Art Deco Rugs - Home decor
by Allan Arthur, Cyberrug.com
Oriental rugs are a fashion statement for the home.
Designs and color ways respond to pressures in different markets,
depending on what the fashion demanded. What's hot on the runways of Paris
and New York, often eventually progresses into fabrics for the home for
use in draperies, wall paper, and furniture coverings. Once in use in
fabrics for the home, the next logical step is to create floor coverings
that will coordinate with these fabrics. The bold colors and stream line
designs of the art deco period, soon gave rise to what we now know of
today as the Art Deco rug.
Famous designers in Europe began to create floor coverings
in the bold designs needed to coordinate with the trends of the day. But
labor costs in the west for hand made rugs, produced an end product that
was very expensive to the consumer. In the late 19th Century, the Oriental
rug industry in Northern China grew tremendously. Hundreds of hand
knotting carpet "factories" cranked out traditional Chinese rugs
for export throughout the world. The production was high, and the labor
was inexpensive. Western entrepreneurs and designers turned to Northern
China to take advantage of the inexpensive labor. Experimentation with
color certainly began sometime early in the 19th Century. By the 1920's,
manufacturers were combining traditional Chinese motifs with new and
untraditional color combinations. This created a truly unique type of rug.
The traditional blues, yellows, reds, and ivory of the Chinese rugs, were
replaced by wild and bold colors of greens, purples, fuchsias, and gold.
You will find exotic colors on my site such as mango red, sea foam green,
turquoise, periwinkle blue, and tangerine gold. Favorite Chinese figures
were kept, such as hanging lanterns, pagodas, curved bridges, and
elaborate vases. But these designs were enlarged and given more prominence
in the rug, often replacing the quiet symmetry of the 
Chinese designs with
abstract and asymmetrical patterns. Bamboo, vines, trees, lotus flowers,
and Chinese flowering plants became stylized splashes of color that
meandered across the field of the rug, and crossed from field to border,
and back again. Probably offending the Chinese sense of order, and
replacing the neatly designed borders that framed older Chinese rugs.
Sometimes large unidirectional outdoor garden designs were created.
Dragons, phoenix birds, and butterflies still graced the landscapes, but
splayed across the rug and the corners of a rug in what I like to call an
Egyptian Revival style. Occasionally, the Chinese motifs were discarded
all together, and strictly geometric
designs were used. These rugs with no Chinese influence in design are
probably the most rare.
The earliest famous manufacturer of these rugs in China
was actually a woman, the American Helen Fette. While working for the
Methodist Mission school, she first began by selling a few rugs to raise
money for Chinese famine relief during the famine of 1920. Around 1921,
she partnered with a Chinese rug manufacturer named Li Meng Shu to form
the Fette-Li Company. The Fette-Li Company eventually became the largest
producer of Chinese rugs in the 1920's-30's in the Peking area. In Peking
area rugs, the foundation threads, called the warp, lie side by side. This
gives the rug a more floppy handle. Early Fette rugs have this same
construction. However, if the knot is turned slightly, they can be packed
tighter, resulting in what we call a stiffer "handle". Most
Fette rugs have this type of weave.
The most famous maker of Chinese Deco rugs by far though,
was the American Walter Nichols. He is so well known, that many people
generically refer to all Chinese Deco rugs as Nichols Rugs. He was born in
New York City around 1885. Walter Nichols began his career in China as a
wool grader about 1920. In 1924, he started his production of Nichols
Chinese Rugs in the port city of Tientsin (Tianjin) in Northern China.
Tientsin area rugs have a different construction than that of Peking.
While weaving the rug, the knots are turned completely sideways. This way
twice as many knots can be tightly packed into the same space. This
creates a densely made carpet with a smooth finished back with a very
stiff handle. Combining this weaving technique with his knowledge of high
grade wools, the "Nichols Chinese Super Rug" was born. Thick
plush wool rugs like nothing before.
The success of Nichols rugs drove others to copy his
production. Remember that there were hundreds of hand made carpet
"factories" in Northern China. But even Fette and Nichols
"borrowed" designs from each other, and we sometimes see the
same design made with the two different constructions. Both Fette and
Nichols marked their rugs with their name. Normally with a small 3 inch
square piece of fabric sewn into one of the corners on the back. The tags
are almost always gone because of abrasion and washing, but also because
inside the tag, that worked like a pouch, the companies placed colored
wool tufts of all the colors used in the rug. People would rip off the
tags to get to the color samples, so they could use them to shop for
fabrics. Nichols also stamped his rugs along the white cotton fringe
" MADE IN CHINA BY NICHOLS". The cotton fringe wears
faster than the wool pile and is often worn away. I have only seen this
stamp on rugs I thought to be from the 1930's and later. It is not clear
yet if Nichols stamped his rugs in the 1920's. The only way we know that a
rug was made by a specific company is if it still has it's tag or stamp. I
am always interested in photos of any rugs that still have their stamps or
tags, and copies of the tag, so that I can document rugs that can be
attributed to specific companies.
As far as dating a Deco rug, there are no hard and fast
rules. But here are some generalities. Earlier experimental pieces before
1920, were probably woven closer to the traditional Chinese format in the
floppy Peking weave. However, there was some production in Tientsin. I
suspect they would have had colors that responded to the the richly
colored silks and velvets of the Victorian period. Since Nichols did not
start his business until 1924, it is certainly not correct to refer to any
of these rugs as "Nichols Rugs".
In
general, by the 1930's, the American
market wanted simpler
floral designs in more pastel or lighter colors. The borders were also
dropped, and the "corner floral" design became popular. In the
1940's, deeper richer colors became popular again, but for the most part,
the simple corner Floral designs remained. Also in the 1940's, more French
Floral designs became popular. The finished edge of a rug along the sides
is called the selvage. It is done by the weaver while the rug is on the
loom. Early Chinese rugs have a white cotton selvage. By the 1930's and
1940's, many rugs were finished with a colored wool selvage that matched
the wool pile along the edge of the rug. Early Chinese rugs are not
carved. They might be "incised" along the edge of designs
though. By the 1940's, deep thick carving became popular, and these rugs
more closely resemble Chinese rugs from the 1980's. Production was
somewhat slowed by Japan's Occupation of Northern China in the early
1940's. So most of the production happened in the economic boom of the
1920's, slowed some for the Great Depression, and then picked up again in
the 30's until WWII. By 1949, the revolution in China was complete, and
China was for the most part closed to the West. So not as much production
happened in the 1940's. I can think of no reason that Chinese rugs would
have been made again in Western designs until President Nixon
reestablished diplomatic relations with the Chinese. I must admit though
that I am not sure what European countries may have traded with China in
the 1950's and 60's, but none that I know of. Certainly, some rugs must
have been available in Hong Kong, but for the most part, 1948 was the end
of Chinese Art Deco rug production.
So Chinese Art Deco rugs were made from about 1910 to the
late 1940's. They were made in response to specific demands in the home
fashion market and filled a specific niche. Anyone that has period fabrics
on their Art Deco furniture, or wall paper on there walls from the 1920's
and 30's, will know why these rugs were so popular.
Allan Arthur
Sources:
"In Search of Walter Nichols" by Elizabeth Bogen,
1996, Museum Books, inc.
"Chinese Rugs: The Fette-Li Company" by Margaret
Setton, 1991, Oriental Rug Review
Republished in a new layout 4 October 2005. Copyright to this article
and images belongs to Allan Arthur. The article was first time published at
Cyberrug.com.
More Cyberrug links: Original
Nichols' pamphlet, Tags
and stamps on Art Deco rugs
