Day six in New York City started with a long window-shopping walk up Madison Avenue. I generally like to purchase clothes on trips, but this trip has been gentle on my clothes budget, since I walk right by Fendi, Prada, Lord & Taylor and other shops with thousand dollar dresses. The first store I dipped in to yesterday was Bardith, a small antique shop, because a beautiful framed tapestry fragment was sitting in the window. The owner was kind enough to take it out for me to photograph, even though I told her that the $4800 price tag was above my budget for impulse buys. She said it was 18th century French. It must have come from a very large tapestry, guessing from the size of the leopard head.
My next stop was the Jane Kahan Gallery to see tapestry representations of the works famous artists, tapestries authorized by the artists and woven at Aubusson in France. Now we are talking real money. The gallery notes that you might be able to obtain a tapestry of, say, Picasso for 1/100th of the cost of the painting. But the painting may cost a hundred million dollars.
There was a large tapestry based on a Henri Rousseau painting, a beautiful tapestry of a chicken by Jean Lurcat, and a fabulous tapestry based on a Romaire Beardon collage. In the case of the Beardon tapestry, the original hung next to it, so you could study how the collage was interpreted, see the decisions of the talented cartoonist who translated it. The tapestry is so true to the collage in spirit. There are aspects of collage that are included, like a ragged border of a tree mimicking the torn paper aspect of the tree shape in the original. Other things can’t be duplicated exactly in fiber, like the newspaper-photo-like fish. Many colors are changed; the blue expanse of sky, for instance, became more purple in the tapestry. The dots of one collage tree are in the tapestry, but another plaint collage tree gained swirly lines in it. I was so captivated by my comparing that I forgot to note THE TITLE of the piece. Sorry.
I finished this fabulous morning with a walk across Central Park. Below, a shadow selfie.
