HALITheInternationalMagazine of Antique Carpet and TextileArt
Editor Daniel Shaffer Deputy Editor Jill Tilden Senior Editor Nicholas Purdon Editorial Archivist & Librarian Rachel Evans Assistant Editor Jenny Marsh Editorial Assistant Emily Roberts
Consultant Editors Michael Franses, Robert Pinner Contributing Editors Julia M. Bailey, Alberto Boralevi John Carswell, Steven Cohen Thomas Cole. Rosemary Crill Herbert Exner. Anthony Hazledine Rina M. Indictor, Ralph Kaffel Donald King. Alberto Levi DeWitt Mallary, John Mills Vanessa Moraga, Thomas Murray Aaron Nejad, Penny Oakley James W. Reid, Maria Schlatter Philippa Scott, Carlo Maria Suriano Parviz Tanavoli, John T. Wertime
Art Director Liz Dixon Art Editor Anderida Hatch
Publisher Sebastian Ghandehi
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HALI 91
THE COVER West Anatolian rug, 16th century. Wool pile on a wool foundation, 1.6 7 X 2.18m (5 6" x 7 2"). This spectacular Anatolian rug from the TIEM collection has been admired by several generations of visitors to Istanbul. It is the only example of the type so far known. The endless compartment design is in the Turkmen tradition with multicoloured oval-shaped medallions at the intersections and minor ornaments not unlike the Turkmen cliemche-gii\ in the compartment centres. The ubiquitous cloudband border is common on west Anatohan rugs of this period. The rug shares its ground colour and border with the diverse whiteground group which includes the bird and gintamani carpets, hut it differs from these in structure and may have been woven near Sivrihisar-Eskifehir, where it was discovered in the §eyh Baha Yusuf Mosque. Turk ve Islam Eserleri Museum, Istanbul, inv.no. 7 12 .
Issue 91
73 EDITORIAL The 8th ICOC: efficiency may not he everything, but it helps.
75 LETTERS A call for information on Assyut shawls; are Wright and Wertime’s ‘anchor’ pieces a safe method of establishing provenance; do you know this face?
77 FRAGMENTS Entrepreneurial genius: a symposium in London looks back at a century of Islamic art collectors and collections; a magnificent Mamluk rug resurfaces; the British Museum announces a major textile initiative; a dated Baluch; a Spanish painting yields a new early animal carpet.
83 THE 8TH ICOC REPORT A tranquil autumnal conference, with neither the euphoria of San Francisco nor the strident gloom of Hamburg, found the rug world older if not necessarily wiser. In this section, reports and comments submitted by voluntary and co-opted correspondents include overiews of the highs and lows of the whole Philadelphia experience by Luigi Ingrami and Luca Brancati. and a spectrum of views on aspects of the academic programme. Among these. Murray Eiland Jr. finds that the
‘Salting’ session laid a few7ghosts to rest (or did it?), and design-related topics provoke a particularly warm response.
92 THE HEART OF THE MATTER Voted yet again the most successful part of the programme, the
ICOC exhibitions drew heavily on East Coast private and public collections. Wendel Swan admires the planned informality of ‘Highstyle to Homestyle’at the Woodmere Art Museum: almost everything pleased, and a handful of rare and wonderful carpets leaped out. HALI's contributing editors single out some of the early rugs for additional comment.
100 A SAMITE HOARD One of the most exciting textile discoveries in recent years has been the emergence, from Himalayan repositories, of startling early complex silks. A small group of these fragments were showrn at Woodmere. Steven Cohen relates four of them to ancient and medieval Indian artistic traditions.
102 CENTRAL ASIAN GES AMTKUNSTWE RK The rise and rise of the Turkmen in the otherwise uncertain world of carpet collecting seems assured after the Philadelphia conference, w7here nothing was more hotly debated or (ecstatically) appreciated. Leading European and US collectors
Peter Hoffmeister and Michael Rothberg reflect on the exhibitions of Central Asian material from the Ethnographic
Museum in St Petersburg, and from Atlantic collections.
106 ATLANTIC HARVEST Turkmens apart, the Marketplace Design Center was the setting for a series of small exhibitions including Kirghiz reed-screens,
Baluch tribal rugs, and Persian nomad and urban weavings.
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108 THEMES FROM THE FAR WEST Gebhart Blazek discusses ‘Mysteries of the Maghreb’, a multi-stranded exhibition that aimed to set North African weaving traditions in a wider context.