Tapestry and tableau: revival, reproduction, and the marketing of modernism

During the three decades that followed the Second World War, dozens of canonical modern artists and architects, prestigious dealers and curators, and significant collectors participated in a revival of tapestry as a medium for modern art. These tapestry revivers included artists as diverse as Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella, architects Le Corbusier and Gordon Bunshaft, dealers Sidney Janis and Denise René, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the noted art critic Clement Greenberg. By revealing these and other figures’ participation in the modern tapestry revival, this dissertation demonstrates not only how integral tapestry was to modernism and but also how we must reconsider our received narratives of modern art in order to account for its historic inclusion of tapestry. ❧ Both tapestry and modernism reached unprecedented critical, economic, and institutional success during the same historical moment, the twenty‐five years following World War II. The coincident rise of tapestry and modern art is a mark of the dialectic relationship between them, particularly the close relationship between tapestry and modernist painting. This dialogue between modernist painting and tapestry occurred both on a conceptual level, through similarities in how they were described and understood, and on a structural level, through similarities in how they were commissioned, circulated, marketed, and collected. This dissertation thus proposes that tapestry, as both a medium and a concept, actually enabled the successful marketing of modernism during the postwar period. By working through the medium and concept of tapestry, modernists were able to emphasize the novelty of modern art while situating it in a historical lineage, to reproduce works by celebrated modern artists for multiple collectors, to advocate a decorative function for modern art as part of modern life, and to articulate the flatness and textile qualities of modernist painting. Examining modern tapestry illuminates how modernists justified and disseminated their art, and how they marketed modernism through exhibitions, reproduction, architecture, and criticism.