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| thesis I. |
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General public opinion of the traditionally European woven tapestry art is problematic in spite of the fact that on the turn of the century the rebirth of this genre occurred. My observation is that the main cause of this uncertainty lies in modernity due to the fact that the genre slipped into multiple disadvantaged position:
- It could not integrate itself into modern arts that were getting become intellectual activities, because it could not leave behind its ancient, slow handcraft technique, which is against speeding modern time-philosophy.
- The process of making tapestry that is the shared work between designers, carton drawers and weavers meant a difficulty in development.
- Despite its "fine art" identity, the genre was regarded applied art based on its material textile and was "condemned" to the Museum of Applied Arts.
- Due to its traditions, it was tied to the representative need of European feudal courts. During the Great French Revolution, J.P. Marat deemed it useless and unneeded. The background of Marat's sentence, which affects even until to present days, was enlightened in Martin Warnke's book "The Court Artist". This implies that the bourgeois society could not forgive neither the former governing society nor the art itself for fulfilling its greater role in the former royal courts.
However Warnke draw the attention to the fact that royal courts formed the system of artist's training: the academies. The academies approached art as a part of higher knowledge. The recognition of the intellectual nature of art is based on this philosophy, which also means that during the concept and form based appreciation of art, the concept, the intellectual idea has priority compared to handcraft, that is the bodily part of art making.
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| thesis II. |
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The appearance and development of autonomous tapestry art that needs the skill of weaving showed up in the 19th century - as an effect of Arts and Crafts movement - denies the fore mentioned concept.
- In my opinion the metamorphoses of the autonomous tapestry art can only be created by the interaction of concept and craft, the intellectual and physical part of art tapestry making - which means the interaction of the idea and the "spoken language" of tapestry, the weaving - and not least by the result of the connected research and shared experiences of artists.
- The theoretical basis to examine the metamorphoses of tapestry art is the concept, how art is "functioning" explained in the book of George Kubler The Shape Of Time. The emphasis of this concept is on the joint efforts of artists, generations of artists, not on individual performance. Even though Kubler's idea was applied on serial art works, it gives very good tool for examining some aspect of tapestry art as well.
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| thesis III. |
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Tapestry art - deemed to be an applied art in the 19th century - changed in function and position in the 20th century:
- It served as the prototype for mass production in the Bauhaus.
- During the Lausanne experiments, it left its traditional techniques and moved into three dimensional space, becoming a new art genre as "tapestry-hybrid" or "spatial-textile".
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| thesis IV. |
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By the millennium traditional tapestry art returned to the stage of contemporary art. In this process the network of generations of Hungarian autonomous tapestry artists - to whom I can surely list myself as a conscious tapestry artist passionate about the genre - played also a significant role.
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