Frontlines

Letters: The travails of an embargoed Baluch, putting a fragment in its place

News: The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney receives 127 Yomut weavings; Caskey-Lees and Bonhams cut back on current activity; James Mellaart and Nunzio Crisa remembered; CDA 2013

Profile: Monique Levi-Strauss, doyenne of ‘Cachemire’, talks to Judy Wentworth to mark the publication of the definitive work on French shawls

Postcard: Soheila Shayegan and friends follow Shah Abbas’ footsteps in quest of the minimalist oelims of Hezar-Jerib in north Persia

From the Archive: Acclaimed ethnographic photographer Josephine Powell’s work remembered in a special exhibition at Koc University in Istanbul

Forum: Red and yellow in antique Chinese carpets — the Sappanwood story, as revealed by three Italian scientists working with Gallery Moshe Tabibnia in Milan

Features

From Revolution to Revelation  Sophie Markariou 

Curator’s choice marking the grand reopening of the Islamic art galleries at the Louvre in Paris

Rhapsodies in Blue  Christian Erber

Turkish connections —or how 18th century Ottoman embroidered silk wall panels came to decorate the Blue Drawing Room of Wildenfels Castle in Saxony

Outwitting the Evil Eye: The Qaraqalpak Kiymeshek  David & Sue Richardson

A unique garment that afforded tribal women protection against malevolent spirits is explained by the authors of a major new book on Oaraqalpaq material culture

Narrative Threads  Ashley Dimmig

The exquisite figurative silks of Persia’s Safavid period give us a window into the courts and cultures of the Shahs, according to the winner of the Godfrey Goodwin Award

Status Signals  Arthur Leeper

Emblems of Empire by John Vollmer and Jacqueline Simcox, based on the MacTaggart Art Collection at the University of Alberta — the best-informed overview yet published of Chinese court costume

Forgotten Carpets of the Forbidden City  Michael Franses

The Ming and Oing imperial carpets preserved in Beijing’s Forbidden City, lost from view for almost a century, have recently been published by the Palace Museum

Context

Exhibitions: ‘The Mae Festa Textile Collection’ for sale by Peter Pap at the NewYork Design Center; ‘Beyond Brazil — the Johann Natterer Collection’ at the Ethnographic Museum in Vienna; ‘Flying Carpets’ at the French Academy’s Villa Medici in Rome; ‘Reflections of Silk’ — Nasrid textiles at the Lazaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and the Alhambra Museum in Granada

Calendar: Auctions, exhibitions, fairs and conferences worldwide

Auction Price Guide: A unique Louis XIII period Savonnerie carpet fetches a seven figure sum in Paris, plus a roundup of Oriental and European carpets and textiles under the hammer in London, New York, Los Angeles, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart and Pans

Books: Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe: 1453-7699 by Nurhan Atasoy and Lale Uruc; The Colors of my Dreams: early kilims from Anatolia by Harry Koll and Sabine Steinbock

Parting Shots: From Connecticut, Aschach an der Donau, Sartirana and London

Last Page: An early 17th century oil painting of ambassadors being received in the Moscow Kremlin at the court of the Russian Tsar ‘False Dmitry l’, from the collection of the Hungarian National Museum, shows an abundance of more or less familiar Anatolian carpet types