By Charles Recknagelis,
Tea and Carpets Blogspot
HANNOVER, Germany; January 17, 2008 -- Is
it true that as life gets more complicated, designs get simpler?
There is one enduring example. It is Iran's gabbeh carpet – today very simple,
and very popular.
Gabbehs were not always the minimally decorated, sometimes single-color canvases
they are now.
Originally, gabbehs had boldly colored, complex designs. Until the mid-1900s,
they still looked more like tribal kilims than like modern abstract paintings.
Nejatollah Hakakian is a Hamburg dealer with many years in the rug business. He
dates the change in the gabbeh's design – and its rise to popularity in the West
-- to just a few decades ago.
"Twenty years ago they started in Iran to do gabbehs with less and less designs
and with tone-on-tone colors. So they changed from highly decorated carpets to
more or less nothing in the field, with just a border around it, and sometimes
not even a border," he says.
"The rule today is three to four colors only, no more, when a normal Iranian
carpet has seven to 17 colors. Now the Pakistans and Indians do the same, making
carpets with almost no design. Mainly you just see the tone-on-tone colors."
That simplification has had the effect of making gabbeh patterns, which have a
centuries-old history among Iranian nomads, easy to mistake for Western
contemporary designs. And it has made the carpet almost a household fixture
throughout Europe and, increasingly in the United States.
Hakakian says he once asked a venerable German carpet dealer why European buyers
did not prefer the many more complex workshop and tribal carpets Iranian
producers could offer him instead.
The reply was one of the best insights Hakakian says he ever received to selling
in the West.
"You Iranians are hungry to see grass that is green, but we are full of it in
Europe," the dealer told him. "We need calm and quiet, so the less design you
have, the more of your carpets we can sell."
But if the gabbeh has a heritage of rich, complex designs itself, how much of
its contemporary look is still faithful to its past?
A great deal, according to Mahsa Heidarian, whose family company of the same
name just won an award for Best Traditional Nomadic Carpet at the Domotex 2008
trade show in Hannover, Germany.
The winning gabbeh's design very much resembles geometric abstract art.
The Heidarians, based in the west-central Iranian town of Shahr-e-Kord, say they
won by letting their nomadic weaver add her own personal touches to a design
inspired by a nomadic masterpiece from the past.
"In nomadic carpets, we don't tell the weavers anything, because it is like
abstract art, it has to come out of herself to be artistic," says Mahsa
Heidarian. "We just try to choose the right person to do it, who knows the
tradition of making nomadic carpets."
She adds that finding the right person is not always easy. "A problem is that
there are increasingly fewer nomads in Iran who have a traditional weaving
knowledge base," she says. "People are increasingly settling down."
The Heidarians say the simplified patterns of modern gabbehs are obtained by
magnifying just one or more of the small parts found in a traditional gabbeh.
Thus, just a medallion can be expanded, or just part of a field, into a whole
carpet design.
"This
simplification responds to the Western market's preferences for abstract art but
it is also true to tradition, because the simple element is there already," says
Mahsa's husband, Arash.
He draws parallels with African art, whose spare lines so interested Europe's
abstract artists at the beginning of the last century. "There is the same
immediate rapport between abstract art and nomadic art," he says.
One might argue that the rapport for modern buyers -- not all of them artists --
must go deeper than just recognizing familiar abstract patterns in a nomad's
work.
Perhaps there is a longing in all modern societies for simpler things, and the
art of tribal peoples -- which is the product of more elemental lifestyles --
helps to satisfy it.
True or false, gabbehs have done well exploring that possibility.
In the early 1990's, gabbeh producers gained still more interest in the West by
turning their backs on synthetic dyes in favor of natural dyes made from local
plants, instead – the nomads' traditional way of coloring the carpets. The
return to nature was so successful that the carpet was one of the main
attractions at the 1992 Grand Exhibition in Iran.
Authors Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III note in their book 'Oriental
Rugs' that "the next year there was such a boom in new gabbehs that it had
created a wool shortage throughout the country.
The gabbeh's marketing also got a boost from Iran's film industry when prominent
director Mohsen Makhmalbaf agreed to do a movie centered on the carpets and the
Qashqai nomads who weave them. The drama, simply titled "Gabbeh," was
commissioned by an organization dedicated to the export of handicrafts, but it
won prizes both at the 1996 Cannes and New York film festivals.
Gabbehs are hardly the only weavings to grow simpler over the decades and become
more popular with Western buyers in the process.
Hamburg dealer Hakakian points to carpets woven by Tibetan refugees in Nepal as
another example.
"The Tibetan carpet was the first with no design, just one or two colors, no
flowers, no medallion. There was a high demand for that until about two years
ago. The Tibetan was almost only white or off-white. Gabbeh went with darker
tone-on-tones, terra cotta, blue, black, red."
Hakakian says that the Tibetan and gabbeh producers are keenly aware of each
other and learn from each other's successes. The main difference between them
may be in how rooted they remain in their own traditions.
The Tibetan refugees were encouraged to weave by Swiss aid agencies which helped
them resettle in Nepal in the 1960's. Today, joined by many Nepalese, the
refugees are a major weaving pool for Western interior designers.
The gabbeh weavers have never had to leave home. And while some are amenable to
design suggestions, the best still stick closely to their own interpretations.
Related Links:
Gabbehs:
Tibetan Carpets:
Contacts:
Advice:
About the author:
Charles Recknagel is an American journalist living in Prague. He travels from
time to time to the east. That is where he caught the carpet bug. He now tries
to keep up with his interest by blogging (Tea and Carpets Blogspot:
http://tea-and-carpets.blogspot.com).
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