Wool and linen
Not on view
Bliss and many of her peers perceived a connection between modern and ancient art. This fifteen hundred-year-old textile was woven by Copts, a Christian ethnoreligious group in North Africa. It depicts a waterfowl holding a lotus flower bud, an image associated with the fertility of the Nile River. Artist Arthur B. Davies originally purchased it from Dikran G. Kelekian, an antiquities dealer and modern art collector whose gallery was just a block away from Bliss’s family home. Bliss acquired this textile and three others from an auction of Davies’s collection following his death in 1928.
[Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern](/calendar/exhibitions/5737), November 17, 2024–March 29, 2025
Gallery label from October 21, 2019–Spring 2020
Looping, knitting, felting, and plaiting have been staple techniques for manipulating fibers since prehistoric times. This ancient textile, one of the first pieces to enter MoMA’s collection, was exhibited in 1931 alongside works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat—painters who recognized analogies between certain styles of ancient and modern art, particularly in their shared departures from realistic depiction.
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