A Bauhaus-Trained Artist Wove Tapestries in the Woods for Decades. Now, Her Legacy Comes Into Focus

If Swiss-born textile artist Silvia Heyden had had her way, she would have been a violin maker. Born in Basel in 1927, she was an avid violinist even as a child. While still a girl, she decided she wanted to learn to make the object that brought such beauty into her life, but she was born too soon for that life course.

“Her dad took her around to a few violin makers. They said, ‘Oh, this is nothing for a girl or a woman. It’s too rough on your hands.’ She was disappointed, but she accepted it,” said her son, Daniel Heyden, during a recent conversation.

Instead, Heyden became a tapestry weaver, a path nearly as difficult, and which her teacher Elsi Giauque told her it would “take a lifetime” to learn. For over half a century, Heyden did just that, devoting herself to the loom and creating close to 800 innovative and rhythmic tapestries until soon before her death in 2015. From Switzerland to Durham, North Carolina, where she moved with her family in 1966 (her husband was hired as a professor at Duke), Heyden found the manipulating of tensile threads an experience akin to the manipulating of strings on a violin. She created unexpectedly modern tapestries inspired by the movements of the natural world and music—but which never received widespread acclaim in her lifetime.

Now, a new exhibition “Improvisational Nature: The Weavings and Drawings of Silvia Heyden” at Charles Moffett (through June 7) is shining a light on Heyden’s overlooked oeuvre, marking both the first New York solo exhibition for the late artist, and the first exhibition of the artist’s tapestries and drawings in the U.S. since 1972.

The exhibition, which was put together in close collaboration with the artist’s son and daughter, is a joyful introduction to a vibrant, hitherto unknown creative talent. Heyden, over her decades of experimenting, discovered a singular approach to weaving, working in a spirit of improvisation that embraced learning through sensation. In some ways, the works are reminiscent of jazz music.

“Silvia’s work possesses such a palpable energy. Her formidable skill and boldness at the loom—the bends, shifts, and folds in her lines, the vibrant and surprising relationships between her colors—enliven her tapestries with an innate movement, force, and dynamism,” said Charles Moffett, in an interview.

And while Heyden spent her career working outside of the global art centers, she nevertheless found inspiration and creative dialogue within the work of fellow women textile artists, including Olga de Amaral (with whom she traded a work), Anni Albers, and Gunta Stölzl, whom she met in 1972.

Heyden’s journey as an artist began as a student at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There she fell under the tutelage of Bauhaus master Johannes Itten and the pioneering textile artist Elsi Giauque, who had been a student of Sophie Tauber-Arp. Here, Heyden learned about color theory, experimental philosophy, materiality, and geometry—all of which would form her nascent approach to tapestry. The school, however, was not entirely encouraging, regarding tapestry as a decorative relic of centuries past/ while looms were present at the school, they were covered in cobwebs, according to Heyden’s accounts.

“Ironically, the founders of the Bauhaus (including Itten) had very little appreciation for tapestry weaving because they only thought of the representational tapestries depicting court scenes and battles. The weavers of those tapestries had to imitate paintings, thereby losing the woven quality…” wrote Heyden in a 2009 letter. “This misunderstanding about weaving since the Renaissance meant that the Bauhaus principles of integrating art and craft, of letting how things are made help determine how they appear, of experimenting and improvising, were never really fully applied to weaving.”

Heyden remained resolute as she graduated in 1952, having been moved by a visit to the medieval tapestries at the Museum of History in Basel.  She saw an expressive potential for tapestry that was yet untapped.  While artists in the Renaissance had made their tapestries working against cartoons, full-scale drawings that served as the blueprint that would determine their forms, previous generations and cultures embraced other strategies. In the Medieval era, the work was far more intuitive and less predetermined.

Heyden embraced this organic spontaneity. Heyden’s drawings, included in the exhibition, underscore her appreciation for the natural world, be it running water or the movement of trees in the breeze. In Durham, living near the Eno River, she often walked the wooded grounds, making sketches. While sometimes these drawings bear strong resemblances to her finished tapestries, other times they are quite different.

Creating a sense of movement in the often flattened medium of tapestry was one of Heyden’s central concerns. In the early 1990s, she had a critical breakthrough at the loom, coming by chance on what she would call feathered weaving, itself a variation on Native American wedge weaving. In a process that involves weaving weft threads diagonally across the warp threads, the tapestry gains a dimensionality and scalloped edges when removed from the loom.

“She wrote a lot about the movement and the rhythm,” her son recalled. “To make a composition dynamic and hold the viewer’s attention, movement could lead the viewer through the work.”  In the gallery, many of Heyden’s tapestries ripple, sculpturally, against the walls in crests. These tensions give the work a sense of momentum. In (2002), the pull of the threads, like a riptide, moves from left to right, while in (2011), energy builds upward, echoing the growth of the flowers. “The feather weave is not something you can possibly preconceive, and that was what she was after,” Heyden added.

She was not wholly unknown in her lifetime,  though she never had ambitions toward fame. In 1972, Heyden had her first major exhibition at the Duke University Museum of Art. She exhibited mostly in the U.S. and particularly in North Carolina, but her works were also shown in Switzerland and Germany. In 1994, the Textile Museum of St. Gallen, Switzerland, presented the most significant exhibition of her work to date. She was not one for self-promotion, however.

“The last thing she wanted to do was deal with money or marketing or publicity. It was not her thing,” said her son. “She wanted to be left in peace, which was ultimately why we lived in North Carolina, because she thought that it was a place where it would be nice and quiet. She said that North Carolina had been her cocoon.”

In some ways, her underexposure may have liberated her creatively, however. “While in some ways, I think the fact that she spent most of her life working outside the prevailing European and American developments in modern tapestry that were shaping the field in the 20th century meant that her work was vastly under-appreciated during her lifetime, I also believe those conditions gave her the freedom, space, and time to hone her approach,” said Moffett.

Rightly, Moffett notes that her works feel startlingly contemporary, “We are already thinking about how we can present her work alongside that of artists of different generations,” he said. “Her work feels very of the moment. It feels like it could’ve newly left the studio when in fact we have work at the gallery that spans roughly forty years of her work at the loom.”

For her family, they hope the exhibition brings Heyden some of the very attention she eschewed in her lifetime. “She was left out to some extent—and happily from her perspective, but something has been missing,” said her son, “I’ve spent a lot of time with her work. There are a lot of artists out there, but I think her work is right up there with the rest of them. I just wonder, why haven’t people seen this work?”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com