Textile artist Marguerite Zorach

A couple of weeks ago, Cynthia Fowler of Emmanuel College contacted me. She is an Associate Professor who specializes in early American art, particularly Modernist Craft production in the early twentieth century. She had noticed my blog and my growing interest in rug hooking in the 1920s so she sent me an article that she just published called "Hooking Magic: Transforming Women's Handicraft into Art" (pages 227-244 in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Texiles, 1750-1950; edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin; Burlington: Ashgate 2009).

I am learning so much from Professor Fowler's work. She wrote her dissertation on Marguerite Zorach, whom she also discusses in this article. Zorach was a modern artist who worked in a number of mediums including paint and hooking, although her large-scale embroideries are what she is most known for. The scanned picture is one of her hooked rugs called Eden (taken from p. 230 of Fowler's article). She hooked it in 1917. Zorach said in an interview in 1957 that she became interested in hooked rugs as a textile art medium when she was on a trip in New Hampshire with her husband, sculptor William Zorach. She met a woman hooking a rug from scraps of old clothing. Zorach said, "It was the first time I'd ever seen one, and I was fascinated. I remember this little old lady took us into her parlor and showed us the rugs. She'd look at them and say, 'Now, I remember the day Susie wore that dress.'...They all had memories for her" (quoted by Fowler, p. 230).

She only hooked a half a dozen rugs, but they make up part of her total body of artistic work, and reveal "her commitment to the handmade and to craft production as a legitimate form of artistic expression," Fowler explains (p. 231).

She was influenced by Cubism and fauvist colors, although her rug Eden is not as experimental as her paintings. But when the rug was exhibited in 1923, it was called "futuristic" and "ultra-modern" because it was radical when compared with the rugs that were being produced during this time period (Fowler, p. 231). The rugs I have been viewing in the books and catalogues from this period are nothing like Eden. They are your colonial american rugs, imitative florals, orientals, and primitives.

So Zorach intrigues me. She appears to be among the first to hook a rug that challenged the traditional craft, who saw in it a medium to express herself as a modern artist.

1951 photographed 'first' public hook in

In case you missed it, Gene Shepherd has posted a link to some fabulous pics of a 1951 public hooking bee (Pearl says it was the 'first' public hooking bee, a claim that needs to be confirmed; Color in Hooked Rugs p. 295). The pics were photographed by George Silk for LIFE magazine in 1951. Shepherd has identified the site as Storrowtown, MA.

1924 Hearthstone Rugs Exhibition

Today I received a copy of the catalogue put out by The Anderson Galleries of New York City in 1924 for the exhibition and sale of the Anna M. Laise Phillips Collection. I had so hoped that the catalogue would be heavily illustrated with photos of all the rugs. Alas, my hopes are dashed. The catalogue is 28 pages with one beautiful photo of a specimen which was reproduced from The Bulletin for the Art Center of New York (pictured here via a scan: more on this rug below).

What an exhibition this must have been! Phillips had on display and sale 183 pieces: the vast majority rugs, not all hooked, and a few quilts. Some were antique rugs and some were rugs her workers had made for the show. She writes:

"I have the pleasure in offering this collection from our Hearthstone Studios, the quaint old-fashioned homes of the descendants of our earlier American rug makers. The Antique rugs have been in the families of our workers for several generations, some of them for a longer time, carefully guarded and kept clean; but softened to harmonious tones by time, which blots out vivid colorings in art as well as nature...Rug making is an hereditary art that for a period slumbered, but did not die; because scattered throughout America, tucked away in little villages and country communities are women who to-day are bending over their rug frames, fashioning with painstaking fingers rugs in the same way that their grandmothers constructed floor coverings. The offerings here shown are made primarily to perpetuate the art of rug and quilt making, and to encourage our workers by CREATING A MARKET FOR THE EXPRESSION OF THEIR INHERITED IDEAS OF DESIGN, COLOR AND TEXTURE" (from Foreword; capital format: original to Phillip's text).

The rugs in the catalogue were collected by Phillips from the homes of her workers from "the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River" and "the Southern States too" (from Foreword).

The catalogue offers a full description of each piece in the exhibit - almost as good as a picture but not quite! Here are a few just so you can see the variety of subjects and materials used:

"STRIPED HEARTHSTONE HOOK RUG. Evenly and closely hooked. Ashes of rose and reseda-green stripes alternating with those of dull gold of equal width. An unusual rug. Size, 5 feet 6 inches x 2 feet 9 inches."

"RARE OLD FLEUR-DE-LIS HOOK RUG. Early American. Original design, closely hooked. A quartet of fleur-de-lis in soft old red in centre surrounded by faint lavender flowers and pearl-gray foliage. Size, 5 feet 4 inches x 3 feet 11 inches."

"CANARY BIRD HEARTHSTONE HOOK RUG. Very fine close hooking of hand-spun lamb's wool. Field in natural gray (uncolored, made by carding together the wool from a white lamb and a black one). Original design. Sprays of flowers and foliage with canary birds. Scroll border in tans, yellows, maroon and black. Size, 5 feet 3 inches x 1 foot 9 inches."

"MARINE HEARTHSTONE RUG. Deep, close, fine hooking of homespun lamb's-wool. Lighthouse rising from the sea on small island with misty purple-tinted sky in the background, sea gulls hovering near; mixed brown and fawn-colored border. Size, 4 feet 2 inches x 2 feet 5 inches."

I have become enthralled with Phillips. I am finding her name pop up in books from the period authored by others. Kent, in fact, drops a line in his book that one of her Hearthstone rugs sold for a four-digit price.

So I started digging around The Bulletin for the Art Center of New York, volume 1 no. 9 (April 1923). I found a mention of Phillips and a (second!) exhibit that she had put on for the Art Center and a fuller description of the rug pictured above:

“Mrs. Anna M. Laise Phillips held her second annual exhibition of American hand-made rugs at the Art Center from March 12-31. She displayed a number of antique and modern rugs from the Hearthstone Studios, the rural home of her rug makers. In the collection was a large carpet eleven by twelve feet, hooked in a basket-weave design, copied from an old rug, also shown. This rug, which is seamless, required the efforts of fifteen workers for seven months, but the result is a rug which stands out as a masterpiece of the handcraft. It is made for a seashore home, to be placed in the dining-room opening towards the sea. The colors are soft dregs of wine, a ‘hit-or-miss’ arrangement giving a purplish rose effect. A reproduction of it is shown on the cover of this issue of the BULLETIN” (p. 171).

Abstract in 1937

You must be able to tell I'm a historian through and through. W.W. Kent's books are fascinating, and what neat thing did I find within today? On p. 212 of Rare Hooked Rugs (1941), Kent displays a photograph courtesy of Mrs. Lilian Mills Mosséller who designed it (Plate 236). Mosséller lived in New York and Asheville, North Carolina. I scanned it and show it here.

Kent claims it is a "famous" rug called "Coffee and Cream." It is an abstract hooked before 1937 when it was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the International Rugs and Carpets show. It was taken on tour across the USA by the American Federation of Arts in 1938. In 1939 it was exhibited at the World's Art Fair in New York. With my interest in abstract rugs, so far this is the earliest intentional abstract I have been able to locate to date.

The design idea was taken from the top of a swirling cup of coffee with cream in it. Unfortunately all we have in terms of a picture is this black and white. But Kent tells us that the colors were fabulous: six shades of white, oyster, eggshell, snow white, with an accent of chartreuse.

Mosséller appears to have been a well-known rug designer in her day. She wrote a few pages about the "contemporary rugs and their future" which Kent put in his book. She had a studio in New York and employed many hookers, whom she calls "artisans" and "workers". She seems to have been known for hiring handicapped people to hook her rugs. Kent preserves a photograph of these men and women working in her studios. She also had devised a huge crude cutting machine which stripped the wool in pieces that look to be around 3/4 inches wide. She was very keen on rug designers being considered on par with Picasso and Van Gogh, and she was very proud that her rug hung in the Met alongside these famous painters.

She is very insistent that designers must start signing their work by weaving their signature in the fabric, just as the painters do with paint. This intrigues me, because here is a shift from the earlier idea that hand-hooked rugs are utilitarian mats manufactured by workers and should not be signed, to the idea that the designer at least is an artist and her rugs will only increase in value if her signature is on it.

Two books by W.W. Kent

This afternoon the mailman delivered two old books I had ordered about rug hooking. Both were written by William Winthrop Kent. One is called The Hooked Rug. It was written in 1937 and reports to trace hooked rugs back to a 6th century Coptic mat!

Hey now I'm interested. An intersection has occurred between rugs and my academic profession (I'm a scholar of early Christianity, particular old Coptic texts!). The Coptic rug he has photographed (see below) is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (p. 6).

It appears that he found out about old Coptic hooked mats from Helen R. Albee and her booklet Abnakee Rugs (my next purchase!). The Copts appear to have been making rugs the same way we do. They pulled the material through a cloth foundation in even unclipped loops. This suggests that the art goes back to the ancient Egyptians. Wow.

I have scanned the image of the cover of Kent's book because I thought the design lovely. Wouldn't it make a good hooked rug itself?

Women Yesterday and Today 2: The Creation of Modern Rug Hooking

Rug hooking began as a craft of poverty in the 1800s. It is the "art" that women and men practiced who had very limited access to materials. Rug making was a "country" craft that relied on scraps of materials cast off by mills or rags that were too worn out for the family to use for cleaning anymore. Burlap seed sacks were turned into no-cost carpets by hooking these cast offs and rags into the holes of the sacks.

We don't necessarily think of rug hooking this way anymore, although my first five years of rug hooking was done only from reclaimed wool that I hunted on the cheap at rummage sales. At my heyday, I bet I had a whole closet of wool (packed in) that I had purchased for under $100. It took a lot of leg work, and many hours of cutting up old smelly coats and laundering them thoroughly, but my "art" was imitative of the ol' days in that I restricted myself to hooking with selvaged wool. When I returned to rug hooking last year, I realized that I wanted my "art" to have more freedom, and so I began to explore new wool and really started to think about dyeing as an art in and of itself. Today we have guilds and camps and shops and magazines and books all devoted to rug hooking.

None of this would have been possible without two women in rug hooking's past who took an under-valued craft that was invisible and elevated its popular image: Lady Anne Grenfell (1920s) and Pearl McGown (1930s). Both women took a local craft that did not have much appeal at the time and brought it to a new level of business and art in their respective locales. Each woman used a similar strategy. Today I will share what I know about Lady Anne Grenfell.

Lady Anne Grenfell had noticed that the wives of the fishermen of Labrador made rugs, but that the rugs were not very attractive. In 1916, she apparently got the idea to design little patterns of northern scenes, put them on burlap and create kits complete with dyed silk stockings and a rug hook made from a filed off bent nail hammered into a piece of wood that fit into a woman's hand. These were distributed to women in the area to hook during the long dark days of winter. The materials Lady Anne supplied were recycled. The silk stockings came from donations from women in Canada, the US and England. There was a slogan at the time, "When your stockings begin to run, let them run to Labrador."

Women who crafted the rugs would be given vouchers to buy used clothing when they returned the finished mat to the Grenfells and Lady Anne sold it in her tea house. Lady Anne is credited with establishing strict standards for the production of the mats and the craft. Mats were hooked in straight horizontal lines and every hole of the burlap was filled. When mats were returned, they were weighed (to make sure that all the materials sent out were incorporated in the mat) and graded before the crafter was paid.

Even though the craft was still a craft of the poor (women had to prove that they were in need to be part of this program), Lady Anne's supply of upgraded (although still recycled) materials, the creation of unique local designs, the standardization of technique and manufacture, and the entrepreneurial connection began to change people's attitudes about rug crafting. Women who had no income, could create mats and exchange them for clothing and medicines, and eventually other goods as the Grenfell mat business took off. Women who previously had had no options found themselves with options. By hooking Grenfell mats, they could earn an independent livelihood and not be forced into early marriages they did not choose. Rug hooking was beginning to emerge as a business option and one that assisted and supported women and their families independent of a husband's income.

Information for this post came from the Henry Sheldon Museum and Paula Laverty's, Silk-Stocking Mats which can be purchased at Amazon HERE.