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JACK LENOR LARSEN AND THE THIRSTY CLOTH

JUDITH GLASS,WITH ANDRÉS MORAGA

On 5 April 2007 at Rockefeller Center in New York, Christie’s will offer a hundred lots from the textile collection of the celebrated weaver, designer and textile manufacturer, Jack Lenor Larsen. Collected since his college days during many years of exotic travels, this archive of historic and contemporary weavings from around the globe has been the most dramatic influence on Larsen’s work.

WHEN ASKED HOW this lifetime habit of collecting began, Larsen replied, “I hadn’t really intended to collect fabrics – in fact, I hoped to avoid it. But when Win Anderson (President of Larsen Design Studio) and I spent a month in Nigeria in 1960, just at the time of independence there and a revival of native dress and local fabrics, those cloths (particularly the blue and white resists) were too tempting not to acquire in some depth. After that, we put aside what we called “treasures”. The ones that were most affordable and most desirable in my eyes were never courtly European or Chinese cloths, but ethnographic ones.” In time Larsen’s collection became known as ‘The Treasure Room’. As the most eminent weaver, designer and textile manufacturer of the past fifty years, Larsen has made an exceptional contribution to the field of textile arts and has been honoured by many illustrious organisations, with awards from the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Society of Arts, London. His designs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2005 a major retrospective exhibition of Larsen’s oeuvre conceived by the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, toured the USA. In that same year he was the

recipient of the inaugural George Hewitt Myers Award at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1927, Larsen studied architecture, furniture design and weaving. After graduating from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1951 he founded the Larsen Company, a byword for signature fabrics for the international design trade, setting new standards in innovation and excellence. His award-winning hand-woven fabrics of varied natural yarns in random repeats have evolved to become synonymous with modern 20th century design. In 1998 the Larsen Design Studio archives of over 25,000 items were gifted to the University of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada. Larsen is a scholar, author, authority on both traditional and contemporary craft, and an avid collector. His home, Long House Reserve, in East Hampton, New York, inspired by the Japanese shrine at Ise, was built as a case study in creative contemporary living and is now a public showcase for his extraordinary collection of contemporary craft. In 1976, after many years of research on indigenous customs, weaving and dying techniques and textile art forms within varied cultures, Larsen wrote the seminal reference work, The Dyer’s Art, ikat, batik, plangi. Several of the iconic works in this book are included in the Christie’s auction. Perhaps the most famous of these is the dynamic

silk ikat panel from Uzbekistan featured as the cover illustration 5. As befits the foremost authority on resist techniques he retains a particular affinity for the method, explaining that “It’s been interesting to me that I don’t think out anything much – I go by feeling, and buy things that appeal to me for some reason or another. Later, I learned that so many of them were resists of some sort… The fact that with resists one can perceive how they were made. One can experience a thirsty cloth and liquid dye, and the marriage of the two. These resist crafts have an inherent beauty in the process, and our perception of that process.” Other highlights in the auction include a good group of Bukhara suzanis, a splendid velvet ikat robe, a Tekke chyrpy, Kashmiri shawls, 19th century patola cloths from Gujarat in India, elaborate costumes made by the Miao hilltribes of Northern Thailand, Siberian mittens, Indonesian silk ikats, glorious Javanese batik-dyed sarongs, elegant Japanese kimonos and graphic Kabuki costumes 6. Many of the textiles have been published and publicly exhibited, such as the vibrant mirror-work embroidered milkmaid’s blouse front from Kutch in northern India 1 seen in Jack Lenor Larsen: Creator and Collector, no.56. There is also a sumptuous silk chenille and metallic-thread cloth by Mariano Fortuny, an early 20th century bedspread by Louis Comfort Tiffany and a 19th century Alabamaslave quilt. Each lot represents a thorough investigation

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