Picture a young man of twenty, drawn off his intended path by a scrap of newsprint. A classified advert, tucked among the usual columns, leads him through the doors of one of Aubusson's grandest tapestry workshops. He has no plan to become a collector. He simply wants to see how the thing is made.
That young man was Hugues Helffer, and the workshop floor changed everything. Standing beside the cartoon painters who translated image into pattern, the dyers who coaxed colour from raw fibre, and above all the weavers who spent months bringing a single panel to life, Helffer encountered the sheer physical demand of haute lisse and basse lisse, the high warp and low warp techniques that have underpinned European tapestry for centuries. What he witnessed was patience made visible: thread by thread, a picture built with the same discipline as a fresco, but soft enough to fold.
Brussels Tapestry, Susanna and the Elders, circa 1515–1520. Wool and silk. 346 × 400 cm. Exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 70 years. Original artwork.
That early fascination hardened into scholarship, then into one of Europe's most significant private collections of tapestry documentation, housed today in the library of a round medieval tower he uses as a country retreat. Nearly 500 pieces span the 15th century to the present, each one, in Helffer's words, a fragment of art history in which symbol, myth and the language of painting are worked through thread rather than pigment.
Victor Vasarely (1906–1997). Vilag. Aubusson tapestry, Pinton workshops. From the artist’s personal collection. Wool, silk and gold threads. 160 × 160 cm. Woven number in the warp: “1/6”.
This autumn, that private world opens to the public. The Amélie du Chalard Gallery in Paris presents The Thread of Time, a collaboration with Helffer on view until 19 September, bringing around twenty museum-quality tapestries from his collection into dialogue with contemporary practice. The span is extraordinary: a rare 'Feuille de Choux' from Enghien, dated to around 1550, sits within the same journey as a twentieth-century tapestry by Victor Vasarely, whose geometric optical language proves that the medium can absorb entirely new visual grammars without losing its essential structure.
Alexander Calder (1898–1976). Boomerangs. Aubusson tapestry, Pinton Manufacture. Wool and silk, 218 × 128 cm. Original artwork.
Tapestry has too often been filed under decoration, admired for its texture but rarely credited with the intellectual weight granted to painting or sculpture. Du Chalard's curatorial position, shaped by years of engagement with textile materiality, pushes back against that hierarchy. Read historically, tapestry functions as a form of social record, capturing the politics, belief systems and visual preoccupations of the centuries that produced it, woven testimony rather than mere wall covering.
Installation view featuring artwork by Max Bainbridge alongside Juan Gris (1887 - 1927), Femme à la corbeille de fruits, and Brussels Tapestry, Susanna and the Elders, circa 1515–1520.
The gallery extends this conversation into sculpture, inviting Max Bainbridge and Gerd Kanz to place their work alongside the historic pieces, exploring shared questions of material, labour and inherited craft knowledge. It is a fitting gesture from a gallery that also champions a living generation of tapestry makers, among them Nadine Altmayer and Abigail Booth, artists reworking the medium for contemporary eyes without severing its historic roots.
The Thread of Time asks a simple question with vast implications: what happens when we finally look at tapestry the way we look at painting? Six centuries of evidence suggest the answer has been in front of us all along.
. . .
Further Information:
The Thread of Time, a collaboration with Helffer, is on view until 19 September at The Amélie du Chalard Gallery in Paris.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Raoul Dufy (1877–1953). The Viaduct, 19th century. Tapestry from the Artistic and Cultural Centre of the Moulin de Vauboyen, Bièvres / Workshop mark “M. V.” and artist’s signature. Wool and silk. 71 × 56 cm. Original artwork.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of Amelie Du Chalard Galery.