ISSUE 132 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004
CONTENTS & EDITORIAL
11 |LETTERS
Bakhshaishes with birds; an upside-down suzani, the Armenian connection. 13 |NEWS
Winter auction commentary; Sotheby's London shake-up; grand gallery opening in Milan. 15 jFRAGMENTS
How Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum has increased access to textiles, head-gear and footwear. 39 |PREVIEW
ACOR 7, Seattle: Pacific Northwest Collections; Jim Burns' Afshar and Persian prayer rugs; David Paly’sworld ikats; Michael Rothberg's Turkmens; Bijar carpets; LACMA's Ardabil and more. Dealer’s Row, plus PNW carpet, textile and tribal art dealers. Also, Silk & Ivory in Doha. Qatar. 69 |CALENDAR
Auctions, exhibitions, fairs and conferences. 75 | ISLAMIC ART
High-fliers at the Paris and London autumn sales; aQur'an conference; museum projects. What turbans tell us in early Safavid paintings. 79 |BOOKS
Silken Threads, LacquerThrones by Susan Conway; AGardenfor theSultan by Nurhan Atasoy: Titles Received. 91 |EARLY AUBUSSON
PILE CARPETS Elisabeth Floret The little-known history of knotted-pile carpet production in the French town of Aubusson. 96 |THE TURKMEN ENSI IN
LITERATURE AND IN LIFE Robert Pinner Surveying the references, interpretations and images of Turkmen ensis in the West. 108 |LIFE FROM THE PAST
Ronnie Newman One man's passion for American folk rugs. 113 |GALLERY
House style advertisements. 117 |REVI EW
Exhibitions: Khmer textiles in Fukuoka; Secrets of NY's Cooper-Hewitt; 'Hunt for Paradise'; Renaissance textiles. Conferences: Navajo weavings at the TM. Fairs: Tucson's Rug Bazaar. 129 jAUCTION PRICE GUIDE
New England needlework in SFand more. 139 |DESIGN FILE
Azerbaijan's carpet industry; Obeetee in India. 147 |NETWORK
Classified advertisements. 152 |PARTING SHOTS
Strange happenings in Tuscon.
t this season o f hoped-for peace and goodwill, we are confident that all our readers will join us in the sincere wish that the next twelve months will be markedly more peaceful and prosperous than the year just ended. Recent tragic events in Istanbul in particular, with suicide bombings aimed at Turkey’s Jewish community and British interests, remind us that like it or not we are all affected by the world’s political troubles and hatreds. We extend our deepest sympathy to the families of all those innocent people in Istanbul, and elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, for whom the start o f 2004 promises continued suffering and sadness.
We are grateful to New England Rug Society member Jeff Spurr for drawing our attention to an article by the Turkish journalist Abdullah Kilic published on the website of the Turkish newspaper Zaman. Kilic’s report recounts how, after the secularisation o f Aya Sofia in Istanbul and its conversion from a mosque to a museum in 1934, the carpets given to the mosque over several centuries as vakf or pious donations were locked away in a storeroom, where they remained forgotten and unseen for 69 years. When the storeroom was re-opened last autumn, a rotting pile of moth-eaten old rugs was revealed which disintegrated as soon as they were handled. This story brings to mind the uncertain fate o f the beautiful, historically important, early Anatolian kilims that were formerly on display in the lower level of the Vaktflar Carpet and Kilim Museum at the Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet, but which have been locked away in damp and destructive conditions for more than a decade.
The relentless round o f international carpet and textile conferences will bring us to the city of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest region o f the USA in March 2004 for the 7th American Conference on Oriental Rugs (ACOR 7), to be held on the city’s scenic waterfront at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. The full range of exhibitions organised by the Seattle Textile and Rug Society and by local members of the carpet and textile trade, as well as the everpopular ACOR Dealers’ Row, are previewed in this issue, which also includes the first major article written for some years in the field of Turkmen tribal rugs by HALI's co-founder, Robert Pinner.
Finally, when you are planning your travels for 2004, don't forget that the ICOC's first regional conference ‘Down Under' takes place in Sydney in the southern spring from 16-19 September. Accompanied by two major rug and textile exhibitions (one o f them from Central Asian Museum collections), and a Dealers’ Fair, this collaboration between the Oriental Rug Society o f New South Wales and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum includes a trip to Canberra to view the superb Southeast Asian textile holdings at The National Gallery of Australia. Watch www.hali.com and www.icoc-orientalrugs.org for further details.
Barbad the ConcealedMusician, illuminated page from Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama of Firdausi, attributed to Mirza Ali, Tabriz, northwest Persia, ca. 1535. This scene from the Bookof Kings, which deals with pre-lslamic Iranian history and legend, is included in the‘Hunt for Paradise’exhibition of early Safavid art at the Asia Society, New York (see pp.120-121). The musician Barbad, denied access to Khosrow Parviz’scourt due to the jealousy of the court musician Sarkash, hides in a cypress tree to perform during a Alow Ruz celebration. The enthroned Shah is depicted wearing his turban wrapped around a fully covered taj (see pp.76-7), while his courtiers all wear turbans inwhich the red pole of the fa/' is exposed. Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MSS 1030.9, fol.73ia
THE COVER
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