Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom
The career of Polish textile artist Tadek Beutlich MBE (1922–2011) was honoured in an exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft from 18 January–22 June 2025. The artist lived in the East Sussex town of Ditchling in the late 1960s–early 1970s when he ran a weaving studio from his home, Gospels. This property had been purpose built as a studio by the weaver Ethel Mairet; Beutlich visited it during Mairet’s lifetime, before being given the opportunity to purchase it after her death in 1952.
‘Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom’ tracked the artist’s successful career, which blossomed from his first forays into tapestry weaving in the 1950s. He studied weaving at Camberwell School of Art 1948–1950, inspired by his visit to a 1948 exhibition of French tapestry at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by the French tapestry artist Jean Lurçat; Beutlich went on to teach at Camberwell for the next twenty-four years.
His early works were influenced by folk art motifs from kilims made in his native Poland, where he spent his childhood. In the 1960s, his pieces turned more avant garde, incorporating sections of open weave and unusual materials such as burnt wood, jute and X-ray film. At the invitation of a British/American company, Mediterranean Industries, he taught a group of women in Malta how to weave rya rugs on vertical looms; pieces made there to designs by Beutlich and other artists including Jean Cocteau were exhibited at Malta House in London in 1963.
In the late 1960s–early 1970s, his works became larger and even more freeform, with tightly twisted hanks of jute and sisal snaking across sculptural wall hangings like Legend and Eruption. He promoted creative exploration, writing in his 1967 book The Technique of Woven Tapestry, ‘I do not intend to give too many strict rules as to what makes a good tapestry design, because all the “do’s and don’ts” are, I think, too restricting’.
When his work became larger in scale and he required more assistants, he felt uneasy at being distanced from having a more personal involvement in creating his work and, looking for a change, relocated to Spain. There, he never unpacked his looms. Having discovered esparto grass—a plant fibre traditionally used for basketry across southern Spain and North Africa—he no longer required a loom to weave, preferring to use loose warps around which he built three-dimensional structures.
The scale of his output is quite staggering. He was dedicated to constantly pushing the limits of his invented technique, saying: ‘While I am working on something, I am wondering how else I could do it… I am really alive when I make work.’
Tim Johnson was one of three contemporary artists commissioned to make new work inspired by Beutlich’s for the 2025 exhibition at Ditchling. He taught a series of workshops exploring the free-warp tapestry technique during the show. Johnson had studied a seven-hour long interview with Tadek Beutlich from the British Library’s online resource National Life Stories: Craft’s Lives in 2020. He was then delighted to discover part of an unpublished manuscript, The Techniques of Free Warp Tapestry. He embarked upon a research residency, hosted at West Dean College and supported by the Emma Mason Gallery and Beutlich’s family, to decipher some of the recorded techniques. Sadly, around half of the manuscript was missing and most of the drawings did not correlate with the text.
Still, Johnson has mastered several of Beutlich’s techniques involving esparto, using wrapping and weaving of yarns. He demonstrated and taught these in an expansive, engaging and inspiring manner during a three-day workshop at the Ditchling Museum, which I attended. His piece for the show, Las Golondrinas (The Swallows), is named after Beutlich’s Catalonian home 1974–1980, where he invented many of his most groundbreaking free-warp tapestry techniques.
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