'From the Vault: Collecting Tapestries at the Worcester Art Museum' Review: Woven Worlds
Striking pictorial works demonstrate the importance, and beauty, of textiles across cultures and time.

Worcester, Mass.

Sumptuous, large, heavy and used in centuries past to warm the walls of Europe's great stone castles and cathedrals, tapestries conjure a long-ago world. They tell expansive tales of courtly life, love, war, myth and more in copious details and rich colors. But these once-hardy specimens, made to last many lifetimes, are sensitive to light, temperature and gravity. Often very fragile, they need to rest, lest their condition worsen. Plus, they demand enormous spaces. They spend a lot of time rolled up in storage.

"From the Vault: Collecting Tapestries at the Worcester Art Museum" is thus an occasion. For the first time in decades—and in some cases for the first time ever—treasures from the museum's noteworthy holdings are on view: 11 full-scale pictorial tapestries from Europe, 19 fragments of Coptic, Pre-Columbian and European tapestries, and one contemporary American piece. Curated by the museum's Delaney Keenan and on view through July 27, the exhibit is an attractive one, though the didactics are understandably keyed to local connections. (The catalog, which contains more art-historical information about them and others not on view, is a welcome supplement.)

"The Last Judgment"

At 26 feet long and 12 feet tall, "The Last Judgment" (c. 1500) rightly serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition, which is hung in one large gallery. It is part of a set that over the years was split up and sold separately; it's the last of 10 panels probably made in Brussels (the pre-eminent center of tapestry-weaving for centuries) titled "The Story of the Redemption of Mankind." (Both the Louvre in Paris and the Palazzo Venezia in Rome own a "Last Judgment.") For 55 years, until 1990, it hung as a popular attraction in the museum's Renaissance Court.

Now, after rejuvenating treatment in Belgium, this religious scene, with more than 100 figures woven in wool and silk threads, looks splendid. Probably designed by Colijn de Coter, an artist known for creating altarpieces, it follows traditional iconography, seating Christ, in a red robe, at the center, surrounded by his apostles, Mary and St. John the Baptist. Nearby, angels with trumpets summon the dead. Below, humanity is separated into those who've been saved on the left and those damned to hell on the right. Benevolent angels crown several of the redeemed; the sinful confront avenging angels and monsters; personified virtues, like mercy, and vices, like pride, are interspersed within the crowd. Its pure pageantry is sure to enthrall.

Several strikingly different weavings are presented as well. The unpolished figures in three 17th-century pieces from rural Norway seem like folk art, and decades ago they were earmarked for a children's art show. They, too, depict religious themes—stories of "The Wise and Foolish Virgins," the "Adoration of the Magi," and the "Feast of Herod and the Decapitation of St. John," which is damaged, missing a large piece. Their weave is visibly coarser, but they are charming.

The 20th-century "Harvest Time" (1937), made in France by Jean Lurçat, who revived tapestries there, provides a completely different aesthetic. The colors are somber (mostly blues and neutrals), and the details are comparatively few. Harvest was a popular theme of older weavings, usually acclaiming abundance, but here the images reflect Lurçat's social realism. His design honors laborers with sunken eyes and grim outlooks. While Lurçat continued the classic practice of incorporating largely vegetal borders, his tapestry's spirit is more akin to Jean-François Millet's sympathetic farmhand paintings.

Lurcat's "Harvest Time"

Diedrick Brackens's "dream disk" (2024) departs even further. Much smaller in scale, and modern in its choice of colors like turquoise, it has the simplest narrative and least detail of any pictorial work here. A surrealistic image of a black man's torso and a fishtail, "dream disk" relates to the artist's African-American, queer identity. But it's jarring. It feels like the obligatory contemporary piece in an exhibit of older art, and the artist and audience would have been better served if it were displayed with other contemporary tapestries.

Visitors may well gravitate toward the more complicated older works anyway. "Keys Being Offered to a Knight" (15th century) is a mystery: Although the symbolic passage of keys was common then, no one has identified the characters, despite the inclusion of two coats of arms. Its lovely millefleur ground is dense with identifiable plants, and the background includes castles and a wide-eyed owl. "Landscape With Two Herons" (17th century), a "greenery tapestry," is simpler, but also loaded with vegetal elements, such as the chrysanthemums that hint at the flourishing Dutch-Asia trade of the period.

"Keys" detail

"Godfrey of Bouillon" (c. 1500) and "Titus Receiving Tribute from Tyre" (1500s), one of six panels from "The Wars of Flavius Titus" owned by the museum (and the one in best condition), also offer narratives that allow visitors to imagine lost times. Two Flemish panels (c. 1475) from the 11-part "Trojan War," a highly desirable series believed to have been woven six times to satisfy demands from Europe's kings and dukes, are among the 17 surviving pieces around the world.

"From the Vault: Collecting Tapestries at the Worcester Art Museum" is an engaging exhibition, likely to please visitors. Equally important, perhaps it will inspire other museums with tapestry collections to pull their woven splendors out of storage and onto their gallery walls.

From the Vault: Collecting Tapestries at the Worcester Art Museum

Worcester Art Museum, through July 27