Date: Fri 26-Mar-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: SHIRLE

Quick Words:

Textile

Full Text:

Textile Gift To San Francisco

with 1 cut as slide

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -- The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has announced

the pledge of a major collection of early Middle Eastern and Central Asian

rugs and rare Central Asian and North Indian silks to the museums department

of textiles, currently housed in the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.

Director Harry S. Parker III stated, "George and Marie Hecksher have today

offered a remarkable vote of confidence in the future of our museum by

pledging to give us their outstanding collection."

"The Heckshers have not only brought us to the top in Central Asian carpets,"

he continued, "but in a single stroke have established us as one of the

pre-eminent collectors of this region's earliest silks." Parker also expressed

his pleasure at the Heckshers' generous pledge of funds for textile department

facilities -- galleries, conservation laboratories, and storage -- in the

future de Young Museum.

In response, George Hecksher noted, "I have spent many happy hours in Golden

Gate Park and the de Young Museum, and my wife and I are delighted to have the

opportunity to give our support to the construction of a new museum in the

park. The benefits to be derived by the people of San Francisco from this new

museum will be priceless."

The Heckshers, who recently moved to San Francisco from New York, are

relatively new to textiles, but not to collecting or museum patronage. During

their years in New York, they built an important collection of original papers

and manuscripts by George Bernard Shaw, which they donated to the J. P. Morgan

Library, and they are benefactors of the Islamic Department of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The couple did not begin to collect textiles until 1993, but brought to their

new interest the same diligent study, aesthetic judgment, and market sense

they had honed in their earlier collecting. Their efforts allowed them, in a

remarkably short period, to form a collection of approximately 50 textiles,

most of which rank among the rarest and best of their type.

The collection has three main areas of focuses, two of them closely related to

the de Young's present textile holdings. These are their small group of early

Turkish carpet fragments and about 30 rugs and other pile textiles of the

Turkmen tribes of Central Asia. Arguable the most important piece from these

groups is one of the earliest, a fragment of a Turkish "animal carpet" dating

to the Thirteenth Century. Although the existence of carpets with animal

designs is documented in Italian paintings of the early Renaissance, they have

survived in only a handful of fragments.

The Heckshers' Turkmen rugs and other furnishings are also among the rarest in

that weaving tradition. They include a number of pieces -- such as a

white-ground wedding trapping from the Chodor Turkmen - that are the only

known examples of their kind.

"What most excites me about the Hecksher gift are the Central Asian and North

Indian silks it brings to the museums," says Diane Mott, associate curator of

textiles. "Until now, we have not been able to acquire textiles from the court

traditions of Asia. This gift of early silks simultaneously launches us in a

collecting direction entirely new to us and establishes us as one of the

foremost collectors of this material. These silks represent some of the

highest artistic and technological achievements of their time.

The Central Asian examples, some of which date to the Eighth Century, exhibit

elaborate repeating designs that reveal the many influences to which this

region, the heart of the Silk Road, was subject. The Indian fragments, of

probable Fourteenth Century origin, are among the earliest representatives of

compound silk weaving form North India. Of ten examples to have come to light,

the Hecksher collection includes five, one of each known design type.