High, Wide & Woolen

Woven pictures, designed by some of Britain's best modern artists, went on display in a London gallery last week. They were new products of an Edinburgh tapestry-weaving studio founded 40 years ago by the fourth Marquess of Bute. The Marquess' sole purpose in going into the tapestry business: to provide the kind of wall coverings he fancied for his own estates. To keep the company going in spite of death & taxes, the Marquess' descendants were now doing their best to make it pay.

They had persuaded such British artists as Sir Francis Rose, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Stanley Spencer to contribute designs, and they hoped the high, wide & woolen results would be shown and sold in France and the U.S. as well as England.

On the whole, the Edinburgh tapestries did not compare with the modern ones being made across the Channel at Aubusson (TIME. March 8,1948). Among the fine few, Sutherland's gawky Birds were abstract enough to look all right in wool. Stanley Spencer's cabbage-laden Gardener was both earthy and pretty, but The Garden of Fools., a soup-thin parody of medieval tapestry design by Surrealist Cecil Collins, was neither. "The fool," explained Collins brightly, "is the symbol of creative innocence embattled with the modern machine . . . The saint, the artist, the poet and the fool are one; they are the eternal virginity of spirit . . ." It seemed a woolly explanation.

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