[MR] Art Review: Textile Museum's 'Timbuktu to Tibet' - washingtonpost.com

[David Chessler]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/08/AR2009020802290.html?hpid=features1

Hajji Baba Textiles: Beauty Made for the Sole

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, February 9, 2009; C01

"Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas" at the 
Textile Museum is not about geography, and it isn't about travel. 
It's a show about a yearning. At its heart is a shared passion, never 
very common, for knowing and possessing Oriental rugs.

The exhibition's lenders, the Hajjis, as they call themselves, have 
felt that hunger gnaw. That's what brought them together. All are 
earnest members of America's premier rug-lovers' society (it's 75 
years old now): the Hajji Baba Club.

There are 90 pieces on display: veils, caps, carpets, horse trappings 
and salt bags. Some are 500 years old. Their coloring is subtle, 
their handwork is meticulous, and lots of them are beautiful, 
especially the carpets, which surely qualify as art. But this is art 
collecting of a most distinctive sort. It's not like buying pictures; 
they come with signatures. Carpets are anonymous. Most everything by 
Rembrandt -- his portraits of himself, his sudden reed-pen sketches, 
his much-worked-over etchings -- carries a suggestion of his 
blunt-nosed peasant's face and his empathetic heart. The least work 
by Picasso, say, a poster or a pot, is similarly imbued with his 
giftedness, his daring, his moist black-olive eyes. Now look at an 
old rug. What can you say about its artist? Not much. The largest, 
finest carpets, those scaled to the palace, come from urban workshops 
and were mostly made by men. Nomadic rugs and village rugs were 
mostly made by women. That's about it.

<<<snip>>>

Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas will remain 
on view through March 8 at the Textile Museum, 2320 S St. NW, open 
Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. 
Admission is free. For more information, call 202-667-0441 or visit 
<http://www.textilemuseum.org>http://www.textilemuseum.org.


--

YIS

Davitt il Bigollo da Pisa
Erudit de l'Academie de Espee de Atlantia
Storvik (rapier)
Roxbury Mill (other things)