Collecting According to Burns:

The Caucasus: Traditions in Weaving;
Selections from the James D. Burns Collection

Review by Joseph Bloom

From Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 8/1

Compiling a book based on one individual's collection -- or even a multi-source exhibition catalog -- is a tricky business. Assuming that the photography, design, and printing are well done, such a book can be no better than the collection of pieces presented -- and we have all suffered through mediocre exhibitions. Given a worthwhile collection, the best of intentions can go awry if the various production facets don't measure up. When the two come together -- collection and production -- the results can be most satisfying, as is generally the case with James D. Burns' new book, The Caucasus: Traditions in Weaving, based on selections from Burns' personal collection, as recently exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington.

Detail of Plate 30, Kazak, 7'x5', circa 1800

Burns, a full-time attorney and avid collector of Near Eastern and Far-Eastern rugs and textiles among other interests, holds the opinion that very few pieces produced in the Caucasus after 1830 are of artistic merit, and thus concentrates his attentions on earlier productions. (Would that we all had the resources to collect Caucasians from the 18th and early 19th centuries!) In this regard, he is like some other well-known names in the rug collecting/scholarship game, and if you can see your way past this particular bias, which becomes a bit rankling in the opening essay, then you are in store for an enjoyable journey.

The Caucasus: Traditions in Weaving contains close to 70 full-page, full-color plates divided into various sections: pile carpets from Caucasian workshops of the 18th and 19th centuries; village and nomadic pile rugs woven before 1830 for domestic use; pile carpets of the middle to late 19th century (only four pieces); and then a triple-header bonus, too often absent from other volumes, of kilims, brocades, and soumaks of the quality rarely seen outside of specialized books on flatweaves, such as Petsopoulos' Kilims.

Each plate is accompanied by the customary narrative description and technical details. Comments within the descriptions of each rug call attention to similarities in pattern elements in other rugs in the collection and are interesting and instructive.

Among the nine plates representing the workshop tradition, one would have to be rather more jaded than this reviewer not to respond with particular enthusiasm to Burns'dragon carpet, circa 1700 (Plate I), or the striking red-field Shirvan covered with palmettes and cloudbands, dated 1208, or 1793 A.D., (Plate 5).

Of the 24 plates devoted to pre-1830 village and nomadic rugs, there are both familiar (but outstanding) and unusual weavings that will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Among the former are a circa-1750 Chelaberd or sunburst Karabagh (Plate 10); a circa 1800 blue-field Lenkoran (Plate 13), very similar to Schürmann's Plate 57 in the bible, Caucasion Rugs, which Burns duly acknowledges; and a narrow Akstafa Shirvan (Plate 22), which includes not only the well-known bird forms but charming representations of a host of other animal forms, a la the "Animal" Shirvan published as Plate 19 in the Textile Museum's 1975 Caucasian Rugs from Private Collections. Of the less familiar varieties, sure to please are an l8th century South Caucasian fragment (Plate 12) with echoes of contemporaneous Turkish kilims and even earlier Anatolian "bird" carpets; an early 19th century yellow-field Shirvan with rarely seen multi-color rectangles framing the center field (Plate 23); and a powerful 7'x5' circa-1800 Kazak (Plate 30 and detail facing page 9), whose rows of colorful octagons are reminiscent of those found in the Oberlin Kazak that serves as the introductory plate in Tschebull's Kazak catalogue of 1971.

Included in this section of later pile pieces is a classic red field Talish with four tiny devices punctuating the otherwise empty, solid mass (Plate 35), and an example of what earlier dealers called an Eagle Karabagh, complete with a medallion shaped field that shoulders its way into the main border (Plate 36).

Like the large section devoted to pre-1830 pile examples, the three sections on flatweaves offer both familiar designs and strikingly original pieces. Be sure to see the wildly primitive red-and-blue Daghestan kilim dated 1850 (Plate 43), the rare Shadda woolen brocade (Plate 46), and the 17th century silk embroidery (Plate 49) that also appears on the handsome dustjacket, and the sumptuous selection of 18 -- count `em -- l9th century soumaks.

If there is any fault to be found with this new addition to the growing body of rug literature, it is in Burns' opening essay, the first three pages of which seem to ramble too freely, and which set forth his almost soap-box-orator stance reviling virtually all post-1830 weavings. For a book obviously aimed at knowledgeable collectors and devotees of Caucasian rugs and flatweaves (no Eilandesque survey this), one is brought up a bit short by Burns telling us that Persia is now called Iran, and that unlike paintings, Caucasian weavings go unsigned, making it impossible to collect "signatures". Then, too, some of his conclusions, such as the causes for the scarcity of older pieces, although thought provoking are offered more as unsubstantiated conjecture (sometimes hard to swallow) than as fact. But we are now getting into the realm of the picayune. The value of The Caucasus: Traditions in Weaving is not in its text or scholarship but in its color plates, which, although just a bit subdued, document a remarkable private collection of 18th and early l9th century Caucasian pile and flatwoven pieces.

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