Book Review: Woven by Hand

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Title: Woven by Hand


Author: Ramses Wissa Wassef

Translator: Denis Mahaffey

Date: 1972

Publisher: Hamlyn

ISBN: 0-600-03876-9

Length: most pages not numbered

Illustrations: most pages consist of full-color photographs

Quote: "My wife and I decided to...prove the artistic potential of the group of children."

To prove, yes; to improve, no. That's the trouble with Woven by Hand.

In the village of Harrania, in Egypt, between 1951 and 1971, Ramses Wissa Wassef and his wife set their elementary school students down in front of simple looms and let them weave tapestries. The result was Modern Primitive Art. Primitive Art was very fashionable in 1972. Both the children's original work, and this book about it, sold well to the international art community and helped some of the children stay in school as long as they did.

The children were carefully shielded from any kind of criticism, or any opportunities to study the work of adult artists, Wassef seems to be bragging in his introduction to this photographic retrospective of the children's work. At the time this was trendy...even if the children's work was deliberately, artificially being kept primitive.

The children were, in fact, paid for their work. "The finished tapestry was measured, and the child...received a sum corresponding to the area...The real value of this system is that it frees me completely from the task of checking the hours of work." It also "freed" the teachers to keep the profit if some tapestries turned out to be more valuable than others, and "freed" the students from any hint that this might have been because some tapestries were more pleasing to the eye than others. Wassef does not discuss this interesting ethical wrinkle.

The children are well along in middle age by now. Their tapestries have faded, if not biodegraded, by now, and if any of the children have grown up to be artists, they probably feel that it's just as well. They did quite well at weaving simple geometrics and images like tangled vines and gnarled trees, but my guess is that even ten-year-olds would have welcomed more instruction in how to make representational art more representational than some of the village scenes these children wove into their tapestries.

In Woven by Hand "The Mad Bull" looks as much like a two-toed cat as like a bull. "Women Going to Market" and "Caliph Ali and His Two Sons" have birdlike faces; conversely the people in "Palm Sunday" have no noses at all. I suspect that the child who wove "The Flooded Village" would have appreciated a chance to see how the boats could be made to look more like boats on a river than like cards laid out for solitaire, and the child who tried to weave "The Calves" would have welcomed material in colors other than watermelon red and denim blue as well as a tip that real calves do not have gory fangs. Children do not actually see the world this way. They see the same shapes and colors adults see, only from lower angles, and some children growing up at this period have expressed a preference for help toward making what they drew look more like what they saw, rather than rhapsodies about their "unique visions."

Was the benefit of sales of "authentic primitive art" worth the cost of failing to help the children bring their work closer to what their "unique vision" really saw? The ethical debate Woven by Hand raises is still interesting.
 
So are the tapestries. Despite the shortcomings of the ones that try to suggest real-life pictures, the more abstract tapestries are appealing. They all have a "definitely different" look that might inspire a needle art project today.