Modern Reception of Late Antique Egyptian Textiles

riographic project in a volume celebrating the work of Thomas F. Mathews, who, as my teacher and mentor, set me on the path of an intellectual adventure that never fails to surprise.1 At the center of this study is a set of Late Antique Egyptian textiles assembled in an album for Dikran Ga rabed Kelekian (1868–1951), an influential collector and art dealer who was a source of historic and archaeological textiles for a number of important museum and pri vate collections in Europe and America.2 At various times throughout his career, Kelekian operated galleries in Constantinople, Paris, London, and New York. Kelek ian’s advertised interests crossed a wide range of periods and fields, including Middle Eastern, Asian, and European “Objects of Art,” rugs and other textiles, and “curios” for the gallery in New York City that bore his name and, during the early years of the period under discussion, the evocative title “Le Musée de Bosphore” (fig. 1).3 Most significant of Kelekian’s fields of collecting were Persian art of all periods and modern painting, each of which played a part in his responses to Late Antique Egyptian textiles. The album is comprised of ten portfolios labeled “COLLECTION de TISSUS. Européens, Persans & Orientaux.” Each portfolio contains fifty plates on which were laid out some one thousand textiles. Originally, sixty-five Late Antique Egyptian pieces constituted a small fraction of the album’s contents. In 2002, when Nanette Rodney Kelekian donated the album to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of the 968 textiles remaining in the album, sixty-three were Late Antique Egyptian textiles.4 Kelekian’s textile album of c. 1910 has preserved evidence of what could be called his own distinctive “peFrom Curiosities to Objects of Art