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Folds: Female Sexuality in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë

by Isabella Dobson

Arched back, clenched fist, lowered eyelids, and rumpled bedclothes: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë depicts the mythological heroine in the throes of sexual pleasure (fig. 1). In the original Greek myth, Danaë is locked away by her father after the Oracle foretells that Danaë will give birth to a son who will kill him. Displeased, the divine Zeus intervenes by impregnating Danaë with a shower of gold that falls into her lap.¹ While scholars, such as Mary Garrard, have often interpreted Artemisia’s works in conjunction with the artist’s own rape in 1611, this purely biographic approach makes it impossible to interpret Artemisia’s heroines as anything other than victims or resistors of sexual assault.² Artemisia’s depictions of biblical and mythological heroines as either particularly ruthless or sympathetic characters are not solely informed by the psychological trauma of her rape; they also record other dimensions of Artemisia’s sexual experience.³ My analysis of Artemisia’s Danaë recenters female sexuality and pleasure as essential considerations in understanding the artist’s oeuvre. Ultimately, Artemisia’s identity as a woman, and her consequent knowledge of female sexuality, explicitly informs how she paints the female body as a site of positive sexual experience.

As a woman who painted women in order to both better understand herself and vie for female excellence, Artemisia was “enfolded” in what she was painting. Cultural theorist and critic Mieke Bal uses this term to mean “embodying…as a way of fully grasping…the self/other dialectic.”⁴ This enfoldment functions as a double entendre because it points not only to Artemisia’s lived experience as a woman, but also to the folds of cloth that bend around Danaë’s body, consequently showing her as a female form made flesh. Importantly, folds can never exist on their own: an outside force must act on the fabric to produce folds. A fold’s existence makes the fabric a convincing depiction, insisting on the presence of the outside force that creates the folds.⁵ Moreover, folds are often features of clothing, which, according to fashion theorist Joanne Entwistle, have the added valence of not only constructing social meanings for their wearers, but also making them aware of the outer limits of their bodies.⁶ The various folds present in Artemisia’s Danaë thus become important sites of visual analysis because they render Danaë’s body as an active participant in pleasure rather than existing as an object of male sexual fantasy.

This seemingly simple act of folding has radical implications for depicting the sexual narrative in Artemisia’s Danaë. Folds reveal to the viewer how Danaë experiences the sensations of her own body. The way Danaë’s body tugs and depresses the folds of bedding beneath her maps the erotic tension that she feels from Zeus’s touch. Art historian Jodi Cranston finds a similar tension in the unveiling of the nude female body in Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, writing that drapery beneath Venus “appears to have the most intimate relationship with the female body through its mapping out areas of greater and lesser intensity of folds alongside the female form” (fig. 2).⁷ Since textiles can respond to human manipulation, the cloth’s depressions show that Venus’s body effectively occupies the artificial, painted space she inhabits. In Artemisia’s painting, the fabric most clearly maps the movements of Danaë’s body in the red drapery underneath her buttocks and knees. Bunched underneath Danaë’s bent knee, the rumpled fabric signals that it has been pulled towards her buttocks by her calf to express intense arousal. The fabric that bulges out from underneath the weight of her buttocks likewise marks its sliding progress toward her calf. Additional folds at the end of the bed are tugged by her feet into sharply indented, v-shaped crevices, furthering the impression of Danaë’s erotic response to touch, not to mention their vulvic shape. Inscribed into cloth, this map of tension in Danaë’s lower body inversely mirrors the bridge of tension formed in her chest and back. Pulled taut with the intensity of being touched by the golden coins, Danaë’s body is a site of pent-up tension waiting to be released. Danaë is not just resting on her bed, but rather reaching for and reacting to a feeling of sexual pleasure.

Such a powerful erotic connection between cloth and body not only has ties to a popular conceit during the Renaissance, but is also echoed in a letter written by Artemisia in 1620 to her lover, Francesco Maria Maringhi. During the Renaissance, the belief that objects could be assigned a human-like agency in artistic and literary contexts was reflected in poetry. In a sonnet by Michelangelo, a belt already embraces the waist of his beloved so a lover laments, “What then would my arms do?”⁸ Thus, Michelangelo suggests that an object can experience human pleasure through the imagined jealous lover. Artemisia uses a similar metaphoric device in a letter to Maringhi dated June 26, 1620, writing that “your Lordship tells me that you know no other woman besides your right hand, envied by me so much, for it possesses that which I cannot possess myself.”⁹Artemisia’s jealousy of Maringhi’s hand mirrors the envy of Michelangelo’s lover as they both mourn the distance from their respective beloveds.¹⁰ Therefore, as evidenced by her adoption of the object-envy metaphor in her letter, Artemisia was intimately aware of the charged associations between inanimate objects and the body, which suggests that she may have been conscious of the drapery she painted beneath Danaë and the way it caresses her nude form.

Danaë’s body as a site of erogenous tension is strengthened by the painting’s relation to another work by Artemisia painted immediately before Danaë: a reclining Cleopatra (fig. 3). The affinity between the poses of the two recumbent women has been noted before by art historian Letizia Treves, especially since they are derivative of the ancient sculpture Sleeping Ariadne.¹¹ Artemisia was likely exposed to this sculpture through prints circulating in seventeenth-century Italy, such as the version created after the Ariadne by Dutch artist Jan de Bisschop , and likely adopted this pose for her Cleopatra (fig. 4). The ambiguity between a female figure swooning or slumbering allows for a variety of psychosomatic states to be grafted onto Ariadne’s pose by the artist. Like Danaë, Cleopatra’s right leg is tucked tightly beneath her left one and her left arm is bent behind her head, giving the impression that the two halves of her body are being stretched in opposite directions. Thus, the aforementioned tautness in Danaë’s body is also present in that of Cleopatra. Resting at the top of her solid thigh, Cleopatra’s right hand also mirrors Danaë, but with an important difference in attributes. While Danaë’s closed fist is studded with fallen gold coins, Cleopatra clutches the instrument of her imminent suicide: an asp. It might seem contradictory for Artemisia to have modeled sexual pleasure and conception after suicide, since the former emphasizes life and the latter takes it. Yet, the two contexts share something in common: both Cleopatra’s and Danaë’s bodies are on the verge of physical transformation. Recognizing this shared corporeal precipice between dying and conceiving, Artemisia ingeniously co-opts how Cleopatra embodies tension to depict the anticipation of Danaë’s erotic experience.

With her gold-showered Danaë, Artemisia asserts that the female body does not have just one erogenous zone but, rather, is covered in them. While the myth dictates that the multitude of gold coins landing on Danaë’s nude flesh represent a male god’s touch, these erotic, haptic moments reveal a network of explicitly female erogenous zones. It is no coincidence that some of the only coins that Artemisia depicts actively touching Danaë’s body have fallen into the crevice formed by her closely pressed thighs so that they are resting as close as possible to her vulva, an area charged with erogeneity, without actually entering it. The only other points of contact between the coins and Danaë’s flesh are in between the fingers of her clenched fist, which are bodily apertures that mimic the double folds of the labia and direct the viewer back to her lap. Even in the falling coins that have not yet touched Danaë’s bare flesh, eroticism is found in the anticipation of their imminent touch as they build a tantalizing erotic tension while suspended mid-air. Every point of contact that a coin makes, or is about to make, with Danaë’s body represents instances of touch that comprise Danaë’s journey toward her sexual climax. Danaë’s tightly pressed thighs and thrown-back head have been cited as evidence for Artemisia’s singular occupation with the difficult aftermath of her rape, but viewing Artemisia’s Danaë through the lens of female sexual pleasure dismantles this limiting, disempowering perspective.¹² In its place, a complex network of erogenous zones and pleasurable reactions emerges, which demonstrates that Artemisia defined female sexual experience beyond the psychological trauma of her rape. Under Artemisia’s brush, Danaë is openly ecstatic, lost in her response to stimulating touch.

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Isabella Dobson is a second year PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. She is interested in the ways that eroticism, desire, and sensuality operate in images of the female body from the Early Modern period.

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Footnotes

1. Apollodorus, The Library Vol. I, trans. James George Frazier, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921) 2.4, 153-155.

2. Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 204.

3. Scholars have traditionally seen Artemisia’s heroines as uniquely informed by her rape. To give two examples of how Artemisia’s rape is used to interpret her works, Garrard argues that the Pommersfelden Susanna and The Elders by Artemisia depicts an “emotionally distressed young woman” (189) who is “hounded on a psychological level” (198), reflecting Artemisia’s own state of mind, and later argues that Artemisa’s particularly bloody Judith Slaying Holofernes functions, in part, as a vehicle through which “to carry out psychic vengeance against her sexual oppressor” (279).

4. Mieke Bal, Introduction to The Artemisia Files (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), xx.

5. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 30.

6. Joanne Entwistle, “The Dressed Body” in Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2001), 45. Note that Entwistle derives this notion of bodily boundaries from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

7. Jodi Cranston, “The Disordered Bed in The Sleeping Venus,” in Das haptische Bild: Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit (München: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 35.

8. Cranston, “The Disordered Bed in The Sleeping Venus,” 43-45.

9. Letizia Treves, “Catalogue: A Selection of Letters from Artemisia and her Husband to Francesco Maria Maringhi” in Artemisia (London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2020), 152.

10. Artemisia wishes that her hands were giving Maringhi sexual satisfaction, when instead, her absence has forced him to masturbate on his own. This sexually explicit excerpt from Artemisia’s letter illustrates her sexual agency and desire as a woman.

11. Letizia Treves, “Catalogue,” 121.

12. Letizia Treves, “Catalogue,” 121. While it is unclear which scholars have put forth this opinion, they cite Danaë’s “pulled-back head and firmly pressed legs as signs of resistance” to support a reading of Zeus’s forceful penetration.

Skeuomorphic Textiles: Stitches in Stone

by Tracey Davison

This essay considers the ninth-century sarcophagus of St. Alkmund as a skeuomorphic funerary textile and its role in the commemoration and creation of a visible presence of the deceased (fig. 1).¹ Now in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery in England, it was unearthed between 1967-68 during the demolition of the nineteenth-century St. Alkmund’s church. The sarcophagus’ ninth-century date makes Ealhmund (son of the deposed King Alcred of Northumbria) its most likely occupant; he was killed on the orders of Eardwulf of Northumbria during his exile in Mercia.² The sarcophagus was reputedly commissioned by the Mercian king Coenwulf (c. 740-821), who may have taken the opportunity to display a martyred prince while simultaneously making a political and religious comment on the actions of Eardwulf and Northumbrian royalty.³

In considering the carved decoration of the sarcophagus, this essay suggests that we are faced with a skeuomorphic textile that emphasizes the features of woven cloth; its rich interlace pattern, demonstrated through the defining of individual strands, reveals the complexities of the weave to the viewer that are present but not visible in textile. It could be construed as a celebration of the embroiderer’s art (in its original form) and its role in denoting hierarchy through elaborate textiles used in a liturgical context.

With this in mind, it is worth exploring whether the woven structure of cloth should be considered a framework for design and how such material might be translated into stone. Skeuomorphic textiles demonstrate the unrestricted, fluid nature of Anglo-Saxon art which often integrates multiple forms of media into artistic practices. The resulting symbolism is often directly related to that of the original model. For a lay viewer, visibility and accessibility of an embroidered vestment would always be removed through the physical distance lying between clergy and congregation. The latter would be aware of the effect created by candlelight on the gold thread but would be unable to fully visualize the intricate stitches. In the case of the St. Alkmund Sarcophagus, the haptic features of the textile model, embroidered in relief upon the ground fabric, are exaggerated in the skeuomorph; the interlace carving merges the moveable aspect of the weave with the solidity of the stone, creating the ambiguity of a solid material that gives the appearance of movement and flexibility.  By referencing relatively flat textiles, the teasing apart of the strands creates negative space between and behind the carving, resulting in a stone block appearing to be both solid and hollow.

The depth of the surface carving and interplay between light and shadow on the St. Alkmund Sarcophagus makes it difficult to establish where the surface design ends and the core of the monument begins. Therefore, the viewer is faced with what art historian Jane Hawkes has described as “symbolic ambiguity.”⁴ The precious textile recreated in the resilient stone has taken on the characteristics of the more fragile material. The stone’s solidity—its most defining feature—becomes ambiguous when rendered as a skeuomorphic textile. One of the primary purposes of cloth is to cover and protect the body; therefore, the presence of a skeuomorphic textile must be part of a visual language designed to inform the viewer about the status of the deceased as well as the nature of the original object.

This materiality has implications for the spiritual value of labor, both for the original weavers and embroiderers, and the sculptor of the skeuomorph. The use of cloth for shrouding the deceased demonstrates the important role of elaborate textiles in denoting both piety and sanctity. Almost invariably, relics are kept in protective reliquaries; the additional act of wrapping them in an elaborate textile refers to the corporeal nature of many relics (fig. 2).⁵ A relic may be merely a fragmentary piece of bone but it is still venerated as the living body of the saint, through the suspension of the anonymity of bodily remains and the normal laws of the grave.⁶ By giving the skeuomorph the appearance of being wrapped in textile, combined with the animated relief decoration representing the embroidery, the stone becomes an object of veneration and would be recognized as such. Skeuomorphic textiles can be viewed as objects of performative piety: the enhanced elements of elaborate textiles and their religious connotations are created to occupy a space and elicit a visual and emotional response.⁷ The interactions of the viewers or users of the skeuomorph build on this framework of familiarity, the “suggestiveness of ornament,” projecting its message forward while simultaneously acknowledging the meaning of the original textile model.⁸

Anglo-Saxons felt compelled to create visual symbols of power that would survive, and stone could replace the vulnerability of textile. Strength, mass, presence, and longevity are all qualities inherent to stone, but—in the case of skeuomorphic textiles—an emphasis is placed on embroidery because of its role in Church hierarchy. The gifting of elaborate textiles—especially of Eastern origin, such as silk from Constantinople adorned with religious motifs—denoted the reaches of the Christian world and reinforced the Church as a presence in both East and West.⁹ As noted in the later entries of the Liber Pontificalis (eighth to ninth centuries), the numerous papal donations of elite textiles to the churches of Rome raised both the profile of donor and recipient, and this status enhancement would equally apply to the patron who commissioned
St. Alkmund’s sarcophagus. A corollary to this lies in the potential of elaborate textiles as moveable furnishings, as they can journey through provenance, production, procurement, purpose and time; however, a skeuomorphic textile rendered in stone demonstrates a permanence and continuity of display.

St. Alkmund’s sarcophagus is a skeuomorphic textile which exhibits interlace as its dominant pattern, with decoration covering both the remaining section of lid and the body of the object (fig. 3). If Coenwulf’s intentions were to create a saint and a shrine, then the maintenance of an unsullied body and the condition of the clothing within the grave were of the utmost importance. This is demonstrated in Bede’s account of Cuthbert (Bishop of Lindisfarne 685-687) whose coffin was opened eleven years after his death; his body was found to be incorrupt and his liturgical vestments intact, thus elevating him to the status of saint.¹⁰ Therefore, the creation of an essentially incorruptible textile in the form of a skeuomorphic sends a powerful message about both the deceased and the patron.

The sarcophagus was discovered broken into three sections in the south-east corner of the nave with its lid level with the twelfth-century floor of the church, meaning it had been deliberately placed to ensure its continued visibility, presumably because of its connection to St. Alkmund. As archeologist C. A. Radford has demonstrated, if the sarcophagus originally stood in the same place when above ground, it would have occupied an important position next to the altar. The reconstruction of the monument by the conservators at Derby Museum revealed a dressed stone underside, implying that it was intended to stand on the floor.¹¹ Due to the decoration on all sides, perhaps circumambulation would have allowed for continued contemplation of the interlace pattern, thereby implying that the lack of figural ornament did not detract from the significance of the object, therefore rendering the skeuomorphic textile a contemplative tool. Furthermore, the small grains of quartz in the stone would have caught the candlelight across the undulating strands of carved interlace and highlighted the contrast between pattern and negative space.¹² As the viewer moved around it, they would have been confronted by a stone coffin that combined light, shade, and carved relief that appeared to move with them. Given that a key purpose of a funerary monument is to keep the memory of the deceased alive, the monument’s capacity to physically respond to its surroundings would suggest the enduring presence of the deceased.

Compared to the figural carving on the St. Andrew’s sarcophagus, the decoration on St. Alkmund’s has been called “unambitious” by Radford (fig. 4).¹³ Such judgments fail to acknowledge the complexity of the non-figural, and that the production of carved interlace required skill to create the linear precision of positive and negative patterns, as well as hidden crosses. Sidebottom also implied that the decoration lacks precision, drawing attention to the variety of patterns used and the way they were combined by the sculptor(s); for Sidebottom, non-uniformity implied multiple makers.¹⁴ Yet, as a skeuomorphic textile, variation could equally point to complex patterning being embraced by the textile worker or stone carver. In this case, the scale and purpose of the piece suggests an experienced hand familiar with high-status decorative textiles.

Rather than interpreting the patterns and panels as at odds with each other, they can be thought of as the separate elements that create texture and ornament akin to an embroidered textile. It may also be useful, from a skeuomorphic perspective, to imagine the panels of the sarcophagus as areas of a flat funerary textile with the tapering corner details widening towards the middle of the cloth drawing the viewer’s eye to the central decoration, which is occupied by the lid (fig. 5).

It may also be possible to explain the jumbling of pattern towards the bottom of the narrow corner panels noted by Sidebottom, not as sloppy workmanship, but rather as a faithful replication of the drape of the original textile in stone.¹⁵ In his piece on the geometry of the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, BL, Cotton MS Nero D IV), Guilmain also touches on the subject of pattern irregularity. He proposes that manipulation of pattern structure does not disturb the design; rather, it mitigates the geometric rigidity.¹⁶ Perhaps one could see this as a deliberate choice designed to represent the softer, more irregular shapes of an elaborate textile rather than the precisely drawn lines of a carpet page in a manuscript.

There is a danger that the scale of an object such as St. Alkmund’s sarcophagus may lead to physical presence overshadowing the conceptual, symbolic nature of the skeuomorph. It is important to note that the design of the skeuomorph’s textile model was a mere idea prior to being rendered in silk and gold thread. With the goal of mimesis in mind, the maker of the skeuomorph may have responded to the physical properties of the textile. Equally, they were motivated by the same considerations as the original needlewomen and the hand that draped the cloth across the coffin. In the case of a skeuomorph, it is important to consider the creative process of the maker who represented a flexible and precious textile—which would have responded to the form beneath—in resistant stone. The purpose of a funeral pall was not to hide the coffin but to “dress” it, thus acknowledging its importance. The degree of thought and contemplation required to reconcile two such disparate materials is evidenced by responses to the skeuomorphic textiles and the conviction that what we are looking at is indeed, as Boulton points out, “embroidered stones.”¹⁷

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Tracey Davison is a PhD candidate in Medieval Studies at the CMS, York. Her thesis addresses the absence of a body of scholarship devoted to the use and perception of textiles and clothing in Anglo-Saxon England, examining the degree to which the art historical and archaeological evidence for early medieval textiles, clothing and adornment can be woven into and supported by the literature (vernacular and Latin, secular and ecclesiastical) produced and circulating in Anglo-Saxon England.

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Footnotes

1. Skeuomorphs are defined as “powerful devices retaining a rich symbolism and possibly evoking an emotional or at least, cognitive response through their relationship with their previous incarnation of the other object, and the associated memories and significance therein.” Meg Bolton, "Embroidered Stones; Considering the Symbolism of Anglo-Saxon Skeuomorphs and the Kirkdale Grave-Slab,” in The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World: Transition, Transformation and Taxonomy, ed. Meg Bolton, Meg Hawkes, Jane Herman (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015), 203.

2. D. W. Rollason, "The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-Saxon England," Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1982): 4.

3. Rollason, "The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-Saxon England," 4. “Northumbrian ambition to control the British borderlands as far south as Shropshire developed into an ambition to dominate the entire island.” T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350-1064 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 388.

4. Jane Hawkes, “Symbolic Lives: The Visual Evidence,” in The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. John Hines (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 1997), 334.

5. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980), 11.

6. Brown, The Cult of Saints, 11.

7. Howard Williams, “Engendered Bodies and Objects of Memory in Final Phase Graves,” in Burial in Later Anglo-Saxon England c. 650-1100 AD, eds. Jo Buckberry and Annia Cherryson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 28.

8. Emmanuelle Pirotte, “Hidden Order, Order Revealed: New Light on Carpet-Pages,” in Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art, ed. Rednap et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998), 204.

9. “On these holy martyrs’ altar he furnished 2 cloths, one of which he wondrously adorned with a gold-studded, gold-interwoven cross, the other with fourfold-woven silk; he also adorned 7 great gold-interwoven veils, sewn around with a purple fringe”. Raymond Davis, The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of Ten Popes from A.D. 817-891(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 8. The Liber Pontificalis records the biographies, decrees and church building programmes including the furnishings and elaborate textile donations of the popes between the first and the ninth century.

10. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I. xxix, 105.

11. C. A. Ralegh Radford, “The Church of St Alkmund, Derby,” The Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 96 (1976), 35.

12. Hawkes and Sidebottom, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, 170.

13. Jonathan Jerrett, "St Alkmund’s Derby – A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe", A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, 2019.

14. Hawkes and Sidebottom, Derbyshire And Staffordshire, 171.

15. Hawkes and Sidebottom, 171.

16. Jacques Guilmain, "The Geometry of The Cross-Carpet Pages in The Lindisfarne Gospels," Speculum 62, no. 1 (1987): 24.

17. Meg Boulton, Embroidered Stones, 198-216.

A Piece of the “Gold Blanket”: Gardiner’s Island, Captain William Kidd, and the Gifting of Family History

by Allison Donoghue

Hidden away in Sylvester Manor, a seventeenth-century provisions plantation on Shelter Island, NY, lies a frayed scrap of green and yellow fabric only 4 3/8 x 2 ½ inches in size (fig. 1). Made of silk, cotton, and gilded silver thread, this cloth would have once shimmered in the light. The looping scrawls of a handwritten note give the fragment an abbreviated provenance: “a piece of the ‘Gold Blanket.’” The note asserts that the fabric was “...presented by the Pirate Kidd to Madame Gardiner of Gardiners [sic] Island,” and later “...presented by Mrs. Kimball to Mrs. Horsford, descendants of [illegible] Gardiner.” Carefully passed down and divided through generations of Gardiner relatives since the turn of the eighteenth century, this scrap presents a unique opportunity to study family connections and legacy in colonial North America. While contemporary family histories are recorded in genealogy books, or may be lost entirely, this piece of fabric is a material embodiment of Gardiner familial connections that has transformed over time with the family. By considering the fabric and legend through the lens of Marcel Mauss’s theory of gifting, this essay will unravel how the scrap functions to create and maintain connections and build family legacy. Family genealogies, like Cutis Gardiner’s 1890 book Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890, court records, broadsides, local legends, and the scrap itself will support the analysis of the 'Gold Blanket' and the connections it creates.

The scrap’s bold colors and distinctive floral motif suggest its journey began in India. The fabric has a woven pattern with two distinct repeating columns, one a glimmering gold and the other a deep green. A full flower with five pink outlined petals and a green stem is visible in the gold columns. The green column is decorated with two gold flowers, cut off by the division of the textile, suggesting a repeating pattern. The five-petalled flower is a common motif found on Indian textiles beginning in the early eighteenth century.¹ Europe had been importing vast quantities of Indian textiles with the best being quality embroidered silks and dye painted cottons coming from Gujarat and Bengal.² However, designs favored by Europeans tended to feature large scale and fantastical florals and foliage on a white background.³ The small, evenly spaced patterning on the scrap could indicate that it was not originally meant for the European market before it was intercepted by Kidd. Although the origin is ambiguous, the luxurious material qualities of the fabric highlight its significant worth. Some of the finest fabrics were woven or embroidered with gilded silver threads called zari, meaning “gold.”⁴ The making of zari was a highly skilled and hereditary profession, passed down through families. The skill necessary to create zari, combined with the monetary value of the materials used in making the thread, resulted in a prized and expensive commodity. The zari woven into the scrap lends to the accuracy of the note’s description of the textile as a “Gold Blanket.” It continues to shimmer today and is but one small example of the intricate and sumptuous patterns that were achieved using the thread. 

Although it likely originated in India, the fabric weaves together the histories of two small islands off the coast of New York State: Gardiner’s Island and Shelter Island.  The former was purchased by Lion Gardiner (1599-1663) in 1636, who established the island as a Manor property and Lordship under English law.⁵ By the turn of the eighteenth century, Lion Gardiner’s grandson and the third proprietor of the island, John Gardiner, and his first wife Mary resided in the large manor house that lay on the West end of the 3,300-acre property.⁶ It was John Gardiner who first encountered Captain William Kidd in the waters off the island in 1701. This encounter made him and Mary into key figures in the legends that would form about the scrap of the “Gold Blanket.” Twelve and a half miles across the bay lies Shelter Island (fig. 2). First purchased by Nathaniel Sylvester (1610-1680) in 1651, it was originally founded as a provisioning site to provide necessities to the Sylvester sugar plantation in Barbados. He and his wife Grizzell established the family home known as Sylvester Manor. Although the current manor house was built in 1737, descendants of the Sylvester family have continuously owned the island for more than 363 years.⁷  

The marriage of Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu and Samuel Smith Gardiner in 1823 tied the two islands and two families together. The note accompanying the scrap records this family connection between the Gardiners and the Sylvesters and suggests the importance of the scrap in sharing and maintaining those connections. Mary L’Hommedieu Gardiner Horsford, the seventh proprietor of Sylvester Manor, was most likely the “Mrs. Horsford” referred to in the note.⁸ As a descendant of both Gardiner and Sylvester families through her grandparents, Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu and Samuel Smith Gardiner, she had an intimate connection to the family legend and a special claim to the fabric, which was gifted to her when it was brought from Gardiner’s Island to Sylvester Manor. The small frayed scrap was eventually placed inside the Sylvester family fireproof walk-in vault for safekeeping, along with other family heirlooms and valuables, where it remains today.

By the time the scrap reached Mary, it had already gained its own mythology through its association with Captain William Kidd. In 1695 the infamous privateer-turned-pirate Captain William Kidd became embroiled in a plot which would eventually lead to his infamy and death—as well as bring the “Gold Blanket” to Gardiner’s Island. Kidd began his piratical exploits in 1697 off the Malabar Coast in the Indian Ocean.⁹ He captured several ships, but his most lucrative prize was the Quedagh Merchant, a large Indian merchant vessel returning to Surat, Gujarat, an important commercial center for the east Asian textile trade during the 17^thcentury.¹⁰ The Quedagh Merchant contained “60-80 chests of opium, 20-30 bales of silks, 200-300 bales of sugar, and 500-600 bales of calicoes, muslins, and other East India goods”—an estimated value of 200,000-400,000 rupees.¹¹ Kidd’s pirating ended in 1701 when he was captured while visiting the Governor of Massachusetts, his former friend and patron Lord Bellomont, and brought to England for a three-day trial.  

England and the American colonies became fascinated with Kidd’s macabre crimes and trial,  as evidenced by several “true” accounts of his behavior, confession, and “dying words” that were published in London broadsides and circulated to the gossip-hungry public during and after his execution.¹² Printed on large sheets of paper, broadsides were tabloids that appealed to a wide range of social classes.¹³ They were often distributed at public executions but could also be found in other public spaces like taverns and marketplaces. Two of these broadsides were written by the chaplain of Newgate prison, Paul Lorrain. His publications especially highlighted Kidd’s refusal to confess to his crimes, drunkenness, and general lack of repentance and morals. Authors highlighted lurid details to emphasize the sinfulness of the criminal and appeal to the public. Several ballads and songs about Kidd were also published and disseminated, most notably Captain Kid’s Farewel to the Seas [sic].¹⁴ The proliferation of print material surrounding Kidd’s trial demonstrates the public’s hunger for the grim details and salacious stories relating to Kidd’s piracy. It was in this period of immense public interest surrounding Kidd’s trial that the legend around the scrap began to develop.

According to John Gardiner’s statement, which was published in court documents relating to Kidd’s trial, the encounter between Kidd and Gardiner in 1701 was amicable, although Gardiner was then unaware that Kidd had been accused of piracy.¹⁵ Gardiner allegedly met Kidd on his sloop anchored off Gardiner’s Island where they began bartering. Kidd gave Gardiner two “bales of goods” and requested “six sheep.” The formal trading done, Kidd asked Gardiner if he could spare a “Barrel of Cyder [sic].” In appreciation of Gardiner’s generosity, Kidd gifted him “…several pieces of damnified Muslins and Bengals, as a Present to his wife” as well as “three pieces of damnified Muslin” for Gardiner’s own use and “Four pieces of Arabian Gold.” The description of the gifted cloth as “damnified,” meaning to inflict injury or loss, suggests that the cloth may already have been damaged at the time it was gifted to Gardiner.  It was after this initial exchange that Kidd requested that Gardiner keep a portion of his treasure on the Island, including a “box of gold,” a “bundle of Quilts,” and “bundle of goods.”¹⁶  

French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of gift exchange, put forth in his seminal work, The Gift (1925), provides a lens with which to analyze this interaction. Mauss argues that gifts are not truly given freely. The gift “possesses something of [the giver]” and therefore is not “inactive;” it imposes obligations that must be fulfilled and reciprocated.¹⁷ According to Mauss, a gift, when given, creates a “debt” that is not fulfilled until it is reciprocated. The obligations, or debt, created by gifts forge connections and build bonds between giver and receiver.¹⁸ By accepting Kidd’s gifts Gardiner entered a reciprocal relationship with Kidd. The initial bartering, a seemingly equal exchange of “bales of goods” for “six sheep” is notably different from  the extravagant presents Kidd gave Gardiner. The cloth and “Arabian gold” seem out of proportion in value as a gift when compared to “a Barrel of Cyder.” It is notable that it is only after the exchange of gifts that Kidd requested Gardiner keep his illicit treasure on the island. Perhaps Kidd’s “generosity” influenced Gardiner’s decision to keep the treasure safe. This exchange—the gifting of the gilded cloth and the concealment of Kidd’s treasure—brought the scrap of golden blanket to the island and into circulation within the Gardiner family. This interaction also placed the Gardiner family into the developing lore surrounding Kidd.

Curtis Gardiner recorded the family legends that formed about the encounter over the next two centuries in Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890. There are several different stories, the tale becoming increasingly embellished with generations of retellings. In one version the fearsome Captain Kidd broke down the door to Gardiner Manor, rousing John Gardiner from bed and hiding his loot “in a swampy place at Cherry Harbor.”¹⁹ In another, Kidd tied Gardiner to a mulberry tree and demanded that Mrs. Gardiner roast him a pig, which was so delicious that he gifted her the cloth of gold.²⁰ Curtis was generally skeptical of the folklore and very concerned with the lack of “proof” these family traditions offered.²¹ However, he chose to include them in his book because “certain pious family fictions…must not be disturbed.”²² Although embellished and fantastical, the stories provided an oral tradition that imbued the cloth with meaning and connected the family to the salacious pirate.

The family placed significant value on the scrap and the family lore it carried, splitting it into smaller pieces and passing it down as an heirloom for nearly one-hundred and thirty-five years. Curtis reveals the continued journey of the fabric from generation to generation. He writes that a Mrs. Wetmore, great-granddaughter of Mary Gardiner, heard from her mother that Kidd “...made [Mary] a present of the silk, which she then gave to her two daughters.” It was presumably Mary who originally divided the fabric between her daughters. Mrs. Wetmore eventually received the fabric passed down to her by her mother, well preserved and cared for by each generation as it was “…now as good as when first given…upwards of one hundred years ago.”²³ Hidden in his footnotes, Curtis Gardiner confided that while visiting Gardiner’s Island in August of 1835, he too was gifted a small clipping of the golden blanket from one of the “remnants.” This clipping was presented to him by Mrs. Sarah Griswold Gardiner, the “widow of the seventh proprietor,” John Lyon Gardiner.²⁴  The continued gifting of the scrap within the Gardiner family is significant, as the exchange of the scrap facilitated and fortified family relationships. The golden blanket had become what might be considered an “inalienable” object.²⁵ Per anthropologist Annette B. Weiner, inalienable objects are unique because they are inherently tied to their original owners, which adds “cultural meanings of wealth” that are separate from alienable objects which are not closely tied to a specific family or history.²⁶ These objects, like the “Gold Blanket”, are powerful because they “define who one is in an historical sense” becoming “…an intimate part of a person’s present identity.”²⁷ As an object tied to the identity of the Gardiner family, the scrap’s value as an heirloom exceeded that of its material worth. 

As the children and grandchildren of John and Mary Gardiner married and left the island, the scrap remained an important tie to their family history. The scrap was evidence of the Gardiner family lore and the connection between distant family members. Today a second, nearly identical, piece of the “gold blanket” resides at the East Hampton Library on Long Island. This fragment is a similar size to the Sylvester Manor sample and is mounted on a black backing inside a gilded frame.²⁸ A popular attraction, stories are written about the scrap in local newspapers every few years. Some of these stories closely echo the family folklore: one label reads, “Kidd broke into the manor house at night…hiding his treasure in the swampy area” off the island and leaving the family with threats of death.²⁹ Others implicate John Gardiner in the legend, one blog writing, “…the Gardiners of Gardiner’s Island…tipped Lord Bellomont on to [Kidd’s] presence” suggesting Gardiner betrayed Kidd’s location and treasure to authorities.³⁰ The continued publication and circulation of the legend maintains the scrap’s connection to the Gardiner family. This remnant was originally a loan from a member of the Gardiner family on occasion of the library’s 40^th anniversary in 1937, but later became part of the permanent collection. This new act of gifting expands the scrap’s network into the twenty-first century, connecting the Gardiners to the East Hampton Library and the larger community. This connection, facilitated and materialized by the scrap, reinforces the Gardiner family’s long history and ties to the local community as descendants of early colonists, founders of Gardiner’s Island, and current Lords of the Manor. The library protects and preserves the scrap—and the family history which it embodies—while simultaneously making it more accessible to the public. The preservation of the scrap within the library weaves together the broader history of colonial textile trade beginning in India, the intimate family history of the Gardiners, and the current community of East Hampton, creating a shared bond through the legend of Captain Kidd.

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Allison Donoghue is a second-year master’s student at the Bard Graduate Center of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. She approaches history from an interdisciplinary lens, centering her work around material culture. She is broadly interested in gender, trade, and the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous people in 17th century New England and New Amsterdam.

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Footnotes

 1. As a global center of the textile trade, Indian textile manufacturers sold to many markets including Indonesia, Thailand, Europe each with a distinctive preference in floral styles and patterns.

2. Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, When Indian Flowers Bloomed In Europe: Masterworks of Indian Trade Textiles, 1600-1780, In the Tapi Collection (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2022), 9-10.

3. Avalon Fotheringham, The Indian Textile Sourcebook (London: Victorian and Albert Museum, London/Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2019), 47.

4. Vandana Bhandari, Jeweled Textiles: Gold and Silver Embellished Cloth of India (Uttar Pradesh: Om Books International, 2015), 26.

5. Gardiner purchased the property first from the from Montaukett Sachem Wyandanch in 1636 and then again from Earl of Stirling in 1639 who had been given the property by King Charles I. Curtis Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890 (St. Louis: A. Whipple Publisher, 1890), 58.

6. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890, 97.

7. “History,” Sylvester Manor, Accessed November 20, 2023, History — Sylvester Manor.

8. Alternatively, the note could refer to Mary’s sister, Phoebe D. Gardiner (8^th proprietor of Sylvester Manor), who married Eben Norton Horsford (Mary’s husband) after Mary’s death in 1855. Both Mary and Phoebe were direct descendants of the Sylvester and the Gardiner family through their grandparents, Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu and Samuel Smith Gardiner. Mac Griswold, The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 3.  

9. Recently there has been significant debate over whether Kidd was truly a pirate. For a detailed account of Kidd’s life and piracy see, David Wilson “Piracy, Patronage & Political Economy: Captain Kidd and the East India Trade” International Journal of Maritime History 27, no. 1 (March 2015): 26–40; and Frederick Hanselmann, Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship: The Wreck of the Quedagh Merchant. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2019).

10. John Guy, “One Thing Leads to Another: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style,” in Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800, ed. by Amelia Peck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 14.

11. David Wilson, “Piracy, Patronage & Political Economy,” The International Journal of Maritime History 27, no.1 (March 2015.): 34-35.

12. Paul Lorrain, The Ordinary of Newgate His Account of the Behaviour, Confessions, and Dying-Words of Captain William Kidd, and Other Pirates, that were Executed at the Execution-Dock in Wapping, on Friday May 23, 1701 (London: 1701);  And A True Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Last Dying Speeches, of Captain William Kidd, and the Rest of the Pirates, that were Executed at Execution Dock in Wapping, on Friday the 23d of May 1701. Licensed According to Order. (London: 1701).

13. Sarah F. Williams, “‘A Swearing and Blaspheming Wretch’: Representations of Witchcraft and Excess on Early Modern English Broadside Balladry and Popular Song,” Journal of Musicological Research 30, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 2011): 314.

14. The “Elegy on the Death of Capt. William Kidd,” the “Dialogue Between the Ghost of Captain Kidd and the Napper in the Strand,” and “The Dying Words of Capt. Robert Kidd” were other ballads that gained popularity at the time of his trial. For a detailed analysis of these ballads see William Hallam Bonner, “The Ballad of Captain Kidd,” American Literature 15, no.4 (Jan 1944): 362-380.

15. Graham Brooks, Trial of Captain Kidd (Glasgow: William Hodge and Company, 1930), 215.

16. Brooks, Trial of Captain Kidd, 215-216.

17. Marcel Mauss and W. D Halls, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange In Archaic Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000): 15.

18. Mauss and Halls, The Gift, 15.

19. Gardiner, Lion Gardiner and his Descendants 1599-1890, 97.

20. Gardiner, 98.

21. Gardiner, 98.

22. Gardiner, 98.

23. Gardiner, 98.

24. Gardiner, 98; Jeannette Edwards Rattray, East Hampton History Including Genealogies of Early Families (New York: Country Life Press, 1953), 343.

25. Annette Weiner, “Inalienable Wealth,” American Ethnologist, no. 12 (1985): 210.

26. Weiner, “Inalienable Wealth,” 210.

27. Weiner, 210.

28. "Captain Kidd cloth of gold," Collection Highlights, East Hampton Library, Accessed October 4, 2022.

29. Colette Gilbert McClain, “Overheard: Fantasy Island,” East Hampton Star, September 12, 2022.      

30. “Buried Treasure on Long Island,” Crime Capsule, accessed November 25, 2023, Buried Treasure on Long Island - Crime Capsule; “Captain Kidd and Gardiner: The Legendary Treasure Revealed.” Dan Rattiner, last modified August 27, 2022, Captain Kidd and Gardiner: The Legendary Treasure Revealed (danspapers.com).

Ties That Bind: Hairwork as Family Portrait in the Nineteenth-Century United States

by Victoria Kenyon

The young artist collected her central material, hair, from people both in and outside of her immediate family. Grow’s placement choices establish family connections and provide crucial context for the way we are meant to read her album. On one page, she depicts herself and her sisters in nearly-identical hair chains inscribed with each girl’s age and arranged from left to right in descending age order (see fig. 1). This arrangement suggests the format of the family tree, the botanical iconography of which goes back to the Tree of Jesse motif in Christian Medieval and Early Modern Europe.⁵ Such documents and other genealogical records, including family registers, were historically important to establishing familial connection. Karin Wulf has examined the religious and political implications of familial genealogy in British America, noting the reflection (and indeed support) of white, patriarchal systems of inheritance in the practice of listing one’s family members and recording events such as marriages, births, and deaths in record books and family bibles.⁶ As in hairwork, there was an element of sentimentality in the emotional connection evoked through documenting one’s family, as well as a didactic quality. Though apparently not a necessary component, some such documents also included physical likenesses of individuals alongside names, as evidenced in an 1875 Vermont marriage certificate (fig. 3).

Grow’s medium does not provide as direct an image of a person as would a photograph, but her portraits reveal some facets of appearance that photos or other media could not, including the full tonal ranges of a person's hair. There may have even been an olfactory component to the objects; another nineteenth-century album, made by Louisa Rice of Paradise Township, Pennsylvania, included a perfume label in a hair portrait of the artist’s sister (fig. 4). Coupled with the fact that period advice guides directed young women to perfume their hair, this suggests that Louisa Rice may have applied the perfume to which the label belonged to that hair portrait, and Grow may have similarly scented her objects to strengthen the connections between individual and portrait.⁷ Grow also creatively shows physical differences in the sisters’ portraits in figure 1; the youngest’s (Louisa, 7) is noticeably smaller. Grow continually groups family members together in her album. Another page depicts her parents and some of their children, though Lucy herself is missing; the Kelseys, included at the bottom of the page, may have been Grow family cousins, as they shared a house with the Grows (fig. 5).⁸ Again, the arrangement of the hairwork portraits, with the mother and father at the top of the page and their children below, suggests a genealogical record, albeit an incomplete one.

Another nineteenth-century Vermont family, the Garvins, recorded their members in a mass-produced family register showing the parents listed above the children (fig. 6). This lithograph includes illustrations of a typical white family: mother, father, son, and daughter. In one vignette, the dutiful mother tends to her children, and in another, she gazes at her husband, who does not look back at her. This imagery further demonstrates the patriarchal nature of genealogical practice, as described by Wulf. This patriarchal family record-keeping imagery appears in popular media too: an 1875 print after Winslow Homer from Harper’s Bazar shows a family in the act of writing down their history. The bearded white man records a new addition to the family lying in a cradle at his feet in a large book, his wife dutifully holding the ink pot steady as he makes his marks while the man’s ancestor watches from a painting above (fig. 7).⁹ Herein lies the tension that Grow’s album produces. Unlike the Garvin register or the Harper’s print, this woman does not just play a supporting role in providing or recording a family image. Grow is the maker of her album’s portraits, and the inscriber of her family’s names.

Most early professional hairwork makers were white, middle-class men trained as jewelers or metalworkers who fulfilled commissions to produce brooches, pocket watch chains, and other wearable articles (fig. 8).¹⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, some women produced hairwork in their own homes, effectively cutting out the middleman to make objects directly from their family members’ hair. Interested crafters could reference a variety of texts, including Mark Campbell’s Self-instructor in the Art of Hair Work (1867) and articles in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine. Campbell claims his book “will prove an indispensable adjunct to every lady's toilet table.”¹¹ Likewise, Godey’s assures “the fair reader” need not “be alarmed…I do not intend to frighten her with a long list of expensive machinery and tools.” Instead, she could use tools common in textile crafts, such as scissors and knitting needles.¹² It is hard to know if Grow would have consulted sources like these, as the images in both of these texts look quite different from the objects she produced, and both were published decades after the initial date in her book. Still, these sources show how middle-class women learned this distinctly feminine-coded craft.

Grow would likely have seen her album’s connections to other domestic arts; she even included a recipe for madder root fabric dye, which could be used for textiles, in the back of her book (fig. 9). This further links her hair album with so-called “women’s work,” or those domestic crafts long undervalued in art criticism and scholarship.¹³ Grow was probably also intimately aware of hair as an expression of gender, which was integral to the nineteenth-century white woman’s image-fashioning, as evidenced in period advice guides.¹⁴ Domestic labor and hair were markers of feminine identity, and hairwork combined both of these forms of gender expression. Thus, it is even more noteworthy that Grow and other domestic hairworkers used the craft to depict not only themselves but also their female and male relatives. One wonders if the young artist saw irony in her use of hair, so often employed to display a woman’s status, to depict a brother or cousin instead.

Writing about salvage arts, feminist scholar Elaine Hedges argues, “in seeking to understand more fully the everyday lives of nineteenth-century women, we must piece together scraps as they once did.”¹⁶ The archive does not preserve the full story of Grow’s life, nor that of her family. The traces of the Grows I have managed to find are owed to the genealogical connections revealed in Lucy’s pages. She pieced together her family and community members’ hair in her books, and we can now learn about their lives through her work. As I have made clear, these were not neutral or entirely innocent practices: in creating these hair portraits, Grow promoted a family history that, while subversive in some ways, fit firmly within white, patriarchal systems. Albums like hers provide tremendous potential for further considerations of collaboration, women’s work, and the many other meanings woven into hairwork. As I have argued, they also expand our views of gender and family image-fashioning in the nineteenth-century United States.

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Victoria Kenyon is a Curatorial Track doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the history of religion and the supernatural in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art, and she is especially fond of exploring the macabre in visual and material culture.

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1. The original date listed for this album in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library records was c. 1820, but the 1870 census record shows that Lucy (by that time married and with two children) was born in 1822. In the album, she notes her age is 17. U.S. Census Bureau, “1870 United States Federal Census,” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, accessed through Ancestry, images reproduced by FamilySearch.

2. See Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

3. Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (Mar. 2001): 61; Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 13; Sheumaker, Love Entwined.

4. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 58-60.

5. Heather Wolfe, “Where do Family Trees Come From?,” Folger Shakespeare Library, February 21, 2014. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/where-do-family-trees-come-from/.

6. Karin Wulf, “Bible, King, and Common Law: Genealogical Literacies and Family History Practices in British America,” Early American Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 482-86.

7. Emily Thornwell, The Lady’s Guide to Complete Etiquette in Manners, Dress and Conversation, in the Family, in Company, at the Pianoforte, the Tables, in the Street, and in Gentlemen’s Society. Also a Useful Instructor in Letter Writing, Toilet Preparations, Fancy Needlework, Millinery, Dressmaking, Care of Wardrobe, the Hair, Teeth, Hands, Lips, Complexion, Etc. (Madison, WI: T.T. Rustone, 1887), 33-36.

8. U.S. Census Bureau, “1860 United States Federal Census,” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, accessed through Ancestry, images reproduced by FamilySearch.

9. Though outside the scope of my analysis here, Shawn Michelle Smith’s interrogation of racial family imagery is essential to my reading of this image: “‘Baby’s Picture is Always Treasured’: Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 197-220.

10. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, 34-35.

11. Mark Campbell, Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work, Dressing Hair, Making Curls, Switches, Braids, and Hair Jewelry of Every Description: Compiled from Original Designs and the Latest Parisian Patterns (New York: M. Campbell, 1867), 6.

12. “The Art of Ornamental Hairwork,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine 58 (February-April, 1859): 153.

13. See Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976).

14. Thornwell, Lady’s Guide to Complete Etiquette, 33-36.

15. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, 26.

16. Elaine Hedges, “The Nineteenth-Century Diarist and Her Quilts,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 298.

Cut With the Tailor Scissors: Hannah Höch’s Textile Designs and the Development of Photomontage

by Iris Giannakopoulou

Hannah Höch (1889–1978) is best known for her participation in the Berlin Dada movement and her pioneering works of photomontage, collages made mostly or entirely from photographic reproductions. Her piece Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, exhibited in the First International Dada Fair at the Otto Burchard Gallery in Berlin in 1920, stands as one of the most iconic images of this European avant-garde movement (fig. 1). Emphasizing her diverse background in handicrafts and the applied arts and her unique position as the only female member of the group, this essay demonstrates the influence of textile design on Höch’s photomontage practice. In doing so, it challenges prevailing modernist narratives of the late 1910s and early 1920s surrounding the development of the medium in association with male artists and with disruptive and virile connotations.

During the mid-1960s, American art critic and curator William Rubin called the development of photomontage “the most significant contribution” of the Berlin Dada and ascribed its invention to the group’s founding member Raul Haussman.¹ The artist, however, was not “the first Berliner to hit upon the photomontage” as Rubin contended, or at least not the only Berliner.² In fact, both Haussman and Höch, a couple at the time, discovered the powerful potential of photomontage during a summer trip to the island of Usedom in the Baltic Sea in 1918. There, the two came across a popular type of engraving at local homes and businesses, which involved collaging photographic portrait heads of local men who were away at war onto found torsos. These mementos had a distinct visual impact on the two artists who were already familiar with the photocollage posters of fellow Berlin Dada members John Heartfield and George Grosz.³ Since 1916, Heartfield and Grosz had been experimenting with collages made from photographic reproductions. Their works, however, were primarily geared towards creating provocative political statements and lacked the artistic qualities of these popular pictures. Upon their return to Berlin, Haussman and Höch began experimenting with the medium by clipping photographs from a variety of illustrated sources and mixing them to create new visual imagery that, as Haussman would later recall, “attacked the political events of the day with biting sarcasm.”⁴

Höch was especially well-equipped when it came to harnessing the potential of the emerging medium. Unlike Haussman, who was formally trained in sculpture and painting, Höch came from the world of crafts. Before the war, she studied glass design and calligraphy at the Charlottenburg School of Applied Arts in Berlin, while in 1915 she transferred to the graphic and book arts program of the State Museum of Applied Arts. During her training, Höch begun to focus on embroidery, a craft that, as a woman, she had likely cultivated from a young age; she earned recognition for at least two designs that were subsequently featured in the Darmstadt needlework journal Stickerei- und Spitzen-Rundschau (Embroidery and Lace Review). With her training in graphic design and experience with embroidery, Höch secured a part-time position at Ullstein Verlag, one of Germany’s largest interwar-era publishing houses.⁵ Between 1916 and 1926, Höch worked three days a week at the pattern division of Ullstein (fig. 2). In this position, she was responsible for designing patterns for knitting, crocheting, and embroidering, and she created advertising vignettes and typographic layouts for magazines such as Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman) (fig. 3). Höch’s responsibilities extended beyond design: she also oversaw the fabrication of these patterns, utilizing a range of techniques including cutwork, drawn- and pulled-threadwork, needle-lace, darned-filet, and embroidery.

This diverse background equipped Höch with a wide range of technical and artistic skills that she was able to apply when creating her photomontages. Her experience in book and graphic design honed her ability to organize visual elements, text, and images into cohesive compositions within a limited space, effectively conveying visual messages. For instance, in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, the deliberate placement of a map depicting European countries that granted women voting rights at the bottom-right corner of the piece—the location usually reserved for the artist’s signature—subverts layout conventions, delivering a clear political statement about women’s empowerment. At the same time, Höch’s special attention to detail and careful consideration of color and texture can be attributed to her experience with embroidery, while the particular emphasis she puts on the outlines of her ‘cutout’ silhouettes is reminiscent of the figures in textile pattern designs as vividly seen in her 1925 piece Sadness (fig. 4). In this photomontage, a hybrid black and white figure occupies the center of the composition, which otherwise consists of an abstract background and a black border. Here, Höch assembles an intricate female figure that invokes some sort of deity and presents it to us on a pedestal, as if on display.

Höch’s photomontages owe greatly to her work with handicraft and textile design and her involvement in the commercial and publishing world of Ullstein, which constitutes part of the technical, material, and formal ecology of her artistic work. As a designer at Ullstein, Höch enjoyed easy access to a wealth of resources, including multiple copies of sewing and handiwork patterns produced by the company, as well as a vast array of illustrated magazines and other printed material. She incorporated these materials, along with recycled textile items, printed papers, and photographic reproductions sourced from various magazines—that she meticulously organized in scrapbooks—in her first attempts with collage and photomontage from as early as 1919. For instance, needle-lace patterns appear in her 1919 collage White Form while diagrams of filet, a kind of net (or grid) into which a design is darned, serve as a background in Tailor’s Flower (1920), as well as her 1921 piece, On a Tulle Net Ground (fig. 5). Many of the media sources that Höch uses in her photomontages come from Ullstein publications such as BIZ and Die Dame. This is especially evident in her use of BIZ material in her Dada pieces Cut with the Kitchen Knife Heads of State (1918-1920), or Dada Panorama (1919) (see fig. 1).

The interrelation between Höch’s textile designs and her photomontage work extends beyond their technical and material analogies, making her work explicitly different from that of her male colleagues. Referencing Kay Klein Kallos’s 1994 dissertation on the relationship between design and the avant-garde in the work of Hannah Höch, art historian Maria Makela draws attention to the formal affinity between “Höch’s diagrams for darned filet and needle lace” and “the compositional structure of her neatly formatted collages and photomontages, which are basically two-dimensional and usually arranged on a vertical-horizontal grid” (fig. 6).⁶ To this analysis, one can add other matters of artistic form that are associated with textile design, such as the dynamic interplay of positive and negative forms, as well as the intricate relationship between background and foreground that characterize her photomontages (fig. 7). Admittedly, Höch’s work is more “surface-oriented,” more “strongly patterned,” and more “rigorously structured” than that of her male Dada colleagues, who took a more a violent, destructive, and chaotic approach to their photomontages and whose assemblages exude a sense of agitation and anti-coherence.⁷ The profound importance of textiles for Höch surfaces prominently in My House-Sayings, a farewell piece she made in 1922, following her separation from Haussman and withdrawal from Dada. Inspired by the German tradition of guestbooks in which visitors could leave wishes and sayings upon departing from one’s house, this complex and multilayered photomontage combines in a constructivist grid, various Dada emblems and sayings by Dadaists and other like-minded writers, along with carefully selected clips of photographs—including her own—and several pieces of textile designs that Höch places at the center of the composition.

While at Ullstein, Höch made a design for the cover of one of its pattern publications. Her sketch depicts the figure of a little girl with a bow on her hair holding a relatively enormous pair of tailor scissors. The girl sits atop of a sphere, which the faded longitude and latitude pencil-lines suggest is not a ball of yarn, but the globe. Its surface is layered with patterns of clothing “which appear like continents waiting to be sewn together,” as Max Boersma explains, while “the word listed beside them—einreihen [to line up]—carries textile, orderly, and militaristic associations.”⁸ In his interpretation, the sketch “can suggest the gathering of fabric along a line during the process of stitching, as well as the act of getting in line or joining ranks.”⁹ However, juxtaposed with the Communist emblem of the hammer and sickle, her sketch evokes another layer of meaning. In a manner analogous to the aspirations of communist proletarian solidarity among peasants and workers seeking to change the world, Höch’s symbol is suggestive of a constructive unity between the spheres of art and crafts as a means of changing the world. For Höch’s part, it seems like there was no contradiction between these two worlds. Such reading, however, disturbs the carefully crafted anti-art, anti-establishment, and anti-aesthetic myth of the Dada revolt. “From the outset, Höch’s photomontage aesthetic was deeply rooted in design traditions, and it was perhaps this as much as anything that led many to discount her work,” insists Makela, even the Dadaists themselves.¹⁰ The distinct and multifaceted nature of her artistic output make Höch resistant to easy labels and categorizations, but it might be precisely this radical resistance that makes Hannah Höch even more quintessentially ‘Dada.’

Höch’s ‘cutting with the tailor scissors’ begets a re-evaluation of the historiographic ‘cuts’ historians perform within their own historical montages. In his seminal theory of the avant-garde, Peter Bürger defines the historical emergence of the avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century as a break in the history of art and a violent rupture with the Institution Art, or the framework within which an artwork is produced and received.¹¹ The narrative of Dada’s dismantling of “the cult of art” and the tradition of newness associated with it, as provocative and alluring as it is, curtails our understanding of the complexity and variety of responses that artists gave to the rise of modern industrial capitalism and eschew the multifaceted and often ambivalent ways in which the avant-garde movements participated in ‘the modern life.’ Weaving a genealogy that links the development of photomontage medium to the domestic arts and clothing reform, to style and fashion, to popular magazines and mass-advertisement, and beyond, to women’s pastimes and feminist activism, Höch’s artistic work offers valuable and nuanced insights into these issues. “Preferring to accept the evidence of hand cutting over the creation of seamless illusion,” Höch and her tailor scissors invite a closer look into the stitches, the threads, and the critical scraps that are often cut out in our historical montages.¹²

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Iris Giannakopoulou is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Yale University where she studies the relationship between architecture and politics in the postwar period. Her dissertation examines how the censorious climate of the early Cold War years impacted the practice, discourse, and overall culture of architecture in the United States. Her previous academic work involves spatial histories of radicalism in modern architectural design and urban planning practices, as well as the historical avant-garde movements’ significance in shaping individual and collective political possibilities. She holds a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (2014) where she is a licensed architect, and a Master of Science Degree in Architecture Design as a Fulbright Scholar from the MIT School of Architecture (2018).

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1. William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 42.

2. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage, 42.

3. Maria Makela, “By Design: The early work of Hannah Höch in context,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, ed. Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, Carolyn Lanchner (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996), 59. In her essay “A few words on photomontage,” Höch refers to the “first instances of this form, i.e. the cutting and rejoining of photos or parts of photos,” which, among others, may be found “in the fading, curious pictures representing this or that great-uncle as a military uniform with a pasted-on head. In those days the head of a person was simply glued onto a pre-printed musketeer.” Höch, “Několik poznámek o fotomontáži,” Stredisko 4, no. 1. (April 1934), unpaginated; translated by Jitka Salaguarda as “A Few Words on Photomontage” and reprinted in Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 219–20.

4. Raoul Hausmann, “Photomontage,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, trans. Joel Agee (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 178.

5. Ullstein Verlag’s portfolio included mass-circulation periodicals such as the Berliner Morgenpost (Berlin Morning Post), BZ am Mittag (Berlin Newspaper at Noon), the weekly Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper), the liberal newspaper Vossische Zeitung, and a number of smaller circulation magazines.

6. Makela, “By Design,” 62. Also see, Kay Klein Kallos, “A Woman’s Revolution: The Relationship between Design and the Avant-Garde in the Work of Hannah Höch 1912-1922,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1994).

7. Makela, 62.

8. Max Boersma, “Global Patterns: Hannah Höch, Interwar Abstraction, and the Weimar Inflation Crisis,” Grey Room, no 91 (Spring 2023): 18.

9. Boersma, “Global Patterns,” 18.

10. Makela, “By Design,” 62. John Heartfield and George Grosz are said to have opposed her inclusion in the First International Dada Fair of 1920 and succumbed only after Raoul Hausmann threatened to withdraw his own work from the exhibition. Furthermore, in their memoirs, Höch mentioned her only in passing or omitted reference altogether. See, Richard Hülsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (1969), ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); George Grosz, George Grosz: An Autobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

11. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

12. Peter Boswell, et al., The photomontages of Hannah Höch, 2.