Displaying items by tag: textile

The Bayeux Tapestry is arguably the most famous piece of embroidery in history. Yet, when it was rediscovered 300 years ago, the final section appeared to be missing. Until now.

Nearly 1,000 years ago, as William the Conqueror sat on his newly-won English throne, a team of embroiderers laboured over a tapestry intended to immortalise his achievement.

The tapestry, chronicling the Norman conquest of England and that battle in 1066, is regarded as a marvel of medieval Europe. However, since it was "rediscovered" by scholars in the 18th Century, its original final scene has been missing.

 After an ongoing battle, it has been decided that Pablo Picasso’s “Le Tricorne,” a centerpiece of New York’s famed Four Seasons Restaurant, will be removed from the establishment. The 19-by-20-foot stage curtain, which has resided in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue since 1959, will be relocated to the New-York Historical Society.  

Back in February, officials announced that the tapestry would need to be removed so that the wall behind it could be repaired. However, many experts feared that the delicate masterpiece could be severely damaged in the removal process. The tapestry’s owner, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, entered into a dispute with the Seagram Building's owner, Aby Rosen, a prominent figure in real estate and art circles. After heading to court and spending weeks negotiating the fate of “Le Tricorne,” Rosen and Peg Breen, president of the conservancy, agreed that the Historical Society would be a deserving home for the tapestry. The piece, which is the largest work by Picasso in the United States, will be the focal point of the society’s second-floor gallery.

The two leading decorative arts institutions in the South are embarking on a new level of collaboration between their organizations. The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg (the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum) and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem Museums & Gardens have entered a five-year agreement for reciprocal extended loans. The museums have already collaborated on the recently opened exhibition, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South (on view through September 7, 2014) at the Arts Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. With nine major paintings MESDA is the largest single lender to the exhibition, while select objects from the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg are already on display at MESDA.

Many of MESDA’s forty objects on loan to Colonial Williamsburg will be featured in a new, long-term exhibition opening at Colonial Williamsburg’s DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in January 2014. A Rich and Varied Culture: The Material World of the Early South will feature materials made in or imported to the South before 1840. The two museums have already begun discussions on several ways in which they can broaden the collaboration. Ideas include research exchanges, conservation, joint exhibitions and, potentially, joint publications. Further evidence of the collaboration will be seen in Colonial Williamsburg’s 66th annual Antiques Forum, February 14–18, 2014. Tentatively titled “New Findings in the Arts of the Coastal South,” the program will feature multiple speakers from both institutions as well as a number of experts from museums and universities across the nation.

IN ADDITION
This May MESDA honored Richard Hampton Jenrette with the first ever Frank L. Horton Lifetime Achievement Award for Southern Decorative Arts. A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, during the past forty years Jenrette has owned and restored a dozen historic properties. He has retained six of them and furnished each with period antiques, many original to the houses. Threads of Feeling, on view at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, through May 2014, displays the Foundling Hospital of London’s eighteenth century record books that retain textile tokens used to identify babies left in its care. The exhibit and catalogue provide insight into social and textile history and is the only American venue. October 20–22, 2013, Williamsburg will host a symposium to explore the objects in context. For information on the institutions, exhibitions, and symposium, visit colonialwilliamsburg.com and mesda.org.