The Painting on the Loom

A weaver in the Middle Atlas is handed a photograph of a painting and asked to make it out of wool.

The painting is a Paul Klee. Blocks of colour, a few wandering lines, the sort of thing that hangs in a museum in Europe. She isn't copying another rug. She's copying a canvas.

This happens more than you'd think. Search for a colourful Moroccan rug and you'll find them by the dozen, sold as "inspired by Paul Klee," some woven straight from his 1929 painting Highways and Byways. Others are done after Rothko, after Agnes Martin, after Gunta Stolzl, who was herself a weaver, at a German loom, a century ago. New rugs, made to look like famous pictures.

Here's the part that folds back on itself. The painters those rugs copy were, many of them, chasing exactly what a Moroccan rug already had. Flat blocks of colour. Geometry that breathes. Pattern that isn't quite regular. The thing a weaver did by hand and by eye, a painter could spend a career trying to reach on canvas.

So the wool became a painting, and now the painting is becoming wool again. A weaver in the Atlas is knotting a picture that was, in some deep way, reaching back toward her loom the whole time.

None of this makes a colourful rug worth less. It just means the word to be careful with is ancient. A bright, wandering, colour-blocked rug can be an old one a woman made following her own eye. It can also be a Klee, in wool, woven last year. Both can be beautiful. It's worth knowing which one you're looking at.