“Hindu Kush,” a Selection from AIC’s Textile Collection
Hindu Kush (1969)Designed by Jan Yoors (American, born Belgium, 1922–1977); Woven by Annebert Yoors (American, born Netherlands, 1926) and Marianne Yoors (American, born Netherlands); Inscribed: Jan Yoors / No. 42 / “Hindu Kush” / 1969 / 213 x 366 cm / 7 x 12 ft. (on handwritten label)Wool and cotton, slit tapestry weave; 210 x 347.4 cm (82 11/16 x 136 ¾ in.). Gift of the Rorimer Family, 2008.
Hindu Kush was recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago as a gift of the Rorimer Family in 2008. The tapestry made it way to the museum though Anne Rorimer, an independent curator and art historian and former Curator of 20th Century Art at the museum. Her father was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1955–1966.
Kore Yoors, Jan’s son, identified Hindu Kush as being designed and woven in 1969 after Yoors, commissioned by the American Institute of Architects, took a trip around the world to document postwar religious architecture for the 1967 International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and the Visual Arts. Kore went on to describe how his father took this opportunity to follow the route that the Roma would have traveled from their ancestral homeland to Europe—form India through Afghanistan into central Asia, to Tashkent, Samarkland, and Isfahan.
The tapestry depicts the treacherous Hindu Kush mountain range in simple organic forms that move swiftly across the composition. The slashing, off-white forms of cascading snow give shape to the series of mountains depicted in brown, while the gray moon appears in the foreboding dark blue sky. The tapestry’s colors, including the unusual brown of the mountains, recall the distinctive tonalities of Roma textiles. These unusual hues were developed with the assistance of the Paternayan Brothers in New York, who would dye wool to Yoors’s exact specifications. The design was then interpreted by Annebert and Marianne in a slit-tapestry weave on a hand-built loom in their Greenwich Village studio. Yoors created a great many designs in his lifetime, and weaving them was such a lengthy process that he never produced his work in editions. Thus Hindu Kush is truly one of a kind.
