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review of Wright & Wertime's In the verdict of Professor Walter B. Denny of the University of Massachuetts at Amherst, Richard Wright and John Wertime’s recently published Caucasian Carpets and Covers is destined to occupy a central place in the scholarship on Caucasian carpets for the foreseeable future. Despite the ups and downs of the rug market itself, the market for books on oriental rugs appears to be able to sustain a considerable production of "high end" titles. Sometimes these are chiefly distinguished by extremely high-quality book design, materials, production and colour illustrations; Orient Stars is probably the premier example that comes to mind from recent years. At other times, however, both production and content have been problematic; the eccentric text and muddy illustrations of Christopher Alexander’s volume on his own collection come to mind in this respect. There is a much smaller number of books in which the quality of production and the importance of the text both reach a high level. Caucasian Carpets and Covers is such a volume. For the aficionado of Caucasian rugs, the basic soures of information on these weavings have given rise to much frustration. To begin with, there was The Word – in a word, Schurmann. Before the original publication of Ulrich Schurmann’s Caucasian Rugs in the early 1960s, the nomenclature and geography of the rugs of Transcaucasia were both confused and inaccurate. The numerous illustrations and straightforward confidence of Schurmann’s system of classification, gleaned from the Soviet-era research, removed the confusion and gave every design a name and a home. Rug writers of a nationalist bent still found a good deal to argue about (and always will, it seems) but the dealer with a Konakend to sell, and the collector with a yen to buy one, were at least able to communicate more effectively. Problems with Schurmann’ classification surfaced immediately; most owners of the book read the author’s caveat about the importance of structure rather quickly and returned to the plates. The fear that his attributions were often inaccurate grew in some minds to the extent that the vague terms "north Caucasus", "east Caucasus" and so on were adopted as a compromise way of looking at these weavings. There were nagging worries about how old the Caucaian rugs forming the focus of most collectors’ interests actually were, and nasty doubts arising from the knowledge that such rugs, in traditional designs just like those of the Schurmann plates, were produced after Transcaucasia fell under the control of the Soviet Empire. On the early end of Caucasian production, the publication of Charles Grant Ellis’s Early Caucasian Rugs by The Textile Museum in 1976 appeared to solve one set of scholarly problems and to create another. Ellis’s thesis that the design origins of the early Dragon Carpets were to be found in the vocabulary of Chinese motifs common in Persian art since the 14th century, and had been given a grammar and syntax in carpets of the Kerman area in the 17th, settled the question of origin of some important forms, but both vexed those who had held to the old theory of an Armenian origin for the carpets in question, and left many unanswered questions about how and why these motifs and design types differed from their alleged prototypes. Meanwhile, yet another development, ominous to many, began to emerge. From Washington DC, Richard Wright began publishing the results of his research in the late 19th centruy history of artisanal production in Transcaucasia, relying on an unusual trove of Russian documentation available to him in the Library of Congress. A newsletter published by Wright himself, and then a catalogue of a small exhibition mounted for the Pittsburgh Rug Society, began to cast even more doubt on the traditional attributions mentioned by Schurmann, and the traditoinal associations of specific rugs with specific areas or ethnic groups of weavers began to look like they were in for a major revision. Wright’s information was disturbing to some because it suggested that the majority of weavers in the Transcaucasus were Muslims; it also suggested that many of the village names attached to rugs were labels of convenience for a massive output of late 19th century rugs produced around a very small number of major centres. Some collectors, who longed for the good old days when the Caucasus was, in the words of one Boston dealer, largely divided into "Cabbys, Daggys, Shirvys and Kazaks", and any good Caucasian rug was from the early 19th century, found Wright’s late dating and his acerbic confrontation of the comfortable old beliefs unsettling. And while the publication of Caucasian Carpets and Covers means that the good old days are now efffectively gone forever, there is much in this intelligent, well-written, and carefully researched book that should give solace to the traditional collector of the beautiful rugs from this complex area of the rug weaving world. To begin with, Caucasian Carpets and Covers is a dazzling piece of book production, oversized (34 X 24cm), brilliantly printed on a slightly creamy matte paper, beautifully designed, with wide margins, elegant typography, and occasional headings set in red ink. The colour illustrations largely focus on flatwoven products from the Transcaucasus, together with reprodutions of some Kustar weaving model graphs from the nineteen-teens and some Zakgostorg commercial lithographs from the twenties that, one hopes, will help some to reach the enlightened position that the real age of a beautiful carpet, like that of a beautiful human being, is a rather insignificant matter. The black-and-white illustrations include reproductions of important early photographs of Transcaucasian rugs that underline the ideas set forward in the text. As beautiful as the production and the illustrations are, however, the most important accomplishments of this book are to be found in its text. Sometimes multi-author volumes look like the old definition of a camel: "a horse put together by a committee." Knowing the previous works of both authors reasonable well, I view the combination here as an unusually good one, having the virtues of complementarity of knowledge, languages, and approach, plus the additional benefit of moderating each other's personal emphases. The Foreword sets out in brief form their joint conception of the ethos and the method of their work. In its substance, the book starts with an extremely useful overview of the history of Transcaucasia and its weavings; the authors reach the interesting conclusion that the Dragon Rugs were a product of southern Azerbaijan, and argue for Tabriz as their place of manufacture. While this is distressing to those of us accustomed to the 17th century as the starting point of Transcaucasian weaving art, the authors hold out a wealth of other possibilities for the lineage of many Transcaucasian artistic ideas that, while it proffers no facts, leaves open a wide range of possibilities (see also "The Tabriz Hypothesis" in Asian Art: The Second Hali Annual, pp.30-53). The second chapter deals with what the authors call the "properties" of the works under scrutiny, both in terms of their materials and structures, and in terms of their motifs and their possible origins. The third chapter of the text, by far the largest, deals with the textiles themselves, and the Kustar movement of government-supported cottage industry that seems to have been the midwife to the birth of so many of them. Using an impressive array of historical documentation, it moves through four main areas of Transcaucasia, district by district, and then chronicles the waning of village weaving during World War I, and the brief revival of the Kustar system under the Soviets and their Zakgostorg export organisation. And in the fourth section, the Afterword, the authors reflect on the implications and meanings of their study for us all. The volume ends with Appendices listing the colour plates and giving technical data on the pieces illustrated; discussing the various types of techniques employed in flatwoven products; and summarising discussions in Russian and Soviet sources of the dyestuffs employed in Caucasian weavings. The notes to the text number almost four hundred, and the bibliography, especially that of Russian sources, is invaluable. Caucasian Carpets and Covers is, then, not just a beautiful book, but also a useful and an important book. What are its major contributions? First, it sets out the later 19th century history, economy and ethnography of the area with great clarity and accuracy, based on thorough review of documents in the relevant languages. Second, it follows an intelligent and carefully spelled-out methodology, something that is rare enough in the rug literature to be truly astonishing when it is articulated as intelligently and even-handedly as it is in this volume. Third, while the text discusses our familiar friends from Schurmann's plates, the illustrations of the volume are largely of flatwoven carpets and covers; this in fact redresses the uneven balance of most publications, where the flatwoven products of Transcaucasian waevers are cursorily treated, if they are mentioned at all. Fourth, the book provides a good model for scholarship on all 19th century carpets, the kind that most of us collect and enjoy. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Caucasian Carpets and Covers, however, is its reflection of contemporary intelletual and political realities in the aftermath of the Soviet era. Although Transcaucasia today is wracked by various ethnic rivalries, themselves the extensions of age-old struggles that the Soviets could suppress but not erase, the possibilities for travel and research have opened up dramatically. Western travellers now visit Baku and Yerevan with some regularity, and Russian and local sources and scholarship have become more accessible to those fortunate enough to have mastered Russian and the other languages of the area. The book reflects these new realities, and indeed is in large part the product of them. The book also underlines the fact that good research necessarily stems from good language capabilities, an area where the duo of Wright and Wertime have considerable strength. In the Middle Ages, European writers and artists conjured up images of foreign lands based on strange rumours and dubious stories of pig-snouted Ethiopians and two-headed denizens of Central Asia. These were widely held conceptions, and they occupied an important place in the Euorpean imagination for centuries. But reality, when it was discovered, turned out to be infinitely more interesting and exciting, if somewhat less bizarre. The new reality of Transcaucasian weaving stemming from the work of Wright and Wertime may shake some of our beliefs, and necessitate a re-ordering of some of our old conceptions. But, as the authors make clear in this important new book, the new realities are in many ways much richer and more varied than the myths they replace. While the discourse on major historical issues of Caucasian carpets is far from over, Caucasian Carpets and Covers brings it to a vastly higher and more productive level. The authors deserve our congratulations, and the book should be regarded as one the most influential and important rug publications of our time.
Caucasian Carpets and Covers: The
Weaving Culture Reviewed by Walter Denny of the
University of Massachuetts at Amherst For Further Reading: Thanks and best wishes, J. Barry O'Connell Jr. |
Persian Rugs the O'Connell Guides |
