Vintage Handwoven Tapestry in Wool by Olga Fisch

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Vintage Handwoven Tapestry in Wool by Olga Fisch

About the Item

Olga Fisch was born in Hungary, studied in Germany and lived in Morocco and Ethiopia before receiving asylum as a Jewish refugee in Ecuador in 1939. For her Indian-inspired designs, Mrs. Fisch uses natural black and white sheep's wool colored with vegetable dye. To make one of her 9 by 12 rugs requires four weavers working eight hours a day for six weeks. Desiring to furnish her home with Ecuadorian-inspired rugs, she adapted designs from Indian pottery and tapas, sheets of native bark cloth. Taking the designs to Indian rugmakers, she had them woven into deep pile. Olga Fisch was respected both for her own art and for her collection of folk art. The folk art-inspired rugs she has designed can be admired, among other places, at the Museum of Modern Art, the United Nations Building, and the Metropolitan Opera House. Trained in the traditional German academic way in Dusseldorf in the 1920s, she is a painter of the realist school. Called the mother of Ecuadorian folk art, she discovered the beauty of Ecuadorian Indian textiles in the 1940s, when others regarded them as crude and worthless. Largely because of the efforts of Olga Fisch the artifacts produced by Ecuador's 250 Indian tribes are now highly regarded. Over the decades she has helped thousands of Indian artists and craftsmen acquire the means of placing their wares in the world market. In so doing she introduced their beauty to a once skeptical public. But when Mrs. Fisch first arrived in Quito as a Jewish refugee, she couldn't have guessed what direction her life would take. An artist who had studied painting in Dusseldorf, Germany, she managed to find work as a teacher in the Quito School of Art. Despite a nearly lifelong interest in folk art, she had no intention of starting a new collection. "I had collected folk art since I was 12 or 13, possibly as a reaction against my father's fine china business," she says. "My first collection came from objects that I bought in Hungarian villages. Then, after my husband and I traveled to Morocco and Algiers, I started another collection of North African folk art." When Lincoln Kirstein, then director of the Museum of Modern Art, visited her home in 1940, he was enchanted with one of her rugs and promptly commissioned her to produce one for the museum. She has also made rugs for the UN headquarters. Fourteen of her luxurious, deep-pile wool rugs are on display at Washington's Textile Museum. Most are 6 x 8, with colors ranging from neutral earth tones to the vivid shades of Latin America. All her life she has been a collector of objects made by villagers, and believes that similar conditions create similar folk art the world over. As a collector and critic, she encourages the preservation of the traditional forms; as an artist, she makes free use of them. A tribute to the breadth of her artistry is that her rugs are exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art. She has designed rugs for the Metropolitan Opera and the UN Headquarters; last year the Renwick Gallery featured her collection of Indian ritual garb.

Creator:
Olga Fisch (Weaver)
Dimensions:
Height: 44.1 in (112 cm)Width: 24.81 in (63 cm)Depth: 1.19 in (3 cm)
Style:
Folk Art (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Brass,Metal,Wool
Place of Origin:
Hungary
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1950-1970
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use.
Seller Location:
Antwerp, BE
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU950412284121

Shop All Olga Fisch

Olga Fisch

Despite her Hungarian roots, artist Olga Fisch is remembered as the “mother of Ecuadorian folk art” due to her love of Ecuador’s art and culture. Best known for her vibrant rug designs and tapestries, Fisch contributed greatly to promoting Ecuadorian folk art abroad and introducing the country’s traditions and heritage to the world.

Born in Budapest in 1901, Fisch became interested in art at an early age. In her youth, she collected Hungarian folk crafts and was keen on becoming a painter.

In the 1920s, Fisch studied realist painting at an art school in Düsseldorf, Germany. There, she met her first husband, the sculptor Jupp Rübsam, and the couple moved to Vienna, Austria, where she worked as a ceramics designer. Following their divorce, Fisch grew unsettled by the burgeoning anti-Semitism in pre-World War II Germany. After she married for a second time, Fisch and her husband traveled to Morocco, Eritrea, Italy and the United States before receiving asylum status in Ecuador in 1939.

Settling in Quito, Fisch became enamored with traditional Ecuadorian folk art and returned to her childhood hobby of collecting crafts — everything from pottery and hand-carved wood sculptures to colorful textiles. Fisch’s sizable collection prompted her to open a gallery, called Folklore, in 1942. However, what she considered beautiful art was regarded by others as crude.

“When I first started collecting the local Indian art and then opened this gallery, people were shocked,” she said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “I remember someone asking, ‘How can you, as a cultured European woman, collect this trash?’” Nevertheless, Fisch’s collection soon garnered international attention and acclaim.

In the 1940s, Fisch began designing folk art-inspired rugs, hand-woven by indigenous Ecuadorian weavers. One rug caught the eye of acclaimed writer Lincoln Kirstein, then curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art; he commissioned her to create a rug for the museum’s collection. Over the years, Fisch also made rugs for the United Nations Headquarters and the Metropolitan Opera.

Fisch returned to Hungary in 1987 to visit family members who had survived the Nazi regime. She later came back to Quito, where she died in 1990.

Today, Fisch’s legacy lives on through the Olga Fisch Folklore brand, store and museum, which still operates in Quito. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Textile Museum in Washington, DC.

On 1stDibs, discover a range of vintage Olga Fisch rugs and other art.