Jane Kahan’s show within a show, UNEXPECTED PICASSO, was a great success at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Featuring unexpected media like tapestries and ceramics as well as a surprising collection of the absolute best of Picasso’s rare linocuts, the presentation wowed savvy opening nighters at the Sloan Kettering Benefit party as well as crowds throughout the week.

Perhaps the most unexpected Picasso of all was contemporary painter Louis Boudreault’s painting of Picasso as an eleven year old boy. The artist is known for portraits of famous people as children.

For the second year, the Jane Kahan Gallery exhibited at ART ANTIQUES LONDON.  This artfair, held in a custom-built pavilion on the site of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, brings together some of the top dealers and the most discriminating collectors in the world.  This year Jane Kahan and gallery director Charles Mathes presented modern tapestries and ceramics by Picasso, Chagall, paintings by Jean Dufy and Istvan Sandorfi, goauches by Arlene Graston and other masterworks.

Jane Kahan Gallery Director Charles Mathes will lecture May 1, 2011, at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee on the Chagall Tapestries of Yvette Cauquil-Prince.

Cauquil-Prince, a Belgian-born weaver who died in 2005, created tapestries with many famous artists, but it was her collaborations with Marc Chagall that were the high points of her career, both professionally and personally.  After Chagall’s death in 1984 she continued to interpret his work in the medium of tapestry in the same spirit as when he was alive.  She did so with the blessing of Chagall’s family to whom she remained close.

Yvette Cauquil-Prince’s tapestries of Chagall, Picasso, Max Ernst, Klee, Leger, Matta and others have been exhibited in museums throughout the world.

In 1973 the Jewish Museum Milwaukee commissioned Chagall to create a tapestry.  The resulting monumental work, Jeremiah, executed by Yvette Cauquil-Prince, was the first Chagall tapestry in America.

Charles Mathes began his career at Rodgers & Hammerstein, where he ran the organization that licensed the performance rights to classic American musicals to theatre companies throughout the world.  Since 1993 he has been Director of the Jane Kahan Gallery.  He is a long-time member of the Appraisers Association of America and the author of seven books including Treasures of American Museums and a series of art and antique-related mystery novels.

A rare Jean Dubuffet fine art carpet is featured in the exhibition GLORIA F. ROSS: Rebirth of Modern Tapestry, Febuary 15 – March 25, 2011 at Jane Kahan Fine Art.

“Tapis No. 2” was a collaboration that brought together some of the leading forces in the 20^th century art, design, and decorative worlds: Jean Dubuffet, the modern artist; Gloria Ross, the tapestry éditeur; Pace Gallery, and the Edward Fields carpet company.

Dubuffet, Jean "Tapis No. 2"

Jean Dubuffet played an essential role in the postwar literary and artistic avant-garde art scene, both in his native France and worldwide.  With works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou, among many others, Dubuffet is considered a master of the modern art world with his vast, eclectic oeuvre and rebellious approach to art.  He believed in taking art off of the canvas, and experimented in virtually every medium.  Major retrospectives of Dubuffet’s works have been held at numerous major museums, including the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art in New York, London’s Tate Gallery, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Dubuffet worked in “cycles,” exploring a style, theme, or image extensively until moving on to his next source of inspiration. “Tapis No. 2” was produced during his “Hourloupe” period, one of his longest cycles, spanning over 12 years.  It is characterized by the use of the emotionless colors of red, white, and blue, punctuated with black lines.  It embodies many of Dubuffet’s strongest ideals about art: his concern with two-dimensionality, a sense of commonality and the mundane, and the creation of work that derives from the subconscious, free from cluttered thoughts and oppressive cultural or societal ideals that can impede artistic expression.

Rare Dubuffet Carpet - Gloria F. Ross

Gloria Ross, the second collaborator on this rare and monumental piece, was instrumental in the revival of Aubusson tapestry making.  She brought together famous artists and Aubusson weavers, and under her guidance hundreds of modern master tapestries came to fruition.  In a few exceptional cases, Ross also collaborated with artists and carpet makers to create modern works in that medium; Dubuffet is the most well known among that small group of artists who created carpets with Ross.

“Tapis No. 2” was made by the Edward Fields company, carpet makers who are perhaps the most well-known in the design industry.   Established in 1935, Fields has garnered an outstanding reputation for fine craftsmanship, quality, and beauty.   They are synonymous with both the decorative and the artistic, combining a craftsman-like sensibility in the tufting process with an artistic eye for splendor and uniqueness.  Edward Fields carpets appear in many important sites, including the White House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.

The carpet was published by Pace Editions in New York.  Pace was Dubuffet’s art dealer and one of the foremost contemporary galleries of the 20^th Century.  Another carpet from this edition was part of the IBM corporation art collection.