Tadek Beutlich was a seminal figure in the mid 20th-century reinvention of craft weaving as an art form. A new show at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in East Sussex will be the first survey in more than 25 years of his groundbreaking work both as a textile artist and a printmaker.
The exhibition will include large works woven at Gospels, Beutlich’s Ditchling studio between 1967 and 1974, with free-standing off-loom pieces and experimental relief prints made using tree sections, Lycra and foam rubber.
Among the most important pieces will be Dream Revealed (1968), a 2.5m-high hanging shroud of unspun jute, mohair and horsehair. Currently under restoration—dust and insect damage are a conservation headache for textile art—it has not been seen in public since 1969.
Tadek Beautlich’s 2.5m-high shroud Dream Revealed (1969) © Tadek Beautlich
Born in Poland in 1922 to a German father and a Polish mother, Beutlich was demobbed in Britain in 1946 after serving on both sides in the Second World War (first as a German army conscript and then in the Polish Corps of the British army). A pre-war art student in Dresden, he resumed his studies in London, beginning at the Sir John Cass Technical Institute before turning to textiles at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, where he also taught for more than 20 years.
Ditchling, a pretty village with easy connections to London and to the Newhaven ferry port for France, has attracted artists ever since Eric Gill set up his craft guild there in the 1920s. Among the earliest arrivals was Ethel Mairet, a champion of vegetal dyes and hand-loom weaving. Beutlich’s Camberwell tutor Barbara Sawyer introduced him to Mairet, and later he bought Gospels, Mairet’s home and studio, after her death. Beutlich worked there for seven years before moving on, first to Spain and then back to Felixstowe, in Suffolk, where he died in 2011.
Beutlich earned international recognition for pioneering original techniques and materials. “He was a tremendous innovator, always experimenting, driven by a fine art approach,” says the Ditchling Museum’s director, Steph Fuller. “There’s always been a hard core of fans, and there’s been a tremendous legacy of contemporary makers who were taught by him. Within the textile field his work is well known but he’s not so visible in the wider art world. Now that textiles are being taken more seriously as an artistic medium, we’re hoping this exhibition will change that.”
• Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, 18 January-22 June