by A. S. Byatt
In a lecture of 1881, ‘Some Hints on Pattern Designing’, he spoke of the relations between design and real things.
Of course you understand that it is impossible to imitate nature literally; the utmost literalism of the most realistic painter falls a long way short of that…If you are to put nothing on it but what strives to be a literal imitation of nature, all you can do is to have a few cut flowers or bits of boughs nailed to it, with perhaps a blue-bottle fly or a butterfly here and there. – Is it not better to be reminded, however simply, of the close vine-trellis that keeps out the sun by the Nile side; or of the wild-woods and their streams, with the dogs panting beside them; or of the swallows sweeping above the garden boughs towards the house-eaves where their nestlings are, while the sun breaks the clouds on them; or of the many-flowered summer meadows of Picardy? Is not all this better than having to count day after day a few sham-real boughs and flowers casting sham-real shadows on your walls with little hint of anything beyond Covent Garden in them?…Ornamental pattern-work…must possess three qualities: beauty, imagination and order…as to the third – order invents certain beautiful and natural forms, which will remind not only of nature but also of much that lies beyond that part.
Morris went on to speak of the change, when classic structures were replaced by ‘young Gothic’, to the use of the continuous line, representing continuous growth. He made his own claims for representative content in the patterns.
I, as a Western man and a picture-lover, must still insist on plenty of meaning in your patterns; I must have unmistakeable suggestions of gardens and fields, and strange trees, boughs and tendrils, or I can’t do with your pattern, but must take the first piece of nonsense-work a Kurdish shepherd has woven from tradition and memory; all the more, as even in that there will be some hint of past history.
If Morris believed in a necessary representative element in fabric design, his sense of the structures and forms he preferred was equally strong. He wanted clarity of form, and he had a need for growth and strength in his patterns. They must be going somewhere.
Above all things, avoid vagueness. Definite form bounded by firm outline is a necessity for all ornament…do not be afraid of your design or try to muddle it up so that people can scarce see it; if it is arranged on good lines, and its details are beautiful, you need not fear its looking hard, so long as it covers the ground well and is not wrong in colour.
Rational growth is necessary to all patterns, or at least the hint of such growth; and in recurring patterns, at least, the noblest are those where one thing grows visibly and necessarily from another. Take heed in this growth that each member of it be strong and crisp, that the lines do not get thready or flabby or too far from their stock to sprout firmly and vigorously; even where a line ends it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth if so it would.
Morris believed in the originality of the craftsman designer – don’t copy any style, he said, but make your own – and then he added something perhaps unexpected – ‘yet you must study the history of our art’ – and finished by joking about the trade.
If I am speaking to any pattern-designers here…I should like to remind them of one thing, that the constant designing of recurring patterns is a very harassing business…A friend of mine, who is a Manchester calico-printer told me the other day that the shifty and clever designers who draw the thousand and one ingenious and sometimes pretty patterns for garment-goods which Manchester buys of Paris, have a tendency to go mad, and often do so; and I cannot wonder at it.
Fiona MacCarthy describes Morris in the 1870s working in what was then the South Kensington Museum, ‘examining historic textiles, especially the Italian late-medieval patterns’. ‘He was building up his own collection of samples: he lists at this period four pieces of brocatelle, c.1520’, ‘very curious and valuable’, ‘a collections of cut velvets, ‘various dates from about 1560’, a lady’s jacket, ‘knitted green silk and gold, pretty’, ‘scraps of a fine piece of gold cloth’. He studied plants and birds, both in historical collections and in his own garden and orchard. May Morris wrote in her biography of her father that he designed forty-five wallpapers and six ceiling papers, giving us an idea of the speed and energy with which he worked. In addition there were many fabric, tapestry and embroidery designs. Morris studied intently the relationship between the design and the fabric or paper where it would be installed – would there be movement, would the design be flat and still as in wallpapers or carpets? He produced designs in 1864, and again in 1868 when he designed five more papers and a chintz. Then another gap until 1871. His most energetic designing lasted until 1890 and the beginning of his period of fierce political activity.
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His late complex and costly design, Wild Tulip, created in 1884, derived from the Islamic designs from Turkey and Persia he studied in the museum. He was thinking about the explosion of images of tulips made by Dutch and Flemish painters in the seventeenth century, when the flower was designed and redesigned and became inordinately expensive. He was also thinking about the Near Eastern tulips in the garden in Kelmscott which flourished energetically.
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Like Morris, Fortuny came relatively late to the design of textiles – he was influenced by his work in theatre design, and by his passion for Wagner. His most important works, the Knossos shawl and the pleated Delphos dress, were made at the beginning of the twentieth century. If Morris was excited by natural places, growths and creatures, Fortuny was moved by women. Most of all, of course, by his wife, Henriette, who worked with him on the design and construction of the fabrics, and modelled them. There are photographs of women wearing nothing but a completely transparent shift – ‘made in transparent ochre silk gauze, printed in silver with plant motifs and worn next the skin’. They are exquisitely beautiful and graceful, but they are not sexy, either in 1910 or now. Apparently the Delphos dresses were made all the same size, with possibilities for adjusting their length and width for different women. The models are, it seems to me, mostly photographed with bare feet beneath the extravagantly long hems.
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Fortuny’s dresses seem to represent two starkly different things. They are made of silk or velvet, in a huge variety of brilliant, subtle colours. They descend simply over the body and end in a pool of shimmering light. They are worn over naked flesh, or over a silk shift. Their simplicity is more glamorous than most high couture designs. At the same time they are in a curious way comfortable. Women may relax in them, lying in an armchair or on a couch, and the pleats may be rucked up, and the wearer may be plump or tiny or tall, and she will look at home in her simple garment. They were worn by princesses and grand dames, by Isadora Duncan and Peggy Guggenheim. Susan Sontag was buried in a Fortuny, as was the heroine of Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group – making some sort of statement about life, death and enduring beauty. The dresses were shown at the Venice Biennale. Fortuny was an artist, and he saw his dresses as works of art. He refused to make a dress for Rita Hayworth – reminding me of a later artist who made splendidly simple clothes, Jean Muir, who refused to design for Margaret Thatcher.
I have been told more than once that there was nothing original in Fortuny’s designs – he simply copied motifs from old church vestments and furniture designs. This criticism was obviously made in his lifetime – in 1910 when he took out a second patent to protect his printing technique that gives velvet an embossed effect found in old brocades, he issued a disclaimer.
The aim of the Société Anonyme Fortuny has never been to create a false antique. In other words, the fabrics are not ‘imitations of the old.’ They are re-editions that are interpreted or translated, as it were, into another language, printed instead of woven, with beautiful patterns drawing on all epochs and all genres. At times they take after fragments of precious fabrics, at times they are completely original. Other times the designs are completely new and modern creations.
And when one comes to look at Fortuny’s work,
over time and in detail, the idea of ‘originality’ and the idea of ‘derivation’ seem somehow beside the point. Fortuny was making studies, working out themes and ideas, from many cultures and in many colours and forms, new and old, combined in new ways or presented in new contexts. Where Morris went back to living creatures and growing plants, Fortuny’s world was human, layer upon layer, intertwined and intersecting. De Osma remarks that the motifs from Arab and North African cultures should be seen as Fortuny’s own inheritance through his father. He lists some – fifteenth-century vegetable motifs that came to Europe from Persia and Turkey, European textiles of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘as well as many motifs from Cretan, Arabic (epigraphic textiles), Indian, Chinese, Japanese and later pre-Colombian and Oceanic (Maori) art’. Some of his strikingly ‘modern’ linear geometric designs turn out to originate in ancient Central America. And there are surprises – a design based on repeated, regular images of fossil trilobites, and another, cotton satin in a goldish colour, with a motif in silver metal that looks, with twining stems and flickering leaves, just like a tribute to Morris’s Willow Boughs.
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And always there were the churches of Venice, and the paintings, above all by Carpaccio, in those churches. This is a world of hangings, upholsteries, huge curtains, rich military garments, sweeping silk capes beside stone stairs and landings and the ever-present water. Fortuny was a naturalist, of a different kind from Morris, in his photographs, showing not well-known ‘views’ but mostly narrow alleys, and secretive looking posts, and the backs of women carrying burdens in the streets. As a photographer he is also a naturalist – he records the life of the streets, and the weather over the canals, creating surprising panoramas, and lights and shadows.
De Osma observes that Fortuny was possessed by the Nordic and found it hard to shake off. He was possessed by Wagner, and by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. De Osma quotes an amazing passage – he says it is illustrating Fortuny’s preference for ‘less complicated and sensational scenes’ – but I think Fortuny is writing about the aesthetic experience of Wagner’s leitmotifs.
Fortuny writes:
It is possible to have a work created in an instant that may completely satisfy the intellect of its author…in which case, either it represents a long period of intellectual work, or it becomes a ‘motif’ no more or less than a product of nature. Sublime art, such as that of Wagner or Michelangelo, is extremely rich in motifs, so much so that any fragment of their works, however small, is as large as any other, because it offers a motif, and whatever that may be, whether the wing of a mosquito or an enormous mountain, in no way will the one be greater than the other.
When I read this – the latest of many readings – I associated it for the first time with the motifs in the textiles – pomegranates, lilies, peacocks, rabbits, strawberries, gryphons, stars. At the beginning of writing this essay, I saw the images of textiles whole, remembering perhaps a colour and a rhythm, the distance of one shape from another. Then I began to look closely at the motifs – what sort of pomegranate is this? How does it relate, spatially and in colour, to the other images? Is it simply elegant or flaunting or there for the visual rhythm? And then I began to think about human history, and how humans decided to make representations of pomegranates (for instance) and why, and did these images acquire allegorical or metaphysical meanings, and when, and who could read them, in a church window, or on a silk dress or a velvet coat?
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POMEGRANATE
The pomegranate has symbolised life, death and the borders between the two in many cultures and at many times. Ancient Egyptians were buried with pomegranates as images of a new life. Pomegranates were embroidered on the hems of the robes of Hebrew High Priests, and grew in Islam’s four gardens of Paradise. Robert Browning’s mysterious title for his poems, Bells and Pomegranates, refers to these priestly hems. They were blessed fruits to Buddhists – ripe, open pomegranates were symbols of fertility and plenty. Anglo-Saxons probably know best the classical myth of Proserpina or Persephone, daughter of Ceres (Demeter in Greek) who was the goddess of earth and fertility. She was swept away by Pluto (Dis), god of the underworld, to be his consort and sit beside him on his dark throne. Her distraught mother neglected the earth, everything decayed and died, and Zeus was forced to ask Pluto to restore her. This turned out to be only partially possible, because Proserpina’s return depended on her having eaten nothing in the underworld, whereas she had been tempted to eat four pomegranate seeds. So she had to return to the underworld for four months a year, our winter months. This pomegranate is lusciously and equivocally portrayed in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of Janey Morris – entitled Proserpine – where the beautiful woman is dark and brooding and holds up the sliced fruit displaying the juicy seeds. A cruel interpretation would suggest that Mrs Morris is doomed to spend a dark wintry life with her husband, with only a glimpse of fruit and light (and Rossetti). The painting hung in the dining room at Kelmscott. I cannot imagine that Morris – however charitable – enjoyed it.
William Morris first undertook to represent pomegranates in 1864 – he produced a design for ‘fruit’ or ‘pomegranates’ which originally also contained some elegant olive branches. Like many designs by Morris the original identity is dubious – is it a fruit, is it a pomegranate? It is oval in shape, rather than round, and looks unlike any pomegranate I have ever seen. It was designed a decade before Rossetti’s painting, and the geometry combines the tile shapes he had been working on, with the slanting boughs of the tree. The ‘fruit’ are more like lemons, ovals with spotted skins that come to a point, though there are also some round shapes with two cheeks. Later designs with pomegranates are realistic, rounded and convincing, some burst open to show the bright red seeds, some still clamped shut. And there is a splendid fabric designed by John Henry Dearle, who was Morris’s former pupil, who had a long and distinguished career as head designer at Morris & Co. Some of Dearle’s work rivals Morris’s own, and his designs are scrupulous, delicate and surprising. His Bird and Pomegranate is still on sale, with various alternative background colours, and has the intricacy of Dearle at his best. It has intertwining branches, not unlike willow boughs, and is spangled with fruit, split open at inviting angles to reveal the red ripe shiny seeds. The boughs are also inhabited by small birds, red-capped like the red pomegranates, or soft grey, flying in to peck at unopened fruit, or by tiny soft grey birds pecking at other fruit. Dearle was very good at depicting many varieties of English birds from many points of view. His design is very orderly and complicated if worked out, but looks happily random at first sight.
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Rossetti’s pomegranate is both mythical and personal. Morris’s, like most of his work, is at one level, the most important level, a representation of a living and growing creature. Fortuny is different. He is working within an accepted symbolism and an accepted gathering of forms, which he plays with, and extends and changes. To begin with, I did not particularly notice pomegranates. Now I see that, in Fortuny, they are everywhere, a language of motifs, as he said himself. It is interesting that Fortuny’s mother’s first purchase for her collection of fabrics was ‘a blood-red piece of old velvet, embellished by pomegranates’.
Describing ‘a sixteenth-century-style red textile’ illustrated in her book, Deschodt describes richness in order. The textile ‘alternates branches with three artichokes and three pomegranates to form a reticulate repeat with ogival links. In the centre of each ogive is a thistle framed by raspberry bushes, or a pinecone nestled in pomegranate flowers. The Spanish-Moorish border has vine tendrils interspersed with leaves.’ Fortuny turned to many times and cultures – Byzantine, Venetian, Renaissance Italian, Greek, Japanese, Indian, Egyptian and Far Eastern, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and in most of these pomegranates can be found, endlessly similar, endlessly variable. They can be combined with thistles – both plants symbolised fertility and abundance in the Near and M
iddle East, and fabrics with these designs were made from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries when Italy traded with the Ottoman Empire. Both pomegranate and thistle have a rounded seed container surmounted by a crown of leaves. They can suggest a closed secret, or something about to burst with shining crimson seeds, with lifeblood in birth and death. The pomegranate was used to adorn images of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Fortuny copies these images, turns them on their sides, redesigns them or makes new images of his own. Pomegranates stand at the centre of a design, or run in ribbons of repeated forms as an ornament. I should like to know if Fortuny, when designing a gown, or a cope, or a velvet cape, thought of the meaning of the images, or just of their traditional and satisfactory beauty.