Art: Rug

In 1698 Peter, Emperor of Muscovy, told the gentlemen of his court to shave off their beards. The commandment had a significance beyond the capillary, for the beards of the Russian nobles were copied from the men who lived to the Eastward; the monarch’s bare chin was the outward and visible sign of his detestation of the Orient. A wise man once called Asia the subconscious mind of Europe, and since the beard is to the face what the East is to Westerncivilization many scholars have thought that Peter was quite right to shave. He did not want to wear his subconscious on his chin. But the Shah of Persia, who affected still the long spiky bristle of the mandarin, was worried. When he heard how the naked chin of Peter gleamed blue and shameless in his new palace, Petersburg, upon the Neva, he sent him a fine rug as one who would say: In mystery the twig is bent, and a patch of hair divides one nation from another. Let peace be between us, my brother, although your shears are impudent.

Peter, called “The Great,” died in his sullen city on the swamp. His beard then took its revenge and sprouted violently under the coffin lid; in time it, too, grew tired. Meanwhile the rug that had carried the forgiveness of Persia hung upon the wall of Leopold I, Sovereign under the Holy Roman Empire, and King of Hungary. Two weeks ago a Scotch art dealer landed in Manhattan. He had a trunk with him. The rug was in the trunk.

Victor Behar, of Glasgow, went to a quiet hotel and had his luggage brought up. In one suitcase he had a docket of papers, the pedigree of the rug attested by the curators of the Austrian State Museum and witnessed by the British consul in Vienna. It was at least 150 years old when the Shah gave it to Peter. Leopold used it as a tapestry in the bedroom of his summer palace. Other Emperors took good care of it; at last it went to the State Museum. French officials said that it was worth twelve million francs and taxed it accordingly. Victor Behar values it at a million dollars. He will offer it to the Metropolitan Museum for exhibition. He wants, of course, to sell it.

When the Shah gave the rug to Peter most Emperors were huntsmen. Wearied after a day of statecraft, they would spend a week pelting after boars. Peter was an impressionable man. In his youth he made the Grand Tour and lived, for a while, in France, where he enjoyed all the pleasures of the Court. He brought back to

Russia a great admiration for western civilization, for grottoes, frangipani and waterclocks; he brought back a mind homesick for the kindnesses of French gentlewomen, and brightened with anunderstanding of French statesmanship.

In his determination to get the Orient out of Russia he moved his capital away from Moscow, built himself a Versailles, procured a Pompadour, and made hunting into a pageant, trotting out on horseback like a Bourbon, with ribbons, hounds, bugles, spears, and streamers. Because the rug showed a hunting scene he became very fond of it.

The slow Persian craftsmen, who made the rug out of silk threads, wove into it animals, riders, flowers. Horsemen move to and fro, pursuing lions, antelopes, ibexes, boars, hares, foxes, jackals and other beasts; many flowers, some western, some Persian, and some the flowers of no land, riot softly on the ground, or hang from delicate vines. The background is salmon-colored. Around the central field runs a quiet legend. In the middle all js speed: bugles blow there, stallions leap, and the beards of riding Khans shake out like flame along a wind of fruits and blossoms. But the border reposes. Two figures with wings recur regularly among the budding leaves; their costumes proclaim them to be Persian genii; among their motionless ranks a gnarled ornament appears in various forms that is not Persian at all but “Tschi,” emblem of immortality, important symbol of Chinese mythology.

It was the border that charmed Leopold, that man of peace. He spent most of his life directing wars against Louis XIV, but he disliked soldiers, particularly his own, never visited a battlefield, and was embarrassed by maneuvers. The rug hung over his bed in an elaborate and jejune country place to which he retired for meditation and amour. It is said that two violin players, blindfolded with black silk handkerchiefs, fiddled at the head and foot of the bed while he was taking his pleasure. He died in 1705 and the rug passed through the estates of a series of princes. Connoisseurs who have seen it in the Vienna museum say that it is the most beautiful rug in the world. Assuredly it is the most famous. Its designer, whoever he was, must have dreamed its pattern many times before he dared to record it. Such spraying valleys, such a flight of flowers and beasts, are the speech of a man who loved the world and knew its changing story. Reds ring together like swords clashing in a book; the silver of the hills, mountain greenery, the gold of the sea, blend and flash under the square border where no wind blows, where the genii squat on their haunches, half-gods patient of subjection, waiting without haste for the repose of all things.

In Pittsburgh

This week the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh opens its annual “International.” Director Homer Saint-Gaudens announced his plans when he came back from Europe a month ago. Augustus John, he said, would give a one-man show. The imported judges would be Pierre Bonnard (France), Giovanni Romagnoli (Italy) and Charles Sims (England). Meanwhile Painter John held an exhibition in London. He wired Director Saint-Gaudens that, to his infinite regret, he had sold all his paintings. He had nothing left to exhibit. Signer Romagnoli agreed to substitute some of his own things for those of Mr. John. The jury for the International (which has nothing to do with the one-man exhibition) remains the same. Now for the 25th year Pittsburgh hangs the new work of a dozen countries in its galleries.* Homer Saint-Gaudens—who of all artistic Americans best deserves the definition “smart son of a smart father”—has from the beginning of his directorship brought good taste and energy to the Carnegie Institute. He has made art social without making it silly; people have long suspected him of being more interested in art than in Pittsburgh and this has made it possible for him to lure some very large flies indeed into his parlor. His International show is unique among U. S. exhibitions because in it native talent is exposed, without coddling, to competition with the best young work of Europe, because the jury is deftly selected from distinguished artists of opposing nationalities and aesthetic beliefs, and because it is the only exhibition outside New York to which the important dealers send their scouts. Last week the Fine Arts Committee of the Institute dined Mr. Saint-Gaudens at the Pittsburgh Golf Club. Near him were ranged the U. S. members of the Jury of Award, Gifford Beal, Howard Giles and Charles W. Hawthorne, and the European jurymen—Artists Bonnard and Romagnoli and Sims. Pierre Bonnard, a pupil of Cezanne and a follower of Gauguin, was born, in 1867, in a town of the lovely name of Fontenay-aux-Roses. He did not get his early art training in a brothel, as did Cezanne, nor did he find it necessary to go native in the South Seas like Gauguin. Indeed, he could neither dissipate nor paint as well as his masters; he had a country inheritance, and sincerity. He uses colors quietly; he is a radical with the mind of an academician. “The Intimists” is the name of the group which has formed round him in Paris; just what is meant by the word no one has yet explained. You do not need to coin a word to explain Pierre Bonnard. He is a poet. He has never been able to get over the wonder of elementary things; it was, more than anything else, this quality of wonder that puzzled people in his most famous picture, “Woman with Cat,” which took third prize at the Carnegie Exhibition in 1923. A woman sits at a table; is a bowl of fruit in the centre of the table; a white cat at her side lifts up his paw.

Giovanni Romagnoli is an instructor of art at the University of Bologna. He has consented to join the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of Carnegie Institute before his return to Italy. His famed picture, “After the Bath,” won second prize in 1924. Painters do well to choose this title (a famous critic once observed) because it suggests that the model has just been washed, justifying the picture as a sort of commemorative plaque.

Charles Sims, associated with the Royal Academy, studied with Jules Lefebyre and Benjamin Constant, acquired a precise and elegant technique, and developed, by painting the cold noses of aristocrats and the torsos of the wives of trade-kings, a satiric turn of mind that would have made him an ornament to the House in the days of Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield. Two years ago he painted a picture of King George. The monarch’s little legs protruded from a dandiacal bouquet of ribbons and stars, ermine and furbelows; his wan, overbred features looked down like a face of wax in a show window. Critics labeled the picture “The Mayfly Monarch.” His Majesty rejected it.

*From Pittsburgh the paintings will go to the Cleveland Art Museum to be exhibited from Jan. 4 to Feb. 14; thence to the Chicago Art Institute from March 7 to April 18.