Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Tapestry design, 1898.
A while ago The Textile Blog introduced the work of the German artist and designer Walter Leistikow, through his contribution to wallpaper design. In this article it is the turn of tapestry design which in some respects is much closer to the general fine art sensibility, but also on a more personal level it produced a piece of work that was closer to the fine art ambitions and intrinsic understanding that Leistikow had between himself and his work.
This one tapestry piece produced by Leistikow in 1898 is an excellent example of the artist's individual approach to the traditional discipline of landscape painting. Leistikow had a fairly wide-ranging reputation for interpreting the landscape of Northern Germany with its rich forests and lakes which often took on a melancholy, or at least meditative quality, though sometimes this could appear to be even spiritual or mythically magical in style and composition.
Leistikow was one of the leading exponents of the Berlin Secession founded in 1898. It was a movement that saw its task as that of highlighting and promoting the cause of modern art in Germany and even further afield, along with the various philosophies and viewpoints that modern art raised. He was both well versed in the modern movement in Europe with contacts and trips to both France and Scandinavia, bringing new ideas and attitudes to Germany and vice versa.
It is interesting to note Leistikow's connection with Scandinavia which at the time had a highly defined tapestry movement of its own. A long standing traditional skills base that incorporated weaving for both fabric and tapestry, was being integrated by various Scandinavian artists and designers, into various forms of either modernism itself, or at least an expanded repertoire that incorporated various aspects of the modern and contemporary world including illustration, graphics and fine art. The resulting imagery was frequently cleansed of over-complication producing compositions that were radically simplified. These often took on the appearance of two-dimensional graphic work often seen in the rapidly expanding poster art medium seen right across Europe during the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Leistikow's tapestry piece also shares this same modern approach to composition. By limiting the power of the traditions of perspective and thinking outside of the narrow constraints of the three-dimensional world that had been set in place in Europe since the Renaissance, artists and designers were beginning to recognise the possibilities of colour, texture and pattern for its own sake. Although Leistikow's tapestry is not a fully abstracted composition, it goes some way into exploring the possibilities of line, colour and texture, elements that have been a powerful contribution to tapestry weaving.
This is not to say that Leistikow by any means copied, or was directly influenced by tapestry design in Scandinavia. However, it is a factor worth thinking about when observing European tapestry work from this particular era. Often fine art and the decorative arts were considered part of the same world for much of their history, and although fine art has spent much of the twentieth century trying to distance itself from the decorative arts and crafts world, the two share much more in common than is sometimes admitted.
Tapestry in particular is a fine art styled discipline. At least some of the tapestry work produced in the later nineteenth century and indeed most of that of the twentieth was in the shape of single pieces of work that were not repeated and were not even part of limited orders. Although an individual artist's composition might well be woven by someone other than the artist, it should not be assumed that the resulting tapestry was not an individual creative piece of artwork. In other words judgements should not automatically be made that because a medium or discipline has been designated as a craft that that negates it from being both creative and entailing a fine art sensibility.
Many fine artists have produced tapestry work over the centuries and equally many tapestry weavers have produced fine art work.
Reference links:
Walter Leistikow (1865-1908): Maler der Berliner Landschaft (German Edition)
Bydgoszcz: Walter Leistikow, Rudolf Oebsger-Röder, Brda, Stary Rynek, Kasimir-Der-Große-Universität Bydgoszcz, Bistum Bydgoszcz, Hugo Braesicke (German Edition)
Das Leben Walter Leistikows. Ein Stück Berliner Kulturgeschichte.
Walter Leistikow
The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany
Die Berliner Secession: Berlin als Zentrum d. dt. Kunst von d. Jahrhundertwende bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (German Edition)
BERLINER SEZESSION (The Berlin Secession)
Katalog Der Funfzehnten Ausstellung Der Berliner Secession Berlin 1908
The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany
