Twentieth Century Tapestries

Mme Paul Cuttoli, smart, svelte, energetic wife of France's Senator from Constantine, Algeria, began mixing art and philanthropy years ago when she imported wool from India, set her husband's impoverished constituents to weaving rugs. Few years after the War she grew interested in the plight of France's tapestry weavers. Flourishing when kings and noblemen wanted something ornamental to keep out the draughts which seeped through castle walls, their craft was dying in an age of steam heat and small apartments. What tapestry weaving needed, decided Mme Cuttoli, was a stiff shot in the arm of modern design as conceived by France's greatest living painters.

Mistress of a popular Paris salon, Mme Cuttoli found it easy to reach her painters, hard to convince them that their fluid daubings could be fittingly reproduced in silk and wool. Her first convert, five years ago, was Georges Rouault, onetime apprentice in a stained-glass factory. But the painters were simple to manage compared to the weavers. Those sensible artisans, with six centuries of conventional design and solid, forthright colors behind them, threw up their hands in horror at Rouault's grotesque figures and great splashings of brick red and blatant blue. "Mais non!" cried they. "We will not soil our looms." Art was only art, however, and a living was a living. In the cottages of La Creuse valley, long-idle looms were dusted off and set to shuttling.

Appropriately housed in the bright Bignou Gallery high over the Rolls-Royce showroom on Manhattan's 57th Street, there opened last week the world's first public exhibition of the first tapestries ever woven from cartoons of famed modern artists. Agog at the novelty of seeing in fine-textured silk and wool original examples of what France's onetime Premier Edouard Herriot called in his catalog introduction "the whimsical fantasy of a Dufy, the 'color researches' of a Matisse, the free inspiration of a Picasso, the often satirical gravity of a Rouault," ecstatic esthetes gurgled learnedly of high warp, low warp, ribs and slips, joined plain gallery-goers in gasps of sincere tribute to the vivid colorings, the exquisite craftsmanship which had reproduced even the blurred edges of pastel strokes in faithful detail. Uninitiates might eye Pablo Picasso's Inspiration and find that famed artist's characteristic distortions no more inspiring in cloth than on canvas. But then they could turn with genuine pleasure to Jean Lurc,at's bright, graceful Le Ruisseau--a stream of blue and white wandering through a pale green meadow beside great-petaled flowers of red, gold, black and green.

More than the French regard for "our friends in America." which M. Herriot noted in his introduction, caused Mme Cuttoli's 20th Century tapestries to be brought to the U. S. for their first public showing. No more than their 15th Century predecessors are they intended for the walls of the proletariat. Each square yard requires six to eight months' work; no design will be duplicated more than three times; prices will be fixed accordingly.

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