Hungary’s Private Collectors Exhibit Their Carpets In Budapest

BUDAPEST, June 19, 2010 – Hungary’s Rug Society is hosting an extraordinary look at carpets in Hungarian private collections this summer.

The exhibition, which began on the first of June and has been extended due to popular interest to the end of August, is jointly sponsored by Budapest’s Jewish Museum, which is the venue.

The 35 carpets on display include both carpets kept in Hungary and several brought in by Hungarian rug collectors living abroad.

One of the most striking pieces is a 17-century Kula carpet (above) contributed by the family of the famous carpet collector Edmund de Unger, who fled Hungary in 1948. His son Richard flew in specially with the carpet, which is rarely seen outside the family home in London.

Another extraordinary piece is a 19th century Isfahan Paradise carpet (right) contributed by a collector of Hungarian origin living in New York. The collector has not revealed his name publicly.

The exhibit was opened by Hungary’s Culture Minister Gabor Gorgey, who himself has more than a passing interest in carpets.

Gorgey has written a well-received novel telling the tumultuous history of Hungary from 1940 to 1956 by following the fate of an Isfahan Hunting Rug belonging to a fictional Jewish family.

The novel, called “The Hunting Carpet,” tells how the carpet – like Hungary itself – changes hands from the family, to the fascists, and finally in 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution) to a Soviet general. The novel has been re-printed five times since it was first published in 1988.

Still other fascinating carpets at the exhibit are several Tranyslvanian carpets (below) contributed by collector of Hungarian origin living in Transylvania, now in Romania.

Historically, much of the focus of Hungarian rug collecting has been in Transylvania, where families bequeathed rich Ottoman rugs to the area’s protestant, and sometimes Catholic, churches. Transylvania, which was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire for 150 years, became part of Romania after World War I.

The fact that the show brings together so many carpets from private collections inside and outside of Hungary is a tribute to the zeal of the Rug Society.

The group, known as “Ten” for the original number of its founders in 2007, wants to re-introduce the Hungarian public to oriental carpets after interest in them all but disappeared during the communist era.

Denes Sandor, one of the group’s founders in 2007, says the current exhibit is the largest to date and the first in the capital. For the first exhibit, in 2007, the group chose a small town, for the second, in 2008, the university city of Szeged.

Sandor would like to revive the days when Hungary was one of the most active places in the Western world for carpet enthusiasts and the home of a number of “firsts.”

Among those firsts was the formation of Budapest’s Carpet Lovers Society in 1923, which debuted with an exhibit of 149 privately held carpets. That was a decade earlier than the formation of the New York-based Hajji Babba Society in 1933.

Going back further, the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest was the first major museum ever to hold a single-theme oriental carpet exhibit – showing 352 Ottoman Turkish pieces – in 1914. That was when major carpet exhibitions were still very much a novelty and had taken place previously only in Vienna (1891), Stuttgart (1909), and New York (1910).

Here is a photo of the current exhibit at the Jewish Musuem, where oriental carpets are displayed in two of the halls and Jewish textiles in a third.

The huge historical – and growing present – interest in oriental carpets can’t help but make even Hungarian collectors sometimes wonder why rugs so fascinate their countrymen.

Sandor says most people assume it must be because the Ottoman Empire directly occupied much of the central region of Hungary for a century and-a-half. But he believes the ties to carpets go much further back than that: to the Hungarians’ own nomadic origins on the Eurasian steppes.

He argues that before the Hungarians, who were renowned horsemen, settled in Hungary some 1,000 years ago, they would likely have had the same carpet culture as other steppe peoples, including using carpets to cover the floors of yurts.

The Hungarian language today remains a Finno-Urgic tongue, so such cultural echoes might not be so distant as they seem. And, says Sandor, that would at least explain why other European nations under long Ottoman rule – such as Greece or Serbia – have never shown as much enthusiasm for carpets as has Hungary.

Here is yet another fascinating carpet on display at the current exhibition.

It is believed to have been woven in Hereke, Turkey, for Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi’s celebration of 2,500 years of the Persian monarchy in 1971.

One clue to the carpet’s identity is its unusual motif of peacocks – the symbol of the Pahlavi dynasty. Another is the border motif of lions holding a sword in the right hand – the same symbol used on the flag of Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

No discussion of carpets in Hungary would be complete without the extraordinary and tragic story of the Gold Train of 1945 – a tale which the location of the current exhibit in the Jewish Museum cannot fail to bring to mind.

During the 1930s and 40s, Hungary’s Nazi-allied government required Jews to deposit all their valuables – including their collections of carpets – in the national bank.

The majority of Jews were later sent to concentration camps but their seized property remained in the vaults until the end of the war. Then, as the Russian army approached, the fascists assembled a 40-wagon train to remove the goods to Germany.

The train was ill-fated from the start.

As it meandered through Hungary and Austria, anonymous trucks pulled up beside it to unload its gold and vanish.

Next, it was seized by Allied troops, first French then American.

Finally, most of its remaining valuables were sent to a military warehouse in Salzburg. From there, they went on to furnish U.S. officers’ homes during the occupation of Germany or were sold in U.S. military exchange stores.

The value of the paintings, jewels, porcelain, and carpets on the train – based upon the existing documentation – would be in the billions of dollars today. Yet most of them disappeared without a trace.

The events remained all but forgotten until 2005, when a U.S. court ruled that Washington should pay $ 6 million in compensation for the stolen property. Given the difficulty of knowing who exactly lost what, the payment was made to Jewish organizations rather than to surviving families.

The Gold Train and the tragic personal stories behind it amount to an inestimable loss for Hungary in every respect, including its once thriving carpet culture.

But the exhibit taking place in Budapest now is evidence that Hungarian collectors can still exhibit some astonishing pieces. And their pieces, plus those in the country’s famous museum collections, provide every reason for rug lovers to again regard Budapest as a carpet capital.

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Exhibition in the Jewish Museum

The First Turkish Carpet Exhibition In The West, by Ferenc Batari, Hali

$ 10 Million Persian Carpet Sets New Auction Record

LONDON, May 15, 2010 -- How much are private collectors ready to pay for Persian rugs?

The answer came at an auction in London last month: just short of $ 10 million.

The carpet – which set a record price of $ 9,599,535 – is a "vase" carpet from Kirman, a city whose weavers are widely considered to have been among the most inventive of the classical carpet age.

The vase carpets, woven in the 16th and 17th centuries, are some of the Kirman weavers' greatest works of art, with spectacular, colorful and intricately designed patterns of swirling branches, foliage and flowers.

The floral patterns may be arranged in vases or, as in the case of the auctioned carpet, there may be no vase apparent.

Such carpets are always highly sought after and rare, with the best examples kept in museums.

But to fetch close to $ 10 million, this carpet measuring 11 feet by 5 feet had to have some unusually distinguishing features. And, in fact, it has several.

One is the unusual energy and charm of its pattern.

Christie's, the auction house which made the sale on April 15, describes its magic this way:

"The designers have worked out an arrangement that makes the blossoms completely secondary to the leaves. It is no longer the powerful scrolling of individual leaves that creates the energy of the design; here it is the rhythm set up by the interlocking leaves.

"Their stems and the drawing of the individual plants growing from each end of the carpet create one rhythm, but the coloring, which makes facing leaves from two different plants still have the same colors, creates the counterpoint. It is an apparently simple but wonderfully satisfying design."

The energy of the arrangement can be seen even more clearly from a distance than from close up.



But the carpet is also noteworthy for another reason that particularly interests carpet historians.

And that is (again to quote Christie's) it "can claim to be the earliest design which can clearly be demonstrated to be a prototype for the most popular Persian carpet design of all - the so-called herati pattern."

Here is a diagram of a herati pattern.

Kirman dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries and its weavings were remarked upon by the earliest western travelers to the region.

Marco Polo, traveling through Persia in 1270, praised the carpets of Kirman as a particular marvel.

By the 17th century, at the height of the Safavid era, Kirman’s designers were at their most inventive and their weaving techniques of a sophistication not seen in other parts of the Persian Empire.

One innovation was to set their looms so that the cotton warps were on two different levels. They then threaded the wool wefts, leaving some tight and others sinuous, to give an immediately recognizable wavy finish to the surface of the carpet.

Interestingly, it was this characteristic weaving pattern that helped an art dealer recognize this particular carpet as a Kirman vase carpet (without a vase) and bring it to auction.

The story of who the art dealer is, and where he discovered the carpet, is still being pieced together by an art world hungry for more details. But the early indications are it is the stuff of which legends are made.

The Financial Times reports that the carpet originally was bought for only €18,000 (some $ 23,000) at an obscure German auction house late last year.

"Cataloged simply as “Persian carpet” and estimated at €18,000, the finely knotted wool rug appeared at Georg Rehm, a provincial saleroom in Augsburg, in October last year," the paper says.

It continues: "Asked to confirm the sale, the auction house refused 'to divulge results ... after extensive negotiations with our suppliers and buyers'."

How the carpet fell out of the sky to arrive at "an obscure German auction house" is unknown.

But by the time it went on sale at Christie's enough of its history had become clear to interest some very competitive art collectors.

The carpet was traced to the former holdings of Martine Marie Pol, the Comtesse de Béhague, who prior to her death in 1927 maintained a renowned collection of antiquities, including both European and Oriental Carpets.

One of her many properties, the Chateau de Fleury in the Ile de France region, is shown here.

Much of the countess’s collection was dispersed in two sales in 1927 and 1928, but the Kirman vase carpet was not included in those. Christie's believes the carpet instead passed on to her heirs before being sold at some stage between the 1930s and 1950s.

Yet even as Christie's evaluators widely publicized the carpet's pedigree before the auction, they badly underestimated what price the carpet might command.

The auction house estimated the carpet to be worth from $307,600 - $461,400. But when bidding began, the price immediately began soaring toward the stratosphere.

There were seven bidders, one in the auction room and six on the phone from Britain, continental Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Among the parties, just one was a museum, all the rest were private collectors.

Britain's Economist magazine described the bidding this way:

"At £2.4m the countess’s rug beat the record price for a carpet at auction; at £3.5m it beat the record for an auctioned Islamic work of art. By £5m, bids began jumping ahead in increments of £500,000, which proved too much for one of the two remaining bidders, who put the phone down at £5.5m, too upset to continue. The rug finally sold for £6.2m (including commission and taxes), proof for the dealer who consigned it that he had been right to trust his instincts."

The identity of the two remaining bidders is secret. But several art dealers have told The Financial Times they believe both were from Qatar.

The Gulf state has a recently opened (2008) Museum of Islamic Art with a major collection of carpets and textiles and it is not impossible the Kirman vase carpet could one day be loaned to it.

In becoming the world's most expensive carpet, the Kirman vase beat the previous record of $ 5.5 million set by the famed Pearl Carpet of Baroda in March 2009 at a Sotheby's auction in Qatar.

The Pearl Carpet of Baroda is not of hand-knotted wool but is "woven" from strings of Basra pearls: one-and-a-half million of them, harvested off the coast of Qatar and Bahrain. It is believed to have been created as a gift for the tomb of Prophet Muhammad in Medina and commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda, who died before he could make the donation.

After the pearl rug, the previous record-holder for the most expensive auctioned carpet was a silk Isfahan rug dating to the 1600s. It previously belonged to tobacco heiress Doris Duke sold for $ 4.45 million at Christie's in New York in June 2008.

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Related Links:

Christie's: A Kirman Vase Carpet

Financial Times: How An 18,000 euro Rug Sold For 6 Million Pounds

The Economist: Rug Rave – Prices Fly For A Persian Carpet

Rug Rag: Pearl Carpet Of Baroda