Focus On: Tribal Textiles

Focus On: Tribal Textiles

Agnes Martin Mark Rothko Sean Scully le Corbusier Charles Eames Barnett Newman Frank Lloyd Wright Postwar & Contemporary Art

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“It feels like it has been speeding up in recent years,” says New York gallerist Gail Martin. She credits this surge in attention, in part, to the 13-year-old Caskey & Lees Tribal & Textile Arts Shows, taking place this year in San Francisco February 8–10 and in New York May 15–18. Fair coproducer Elizabeth Caskey concurs with Martin’s assessment of the market. Tribal textiles “weren’t big sellers 20 years ago,” she notes. “We’ve seen the rise in interest not just in an academic form but as something that people will buy because they like them.”

Caskey is careful to clarify that the term tribal textiles is somewhat misleading, since the cloths “are not necessarily tribal. They are non-European and are made in traditional ways, techniques that are hundreds of generations old, perhaps.” The objects run the gamut in terms of value, historical period and country of origin. Some of the most popular items include 19th-century Uzbek suzanis—ornately embroidered fabrics priced in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars—and the slightly less expensive 19th- and 20th-century central Asian ikats, whose patterns are created by tie-dyeing the threads before weaving. Collectors are drawn to all varieties of pre-Columbian material, particularly remnants from the Paracas, Nazca and Hauri cultures, which, estimated in the tens of thousands and above, bear the highest price tags among this ample subset. Then there are African works, which encompass, but are not limited to, strip-woven cloths from the Ashanti and Ewe people in Ghana, Kuba textiles from the Congo and indigo-dyed pieces from Cameroon. Among the items that Martin is bringing to San Francisco is a rare mantle from the Hausa culture in Niger, made from red, orange, blue and black squares assembled to form an Op art–esque diamond pattern, priced under $5,000.

In the past 15 years, the market has not only grown but also “shifted dramatically toward more modern-looking objects,” says Graz- and Vienna-based dealer Gebhart Blazek, whose booth at the Tribal & Textile Arts Show features a selection of 20th-century Moroccan pile carpets with colorful abstract or geometric designs, such as checkerboard squares or diamonds ($4,000–14,000 each). The growing taste for such patterns can be attributed, partly, to the fact that they complement the “clean, stark and uncluttered” look of modern decor, says Caskey. New York–based architect Lee Mindel explains, “The roughness of the textiles juxtaposed against glass, concrete and wood make each material more potent.” The connection between the modernist aesthetic and tribal cloths is not without precedent: According to Blazek, some of the century’s most renowned architects and designers, including Le Corbusier, Ray and Charles Eames, Arne Jacobsen, Florence Knoll, Frank Lloyd Wright and Charlotte Perriand, lived and worked with these objects.

Leading Santa Fe textile dealer William Siegal, who is not participating in the San Francisco fair, picked up on the renewed taste for minimalist textiles as early as the late 1990s, when he curated a show at New York’s Knoedler Gallery that demonstrated the parallels between a range of fabrics and modern art. There, an African, Indonesian or pre-Columbian cloth was hung beside the Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko or Sean Scully work that it most resembled. “The textile dwarfed the canvas in every case,” says Siegal. “And these paintings were no slouches.”

Currently, the most coveted commodities on the circuit are lawons, also known as “Rothkos,” from Palembang, a region in southern Sumatra. The nickname derives from the fields of rectangular color that bleed into equally vivid borders, always some shade of red, producing an effect reminiscent of the artist’s signature paintings. The textiles with the most unusual hue combinations are the ones that inspire the largest checks. How large? Just last spring, at the second sale of Lord Alistair McAlpine’s textiles at Sotheby’s London, a new benchmark was set when two lawons sold for £10,200 ($20,200) each, and another made £12,000 ($23,800). Murray, who is showing several “Rothkos” priced at $13,500 apiece in San Francisco, points out that a record for the painter had been set at Sotheby’s New York just two weeks before the McAlpine sale, when his White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), from 1950, fetched $72.8 million. The dealer contends that the succeeding leap in value of the Indonesian “Rothkos” was no coincidence.