De la tapisserie au Fiber Art : crises et renaissances au xxe siècle

In the late nineteenth century the questioning of divisions between the fine and applied arts enabled a “renaissance” in tapestry. Subsequently this art’s complex relations with painting, architecture and – from the 1960s – sculpture were hotly debated in an endless quest for laws that would give tapestry aesthetic autonomy. Through criteria such as murality, the structuring of surface through color, symbolic meanings, functional qualities and the creation of a spatial environment, the creations of the past were brought into dialogue with the Paris School, modernism and post-modernism. In France the prestige of the Manufactures nationales and the workshops of the Creuse contained the revival within the bounds of a hierarchical relationship between painter and weaver, reflected in the extraordinary expansion of production in the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile in Germany, Eastern Europe and the United States, the pictorial paradigm gave way to ideas based on the practices of the Bauhaus, paradoxically relocating the textile medium within the “fine art” field.