complicated class dynamics latent in these projects extends beyond the scope of this essay, but figures into the analysis provided in my book Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École and forms part of my wider transregional project.
26 Archival document consulted at the Aref El Rayess Foundation, Aley, Lebanon.
27 Etel Adnan, personal communication, July 2019.
28 Etel Adnan, Life is A Weaving trans. Wendy Parramore (Paris: Galerie Lelong, 2016): 10.
29 Ibid., 30.
30 Ibid., 31.
31 Ibid., 32.
32 Ibid., 34.
33 Ibid., 58.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jessica Gerschultz
Jessica Gerschultz is Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas and author of the book Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). Her research centers on transregional articulations of modernism, tapestry and fiber art, and feminist methodologies. She has held numerous fellowships and awards, including the American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship in 2016, and has served on the board of AMCA, the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey, since 2015.