Art from Below: How Tribal Kilims Came out on Top

The enthusiasm for tribal weavings, especially flatwoven kilims, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The popularity of these rugs—characterized by simple compositions featuring bold colors and graphic arrangements—postdates the launch of the Apollo program to place astronauts on the surface of the moon. In earlier decades and centuries, few collectors or decorators showed serious interest in flatweaves. For centuries, the most desirable rugs followed the classical compositions exemplified by the 16th century Ardabil Carpet, arguably the world's most famous textile. 

The Ardabil Carpet is among the world's most significant rugs. Its classical composition exemplifies the aesthetic standards prized by collectors and decorators for centuries. // The Ardabil Carpet (Google Art Project)

The Ardabil Carpet was bought by a British merchant in 1890, a time in which kilims were treated as disposable wrapping for the bundles of knotted pile carpets being shipped to the West. 

In their definitive history of flatwoven rugs, Alastair Hull and Jose Luczyc-Wyhowska write that while Westerners associated pile carpets with luxury and status, kilims woven by rural nomads were relegated to use "as dog blankets" and "picnic rugs".

“Whereas the exotic and luxurious character of the knotted carpet had ensured its desirability by the church and elite even before the sixteenth century, flatwoven rugs were ignored or regarded as the inferior work of the peasantry." (Hull and Luczyc-Wyhowska, Kilim: The Complete Guide, 1993, p. 19).  

Henry VIII standing astride an Ushak carpet // Henry VIII, After Holbein (Google Art Project)

The Yellow Oval Room, decorated with an antique Ushak carpet // The Obama White House (National Archives)

As early as the Tudor period, Ottoman carpets were seen in the West as elite status symbols that communicated exoticism and wealth. Henry VIII famously posed for a portrait astride an Ushak rug, one of 800 carpets in his personal collection. Some five centuries later, the Obama White House also chose an antique Ushak carpet when decorating the Yellow Oval Room, a quasi-private personal space on the executive mansion’s upper floor.

The selections are easily understood. Traditional pile carpets are, for the most part, serious business. They convey the majesty and authority of high office—whether concentrated in the English throne or the Resolute Desk. 

On an aesthetic level, such rugs are well-suited to interior spaces with scrolling millwork, crown molding, voluminous drapery, and wood paneling. Naturally so. These rugs were designed to blend naturally in the drawing rooms and studies of elite buyers. Over the centuries, Ottoman and Persian workshops producing such carpets adapted their motifs and compositions in response to shifting consumer tastes, just as brands today scramble to forecast consumer preferences.

A different visual language

Kilims and tribal weavings communicate in an entirely different visual language. They are made to advertise a weaver's tribal affiliation. Identifying motifs were woven into saddle bags and rugs slung across pack animals and draped over the doorways of nomadic tents. The need for motifs that are legible at a distance naturally expressed itself through bold, geometric compositions that prioritize clear and crisp weaving. 

Interlocking blocks of bright color bring motion and drama to this Persian kilim, a playful innovation on a conventional diamond grid composition. Veramin eye-dazzler, Persia (c. 1900).

With the notable exception of Swedish-made flatweaves and Diné (Navajo) blankets, flatweaves were seldom used in the decoration of Western homes before the mid-twentieth century.

Sentiment began to shift in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only did the Middle East's oil and gas boom create new economic opportunities, but the jet age ushered in a new era of international leisure travel. As the distance between points on the map shrank, young Western travelers, hippie trail beatniks, aid workers, and corporate expatriates enjoyed access to souks and bazaars unfiltered by rug merchants and other middle-men. These travelers were drawn to the unmuted visual language of kilims and other tribal weavings.

The very qualities that had prompted traditional collectors to pass over tribal rugs became the weavings’ strongest selling points. The overt symbolism and graphic quality aligned with changing aesthetic preferences overtaking the worlds of art, architecture, and design in the middle of the twentieth century. 

One early kilim collector, Oliver Hoare, has described his incredulity that others failed to recognize the graphic appeal of tribal flatwoven rugs earlier.

“One heard explanations that [tribal kilims] did not involve the same amount of work as knotted pile carpets, which seemed like judging a painting according to the number of brush strokes” (Black and Loveless, The Undiscovered Kilim, 1977, p. 16).

The bright pastel kilim harmonizes with other textiles selected by Alexander Girard, bringing warmth and approachability to the Eero Saarinen-designed Miller House in Columbus, Indiana. // Vitra

One London dealer describes how a prominent art critic bought a tribal kilim to hang on a wall and quickly fell into a buying mania. The critic afterwards “sold many of his modern paintings to finance further collecting” (Black and Loveless, p. 8).

Over time, this shift widened beyond the jet set and art gallery crowd. As interior decorating and home furnishing bent toward a simplified minimalist aesthetic, the dramatic compositions and color fields that dominate tribal weavings came into vogue, challenging the graceful but stuffy floral motifs of knotted pile carpets that had been the bread and butter of the rug world for centuries. Rug motifs popularized during the sixteenth-century rule of Shah Abbas, it turns out, were ill-suited to an age of nuclear weapons, color television, and pop art.

By the 1970s, the growing popularity of kilims translated into earnest assessments of these rugs as exemplars of religious and indigenous art, and scholars began to more seriously document previously overlooked rugs. In 1972, Turkey’s ministry of religious endowments began cataloguing kilims that had been deposited over the centuries at local mosques across Anatolia—in many cases buried and forgotten under successive generations of donated rugs (Balpinar and Hirsch, Flatweaves of the Vakiflar Museum Istanbul, 1982). Those kilims formed the nucleus of a new museum dedicated to flatweaves in Istanbul. A kilim exhibition in a London gallery followed in 1977, as did a flurry of books that sought to elevate kilims to the level of legitimate woven art.

Looking back on the changing landscape, one collector remarked, “once the discovery had been made it was inconceivable that no-one had realized it before” (Black and Loveless, p. 16).

As stimulating as a Klee

We live in a world that has inherited these aesthetic shifts, and tribal kilims are no longer emerging curiosities.

Happily, the thrill of discovery hasn’t disappeared entirely.

Georgie Wolton, “Britain’s most influential modernist architect,” described her first encounter with flatweaves as a revelation: “… to me this dusty but quietly glowing Caucasian kilim was as stimulating as a Klee and more exciting than a Mondrian. In a sense it changed my life” (Black and Loveless, p. 14).

It is asking too much to expect a rug to change one's life. Still, the right rug just might have the power to transform a room.

Mazandaran Kilim, Iran (c. 1940)

"Kairuan" by Paul Klee