A market for Modernist carpets

Manik Bagh or ‘Jewel Garden’, the palace of the last Maharaja of Indore, Yashwant Yao Holkar II (1908–1961), and his wife Maharani Sanyogitabai Devi (1914–1937), was recreated in the early 1930s by the German architect Eckart Muthesius (1904–1989), who brought together the most avant-garde architectural and design ideas of the day in a Modernist gesamtkunstwerk.

Muthesius decorated the Indore palace interior with furniture and fittings of his own design as well as specially commissioned works by other leading artists and designers, including Le Corbusier, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, René Herbst and Marcel Breuer.

For the Manik Bagh carpets, Muthesius chose Ivan da Silva Bruhns (1881–1980), the Franco-Brazilian designer whose first ‘abstract’ rugs were woven as piecework by weavers he had taught in a village near Reims.
By 1925 he had established his own atelier in Paris, with a workshop in the southern Paris suburb of Savigny-sur-Orge, weaving carpets in the ‘Savonnerie’ technique for high-profile commissions from the rich and famous, embassies, ministries, and even for the French transatlantic liners Ile-de-France (1927), Atlantique (1931), and Normandie (1935).

Da Silva Bruhns carpets were typically woven using subdued earth tones and a decorative repertoire at first inspired by Berber rugs, as well as by African and pre-Columbian artefacts. From the late 1920s, like many of his contemporaries, he embraced the Modernist aesthetic, and much of his work over the next decade, including the Indore carpets, shows the influence of Cubism.

His carpets and rugs are woven on cotton foundations with thick pile made from the finest wool imported from Argentina and Australia. They are usually signed and often also carry the cipher of the Savigny workshop. They are known for their high quality (see Susan Day, ‘Art Deco Masterworks’, HALI 105, 1999, pp.78–81).

The Holkar family sold the Indore palace in 1976, and much, if perhaps not all, of the original suite of carpets was sold off during the 1980s at Sotheby’s auctions in Monaco, where they were bought both by private collectors and leading gallerists, mainly in France. Several of them have reappeared at auction since, most notably lot 329 from 11 October 1987, an unusually large carpet for the maharaja’s living room (1), which has appeared twice at Christie’s in New York, on each occcasion setting a new world record auction price for a Modernist carpet of any description by a considerable margin—9 December 2014, $437,000; 7 June 2017, $631,500 (see HALI 193, 2017, p.133).

Christie’s sale in Paris on 3 October 2023 of fittings and furnishings originally from the Manik Bagh, ‘Modern Reign, Tribute to the Maharajah of Indore’, featured 32 lots, among them six Bruhns carpets in five lots (including one pair) with his Gothic signature and monogram. Four of the six also carry the inwoven Savigny mark.

More than half of the top dozen 20th-century/Modernist carpets and rugs at auction in HALI’s files, all of which sold for more than $100,000, are da Silva Bruhns commissions, most of them from the Indore suite. Following the twice-sold New York carpet mentioned above, at $250,245 (€239,400) comes the most expensive of the present Bruhns carpets in Paris, lot 15 (2), previously lot 231 in Monaco on 25 May 1980.

The first Paris Bruhns carpet is closely followed in price rank by something very different—Röda Rabatten (The Red Flowerbed), a three-metre diameter round flossa (pile carpet) designed in 1944 by Barbro Nilsson (1899–1983), and woven in Båstad, southern Sweden, by the Märta Måås-Fjetterström workshop. This carpet was sold in April 1997 at Bukowskis in Stockholm for almost two million Swedish krona ($247,250; see HALI 93, 1997, p.130).

Röda Rabatten is followed in turn by another da Silva Bruhns Indore carpet (3), lot 2 from the present Paris sale, where it made$237,075 (€226,800). Previously lot 333 in Monaco in October 1987, a photograph of this carpet, circa 1933, on the floor of the Maharani’s salon at Manik Bagh, appears in the online feature accompanying Christie’s Indore sale cataloguing.

Next in the top twelve at auction comes the first of two English-made carpets designed in the late 1920s by the Anglo-Irish artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992) (5). It was sold at Christie’s in London in October 2016 for $210,715 (£173,000; see HALI 190, pp.47, 139).

The young Francis Bacon had briefly worked as an interior designer in the late 1920s after returning to London from Berlin and Paris, where he had been exposed to the rapid growth of Paris School Modernism. The few rugs he designed (no more than about a dozen are recorded) are believed to have been produced around 1929 by the Wilton Royal Carpet Factory as part of their ‘Wessex’ range of Modernist pile carpets. However, the Christie’s carpet (5) could have been made somewhere other than Wilton itself, as it is substantially larger than other known Wessex rugs designed by Francis Bacon, such as lot 34 at Sotheby’s, Paris, in November 2013 (6), which fetched $181,450 (€133,500; see HALI 178, p.139).

Sandwiched between the two Bacons is another da Silva Bruhns carpet, exhibited in 2002 at the Blondeel-Deroyan gallery in Paris (HALI 123, p.87), and later sold in December 2016 at Sotheby’s in New York for $187,500 (HALI 192, p.132).

Almost as much was paid for a large French Art Deco carpet (4), unsigned, but attributed to Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879–1933), which sold for $181,105 (€145,000) in May 2012 at Christie’s in Paris. Two years later, in May 2014, another Ruhlmann carpet made $130,400 (€95,100) in the same rooms.

Another Wilton Wessex wool pile carpet, made about 1930 to a design by the American Modernist Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954), and with the designer’s monogram, sold at Sotheby’s in London in May 2005 for $114,600 (£60,000; see HALI 142, p.117).

Kauffer, who came to Britain just before the First World War, was a leading advocate of the concept of gesamtkunstwerk in interior design. Probably the first Modernist carpet designer in England, his rugs were clearly influenced by the work of sa Silva Bruhns and others in France. In 1929 Kauffer’s rugs, all Wilton products, were exhibited in London, where they were an important influence on the Wessex rugs designed by Francis Bacon.

Brief mention should be made of a controversial trio of Modernist rugs, with a design copied from a known da Silva Bruhns carpet. Two have an unverified Bacon signature, but they appear from their weave to be of Irish (Donegal) origin. The unsigned example made $79,130 (€61,000) at Rippon Boswell in Wiesbaden in November 2012 (HALI 162, 2009, pp.28–31; HALI 175, p.162).

Returning to the remaining four Indore rugs at Christie’s in Paris, lot 5 (9), a mirror-image pair (previously lot 330 in Monaco in October 1987), sold for $184,390 (€176,400). Although not matched in size, another likely pair, or at least companions, lot 21 (7) and lot 10 (8), were originally separately sold at Monaco auctions in May 1980 (lot 232) and October 1987 (lot 335) respectively. Signed da Silva Bruhns, they lack the Savigny monogram. Here they fetched $85,6110 (€81,900) and $55,350 (€52,920), the difference fairly reflecting their relative sizes.