Rowena Easton on the restless creativity of Tadek Beutlich (1922 – 2011)

‘My trouble is that I have so many ideas. Every time I start something I think about how it could be done differently – my wife tells me that I’ve got the brain of a grasshopper.’

When I look at the vast range of works produced by visionary textile artist Tadek Beutlich, over his lifetime, it doesn’t just conjure always-busy fingers, it reveals a mind, and a body, that was constantly on the move. Perhaps I can explain his restlessness using the language of weaving: if 20th-century history is the warp (the background), then it’s no wonder Beutlich’s weft was prone to flight… off the loom in search of new forms and alternative ways of seeing.

Beutlich was born in Lwówek, Poland, in 1922, to comfortably off parents. But, when he was eight, financial problems forced the family to move to Poznan. There he earned a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts and began training in ceramics, stained glass, sculpture and weaving. The Nazi invasion of 1939 forced the next rupture. Being a Pole of German origin, Beutlich was made a German national and he transferred to Dresden Art Academy.

In 1941 the young art student was drafted into the army and sent to the Eastern Front. Then on to Italy, where he was captured by the Allies. Another shift: because he strongly identified as Polish, he was released from the POW camp into the Second Polish Corps – to fight for the Allies.

Beutlich’s early drawings of circus performers were made while waiting for demobilisation, during 1945-46, in Rome. For several months he studied at Rome’s Royal Academy of Art and travelled round Italy visiting museums. Already that restless creativity is apparent: his line loops from character to character, threading each scene together.

He left Rome for London in the late 40s to study painting and drawing, taking up a government grant offered to ex-servicemen. An exhibition of French tapestries at the V&A inspired him to transfer to textiles. But it was Ethel Mairet (1872–1952) who had the most profound artistic impact. During a visit to Gospels, her home-workshop in Ditchling, he was captivated by her responsive, imaginative approach to weaving colour and texture.

Over the next decade or so, Beutlich made Modernist and Polish folk art- inspired flat-weave tapestries in wool and cotton. Then, in 1967, Mairet’s death offered an opportunity. He bought Gospels for its huge studios, then set about creating the extraordinary monumental woven constructions that shifted his textiles into the sculptural realm.

Sisal, jute, mohair, horsehair, charred wood, acetate, X-ray film… anything might find its way into his spectacular open-weave hangings. Like his most celebrated examples – one of which, the recently restored eight-foot-tall Dream Revealed (1968), is now on show at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft for the first time in 55 years – they are characterised by viscerally undulating and twisted forms. This is reflected in the organic quality of the sketch below.

While the Ditchling workshops gave Beutlich freedom of scale, he felt constrained by having to run his studio as a commercial enterprise; the distractions imposed by having to oversee assistants, to deal with clients and take part in exhibitions. In 1974, at the peak of his career, he sold Gospels and moved to Spain, leaving behind staff, equipment and looms, to focus on making directly with his own hands, a technique he called ‘free warp tapestry’. Here, having gifted himself the freedom to experiment, new free-standing forms emerged, like living organisms, woven using the surrounding esparto grass and wrapped with vivid acrylic wools from the local market.

The natural world continued to inspire Beutlich on his return to England (this time Folkestone) in 1980, and he regularly visited Spain, but it wasn’t long before strange hominal forms began to intrude. He sketched in the evenings, often in front of the television, which, I imagine, served as a medium through which his mind could access long-buried feelings or grasp fugitive images. Faces and figures materialised from repetitive, compulsive mark-making in biro and ink, their anatomy malleable, elastic, threaded together… devouring. Only large liquid eyes retain any sense of self.

He translated these anguished images into the small sculptures that mark the final phase of his career. Pieces such as Ring of Figures (1997), where he used cotton wool and PVA glue to sculpt individual bodies, before weaving them together into a grotesque amorphous crowd. The collective horror it expresses, the disgusting vulnerability, recalls Goya’s Black Paintings, and it is easy to trace the thread back to his wartime experiences. Beutlich, though, refused to assign meaning.

With thanks to Emma Mason Gallery. See Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft until June 22.