CONTENTS ISSUE 170 WINTER 2011

49 The Metropolitan Museum of Art New galleries

131 Alexis Renard at Asian Art in London

116 ‘Weaving Abstraction’ at The Textile Museum

FRONTLINES NEWS David Black’s latest weaving exhibition; a new Istanbul gallery for Mehmet Çetinkaya; the November auction at Rippon Boswell Wiesbaden; Maastrict 2012; the sad loss of Mary Hunt Kahlenberg and Richard Morant 27 FAIRS The return of antique rugs to Domotex Hannover – a preview of the antique carpets that will be showing at the fair in January 2012 31

FEATURES ISLAMIC ART RETURNSTOTHE MET

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SHEILA CANBY, SHEILA BLAIR & JONATHAN BLOOM, DENIZ BEYAZIT, ROGER PRATT, DEWITT MALLARY, JULIA BAILEY, WILLIAM ROBINSON, WALTER B. DENNY, The Scholars’ View Blair & Bloom review the Met’s $50-million Islamic gallery renovation 51 The Making of a Collection The current Met exhibition devoted to donors to the collection 60 From the Outside Looking in First impressions of the Met’s new Islamic galleries 63 Behind the Scenes How the galleries were created with carpets and textiles in mind 68 IMPERIAL PUZZLE 76 Sixteenth-Century Persian Spiral Vine Carpets with Animals CHRISTINE KLOSE A posthumous tribute to one of the most prolific independent carpet scholars of her generation – we present Dr Klose’s final ICOC paper, given in Istanbul in 2007, in which she reconstructs the extent of a highly regarded design type of early Safavid ‘Hunting’ carpets

THETREE OF LIFE

Textiles and Carpets in the Context of Nature Worship SUSAN DAY Examining the extensive use of tree imagery in carpets and textiles. An abridged and updated version of ‘The Tree of Life: a Universal Symbol’, first presented by the author at ICOC IX in Milan in 1999, and published in 2001 in OrientalCarpetandTextileStudiesVI

HIGH LIGHT

HELMUT F. NEUMANN A report on the collections of the Abegg Foundation in Riggisberg, Switzerland, which reopened its doors on a new permanent exhibition in autumn 2011 after extensive modernisation

TOTHE HEART OF ISLAM

VENETIA PORTER With reference to the British Museum’s upcoming exhibtion ‘Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam’ the curator examines the textiles of Mecca and Medina

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CONTEXT EXHIBITIONS ‘Chinese Weaving: Antique Textile Art: XVth-XIX Century’ at the Moshe Tabibnia Gallery in Milan; The Textile Museum Washington’s Kuba cloth and basketry exhibition ‘Weaving Abstraction’; more baskets, this time Aboriginal, at the British Museum, London; Christian Erber reviews Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent ‘Gifts of the Sultan’ show; Jonathan Hope’s collection of batiks and trade textiles in Edinburgh; Central Asian rugs at David Sorgato’s gallery in Milan; Anatolian kilims at San Francisco’s De Young Museum and Tom Cole’s Marin County gallery 113 FAIRS a review of the San Francisco Antique Rugs and Textiles Show; the top pieces from Asian Art in London 128 CALENDAR Auctions, exhibitions, fairs and conferences worldwide 132 AUCTION PRICE GUIDE Recent sales in Europe and the USA 137 BOOKS TurkmenCarpets.MasterpiecesofSteppeArt.TheHoffmeisterCollectionby Elena Tsareva, reviewed by Michael Rothberg; Stephen Cohen looks at Rapture.TheArtofIndianTextilesby Rahul Jain; Michael Buddeberg on Tom Cole’s PatternsofLife:TheArtofTibetanCarpets 148 SPECIAL REPORT An in-depth look by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar at leading edge rug production in Afghanistan and the entrepreneurial designers who are changing the face of traditional weaving 155 PARTING SHOTS From San Francisco, New York, Berlin, London and Washington 166 LAST PAGE An inscribed Tiberias tiraz reed prayer mat from the Metropolitan Museum 168

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