Textile weaving has long been undervalued as a creative art form. But this is changing. A year ago, at London’s Barbican Gallery, Unravel, The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, was a groundbreaking event. It showcased 50 international artists using textiles as a medium to explore ideas about power, resistance, and survival. At Art Basel Miami in December, textiles were everywhere.
Surfing the wave, Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom, at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex, brings out from the shadows a seminal figure in the mid-20th-century transformation of hand weaving from a craft into an art form. The show, running until June 22, is the first public gallery retrospective in more than 25 years of Beutlich’s groundbreaking work as a textile artist and a printmaker.
Born in Poland in 1922 to a German father and a Polish mother, Beutlich studied art in Poznan and Dresden before serving, unusually, on both sides in the Second World War. Forcibly conscripted by Germany, he was sent to fight in Russia and Italy. Taken prisoner, he volunteered to join the Polish Corps of the British 8th Army, fighting its way from Monte Cassino to the Gothic Line. Demobbed in Rome in 1946, he migrated to Britain and resumed fine art studies at the Cass Institute before turning to textiles at Camberwell College, where he also taught for more than 20 years.
Initially attracted to tapestry work by a show at the Victoria and Albert, Beutlich developed increasingly original techniques, initially using darning wool from Woolworths, before abandoning the traditional loom to weave complex monumental hangings and free-standing three-dimensional constructs. He started using a mix of unconventional fibres such as horse hair, sisal and jute, tying in hanks of raw or brightly coloured thread and fragments of everyday detritus – burnt wood and celluloid film. He also experimented with free-form printing, stamping out relief prints that incorporated found materials, including tree sections, Lycra and foam rubber. There’s a striking parallel with work being done simultaneously by the Italian Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti.
Beutlich’s connection to Ditchling started when his Camberwell tutor, Barbara Sawyer, introduced him to Ethel Mairet, a champion of vegetal dyes and hand-loom weaving. A rustic haven in easy reach of London, Ditchling’s arts and crafts community bloomed after Eric Gill set up his guild there in the 1920s. Mairet, an early arrival, built her home and workshop, Gospels, in 1921. After her death, Beutlich bought it from her estate and lived there for seven years between 1967 and 1974.
Beutlich “was a tremendous innovator, always experimenting, driven by a fine art approach”, Steph Fuller, the Ditchling museum’s director, said in an interview. “There’s always been a hard core of fans, and he has taught a tremendous legacy of contemporary makers. His work is well known in the textile field, but he’s not so visible in the wider art world. Now that textiles are being taken more seriously as an artistic medium, we hope this exhibition will change that.”
The museum show includes large hangings woven at Gospels and free-standing off-loom pieces alongside experimental esparto grass works made in Spain after he left Britain for several years in the late 1970s. Many are named for insects, birds and funghi. Others are inspired by surrealism. Among the most important is Dream Revealed (1968), a 2.5-metre-high wall hanging of unspun jute, mohair and horsehair. Newly restored, it is being shown publicly for the first time in more than 50 years.
Also shown are pencil drawings and strange miniature figures modelled in grass, cotton wool and glue. The drawings include spiky early sketches of circus scenes in Rome, but most are pencil portraits of faces done later in life, along with the figurines, after he returned to Britain from Spain. These are angst-filled, in the register of Goya or Munsch’s Scream. By turns beautiful and disturbing, Beutlich’s art can be seen to express a subconscious working out of the traumas and disruptions of a war-torn life.
Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft Sat Until – Sun 22 June
Words: /Photos Claudia Barbieri Childs © Artlyst 2025