I'm interested in pattern because it's around us everywhere. We walk past it without giving it a second glance, and yet if you scratch the surface it always reveals something surprising, often something that deepens our understanding of a place, a family or an individual. Patterns that could be viewed as merely decorative turn out to capture the hopes of the maker, the commissioner and the community.
This month I'm looking at traditional Romanian embroidered blouses. Marina, one of the sitters nominated for “Drawn to the Boro”, arrived at her sitting wearing one. As we chatted, and later as we exchanged emails, it became clear that the blouse wasn't just a pretty thing to wear: it symbolised inheritance and pride in where she comes from.
When I started looking into the history of the blouses, one figure kept emerging: Queen Marie. Born in Kent in 1875, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she married the heir to the Romanian throne at seventeen and moved to a country she had never lived in. She took up the embroidered blouse and was photographed in it again and again, at home and on tours abroad. One reading is that the blouse said: I wasn't born here, but I have chosen this place. It was politics too. A young country needed to be seen, and a queen in village embroidery was a powerful image.
At the same time, a very different group was reaching for the same embroidery.
Queen Marie wearing a traditional blouse Photo from the National Archives of Romania
The Legion of the Archangel Michael, later the Iron Guard, was a violent, antisemitic movement that held up peasant life as the true Romania. Its leaders wore embroidered peasant shirts, with crucifixes and small bags of Romanian soil round their necks. Their message was the reverse of Marie's: being Romanian was something you were born into, and some people never could be. In 1933 its members shot dead her friend, the Prime Minister Ion Duca, on the platform at Sinaia station. The following year Marie published her memoirs, warning readers at the outset that they would meet "this spirit of optimistic tolerance" all through its pages. "I see the good in people rather than the bad," she wrote.
The blouse also fascinated Henri Matisse. He painted La Blouse Roumaine in Nice over the winter of 1939 to 1940, scraping away the details of his model until only the simplest details remained, except the blouse and three colours: red, white and blue. Weeks later, the German army broke through. Offered a visa to Brazil, he wrote to his son that leaving would feel like deserting: "If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?" He was seventy and unwell. He was not publicly outspoken, but he saw his joyful paintings as an act of defiance against the unfolding horrors. His wife Amélie and his daughter Marguerite worked for the Resistance, and in 1944 both were arrested.
La Blouse Roumaine 1939 Matisse Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne
Brâncuși, Marina's favourite artist and seven years younger than Matisse, stayed in Paris and also kept out of public life, spending the war years living an almost monastic life in his studio. He had grown up in Gorj among carved wooden gates and pillars. In Romanian folk art the rhombus is everywhere, emblazoned on blouse sleeves and carved into wood. The shape is often interpreted as the sky, or a gate between worlds. In 1935 he was asked to make a memorial in Târgu Jiu, near where he was born, for the townspeople who had held the bridge against German troops in the First World War. Instead of a soldier with a flag, he made a column of stacked rhombuses almost thirty metres high, which he first called the Column of Endless Gratitude. “The Endless Column” was unveiled on 27 October 1938, twenty-two years to the day after the battle. Some interpret it as a gateway between heaven and earth.
The Endless Column Brancusi shown on a 1998 Postal Stamp
When I wrote to Marina after her sitting, she told me about the blouses her grandmother and great-aunts had made: vivid and multicoloured, some of them sewn with beads. They were her mother's, and one day they would have been hers, part of her dowry. But as a girl, in a burst of creativity, she cut them up to make clothes for her dolls, and turned the beads into jewellery. She was dreaming of becoming a fashion designer, and didn't realise what she was destroying. "Can you imagine my mother's face," she wrote. Her grandmother and great-aunts are no longer alive, and the blouses are gone. But I think those memories are where her lifelong love of Romanian textiles began.
