Oriental rugs give us pleasure because they beautify our homes. However, only some rugs can be considered works of art and long-term investments. There are few true antiques dating from the beginning of the 19th century until the turn of the 20th century. The carpets that were made during this period are considered artistic expressions of nomadic groups who lived in isolated camps in Persia, the Caucasus, Turkey and Turkmenistan. Using portable tears, they continually reinterpreted figures from their clans passed down through many generations.
Artistic carpets were also woven on looms in larger cities where customers ordered the ateliers to make the best carpets in which artists spent up to 15 years dedicated to a single project. Across the Middle East and Central Asia, brides and grooms ordered rugs to express to each other their deep affection for their shared life that they could not put into words. In many cases, they gifted them to their spouse on their wedding day. Parents wove carpets to pass on the rich symbolic heritage of their cultural group to their children. Teachers weaved to communicate the deeper aspects of their teachings.
But, rugs were not just created as pieces of art. They also served a variety of purposes as cushions in the desert, covers for their cargo, and as doors at the entrance to their yurts. The best weavers strived to employ each technique as perfectly as possible. The many activities involved in making a rug – raising sheep, spinning the wool, manufacturing the dyes from pure natural sources, manually tying hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of knots – have made rug weaving one of the most labor-intensive art forms. .
This long and laborious weaving process that existed until the end of the 19th century was quickly transformed as rugs began to be produced for export to Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, the pressure to satisfy the decorative demands of the Western market led to the creation of large workshops throughout Central Asia. Measures aimed at saving time were employed. Natural dyes that took time to produce, with their wide range of color shades, were replaced by easy-to-prepare but aggressive chemical dyes. This forever compromised the level of textile art practiced until then, diluted the enormous range of design in the clans’ repertoire used in carpets and even frustrated the artists’ inspiration. In just over a generation, carpet manufacturing became an industry whose main motivation was the production of large quantities of decorative pieces.
With these two categories of rugs available today – decorative and pieces of art – how is it possible to recognize an oriental rug that has an artistic level? Regardless of the region in which it was woven, the carpet considered as art is a unique artistic expression, with a breathtaking visual impact, which affects those who observe it. The use of the best quality materials is essential. An artist-grade rug offers a deeply harmonious hue of color resulting from the expert use of pure natural dyes, which gradually soften over time. The best dye masters were talented chemists who created unique colors and produced visual depth.
The variety of rarely found hues is a significant sign of textile art. For instance, a vibrant range from celadon to emerald green was produced from a lengthy process of dyeing indigo blue wool with a yellow dye, obtained from onion peel or saffron. The creation of ruby red from a type of beetle or purple extracted from sea snails also required highly skilled labor. The use of top-quality wool is also of paramount importance. This can be seen in the luminosity that wool gives to the rug and how it enhances the saturation of the dyes. The best wool is elastic and full of natural lanolin that is felt to the touch. It is literally a living and durable material.
Many artistic-level rugs are brilliant explorations of the language of geometric patterns of the artist’s clan or a specific region. Others demonstrate great uniqueness and rarity in their design and color. In both cases, the individual mark of their makers is present. However, the most important attribute is also the most intangible. For a rug to be considered of artistic level, it must possess a level of beauty that is literally breathtaking and must emanate a deep sense of balance and harmony. An artistic-level rug is an impressionist work, inspired by the glory of the sunrise, the splendor of a field of wildflowers, the strength and dignity of a mountain, or the unfathomable number of stars visible on a cloudless night. It expresses the sublime, perfectly capturing the timeless.
Several of the early modernists were captivated by the art of rugs. The cubists, for example, Klee and Kandinsky, studied the abstract forms of rugs in search of a new non-representative aesthetic. Matisse was delighted with the inventive use of color in rugs, as was Paul Gauguin, who encouraged his colleagues to study rugs to learn the employment of color use. Today, a new generation of collectors is discovering what these pioneers of modern art recognized a long time ago, that the knowledge of combining color and design in artistic-level rugs is as masterful as any painting or sculpture.
One of the greatest challenges for the novice and enthusiast of artistic-level rugs is that most masters never signed their works. An antique rug is anonymous art. Large rugs are not affected by pop culture trends or by the status of artists or their buyers. An antique rug must be judged by its own merits, by the degree of its art, and by the depth of the impact it has on the experienced viewer.
For those wishing to discover artistic-level rugs, it is certainly helpful to read some of the available literature on oriental rugs. However, what is more enriching is to educate the vision. This can only be achieved by observing as many rugs as possible of different quality levels. In this process, you may discover how some rugs affect your heart and animate your mind in a profound and penetrating way. Ultimately, it is by this internal moving effect that you can recognize those antique rugs that are true works of art.
