PORTALEGRE TAPESTRIES

MARINA ALMEIDA
Words

VASCO CÉLIO
Photography

Magazine Layout

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE? WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? HOW DOES IT SPROUT AND TAKE SHAPE IN CREATIVITY, IN HUMAN HANDS, IN TIME, AND FLOW INTO OBJECTS THAT WHISPER, ALL POWERFUL? I HAD NEVER SEEN THIS INVISIBLE THREAD OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION AT SUCH CLOSE QUARTERS UNTIL I FOUND MYSELF LOST IN CONVERSATION AND TOTAL FASCINATION AT MANUFACTURA DAS TAPEÇARIAS DE PORTALEGRE (PORTALEGRE TAPESTRIES).

A soft picture covers a museum wall. It measures almost 13 metres long by 2.40 high. It seems that the wall is both just the right size, while too small for such grand work. Based on a card by Almada Negreiros, Portugal is a monumental tapestry covering one of the Portalegre Tapestry Museum’s walls. It is also one of many artworks created by Portuguese and foreign artists who have worked with the Manufactura workshop during 76 productive years.

Since 2005, this jewel of Portuguese craftsmanship has been housed in an old olive press, a three-storey building in the centre of Portalegre, a stone’s throw from the local high school (now the Instituto Politécnico), where Guy Fino and Manuel Celestino Peixeiro studied. And this is where a remarkable story begins.

In 1939, Fino moved to the Alentejo border town from Covilhã, where his father, Francisco, was a wool manufacturer. As a boy, the young Fino treated the factory as a playground, and was often found sitting inside the wool remnant box, listening to the stories that the spinner told him. He was fascinated by wool, which he said was "the finest and most faithful of all existing fibres".

After leaving high school, Manuel became a pilot in the air force, while Guy worked with his father, who set up a business in the town. Having gone their separate ways, the two friends were soon reunited when an accident ended Manuel's flying career. The now unoccupied friend suggested opening a sawmill, which Fino rebutted, saying that wool was his forte.

They eventually decided to set up in an old silk factory and produce traditional knotted rugs. Unfortunately, they soon realised that cheap North African rugs were monopolising the market. At this point, Manuel's father, Manuel do Carmo Peixeiro, suggested they make wall tapestries, showing them a particular stitch he had developed in France while working at Roubaix. He gave the two young men a sample and what followed can only be described as a revolution.

Sea of stitches

1946, Portalegre. Manuel senior, Manuel junior and Guy began studying the stitch, looking for weavers, choosing wools, how they were spun, the different twists, the dyes to be used. Guy developed the first vertical loom, which was made of wood and can now be found in the museum. He then built another, in iron, which is still in use.

Manuel do Carmo Peixeiro gave the designs to the weavers for them to study, and it was these women who began developing a technique that lasts until today. This included both preparing the design for weaving and weaving the piece itself, constructing the design with a sea of invisible stitches.

"The only thing Manuel do Carmo Peixeiro knew about was the stitch he had developed. After that, it was the women who developed and created the design’s interpretation, choosing what was kept and what was discarded. It's this fundamental knowledge they have that no computer can match," says Vera Fino, Guy's daughter and one of Manufactura’s guardians.

Another is Maria de Lurdes. Big hands, deep voice, a touching correctness. She sits by a large window. For decades, she has been responsible for turning the artists’ designs (the cards) into a weaving design - in other words, the design used by the weavers.

The work of a designer can take months, many months. It starts with the enlargement of the artist's card to real scale - for example, Almada Negreiros's Portugal card is 0.5 by 2.5 metres, the tapestry is 2.46 by 12.64 metres. Next, the design is corrected, ensuring proportion and balance, always focussed on being faithful to the artist's original.

"It's the ability to lose ourselves, and be the other", says Fernanda Fortunato, another guardian of woven art. “Miss Fernanda” has worked here for 63 years and a lifetime, "a short house born and bred in the Alentejo", in the words of Fernando Namora, who dedicated a chapter of the novel Sentados na Relva to her.

There are many stories to be told in this room. Like that of the architect Siza Vieira, who drew the figures for the tapestry Jazz (2010) with an old biro and unreliable ink. Siza's lines are on the tapestry, currently in a building in Rotterdam, with those same gaps. Or, more recently, the watercolour blotches by Henriette Arcelin in the Ponta da Culatra tapestry (2022).

History of Portugal

The first Portalegre tapestry, Diana (1948), was based on an original by João Tavares, a painter and drawing teacher (who also trained some of the house designers). For the first tapestries, Guy Fino contacted the artists and challenged them to make tapestries in Portalegre. In 1949, Manufactura made its first appearance in Lisbon, as part of an exhibition at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, although its real breakthrough came in 1952. That year, an exceptional exhibition of French tapestry was held at the Janelas Verdes Museum. Guy Fino decided to organise an exhibition at Palácio Foz showing two tapestries by Guilherme Camarinha and the respective cards. The Portuguese Head of State, António de Oliveira Salazar, visited the show, and official orders soon arrived. During the Estado Novo regime all public buildings had to have artworks, which meant that Manufactura could hardly keep up with so much work. The tapestries could now be found in town halls, courts, universities throughout the country. In the National Library reading room there’s a monumental design by Guilherme Camarinha (História do Papel, 1961), who was one of the artists who worked most closely with Manufactura.

Over the years, many artists have had their work transformed into wool: Júlio Pomar, Vieira da Silva, Lourdes Castro, Menez, Cruzeiro Seixas, Jean Lurçat, Le Corbusier, the list is long and includes contemporary artists, such as Vik Muniz (who created a 2.5-metre-high photograph of a tapestry) and Joana Vasconcelos. They can be found in museums, as well as a number of domestic and international institutions. Other examples can be enjoyed in the Portalegre Museum and the Galeria Tapeçarias de Portalegre, in Lisbon, in temporary exhibitions.

Every item is documented in the archive, where rolls of brown paper store the weaving designs and palette of colours. This precious information is vital for restoration (as demonstrated recently with Camarinha's tapestry in the National Library), as well as for weaving new tapestries, when possible.

When a wall tapestry began to fade, a series of four or six pieces of the same design were reproduced. Manufactura would contact the artist to ask if they wanted to do tapestries, draw up a contract, indicating how many tapestries could be produced from the same work. "Often, the artist would come to us. That's what happened with Nadir Afonso, for example. We made seven different tapestries by Nadir because he wanted to come to Portalegre to make tapestries. They were very successful and sold very quickly. At the moment, we only have one or two that haven’t sold out". Vera Fino, director of Manufactura, dropped everything to help her father when he became ill. A chemical engineer with a doctorate from the USA and a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, she has led the company for two decades.

After the glory days and international recognition, Manufactura is struggling to survive and preserve this unique heritage. Orders are thin on the ground. No orders means no work. No work means no training. No training means this knowledge dies. This is what Vera Fino is facing. If she needs weavers, she can still find them, but not designers. Lurdes needs to pass on what she knows.

Designing pixels

After the design is enlarged and corrected, each stitch of the future tapestry is defined on graph paper - a kind of pixelization. Each tapestry is prepared stitch by stitch. And this is just one of the various complexities of this work. Lurdes then chooses the colours. Manufactura's swatch boasts an impressive 7,000-plus hues in tubes lined up on trays emerging from wooden drawers. There are almost imperceptible nuances, with 200 shades of black alone. That said, some colours still have to be made. Imagine watercolour paints, which are mixed to achieve a single tone - Lurdes does this on wool. How? The woollen thread used in tapestry is made up of eight strands. When the colour used by the artist isn’t a primary colour, and isn’t in the Manufactura catalogue, mixtures are necessary. This is done by combining different coloured strands until the exact tone on the artist’s card is achieved. "I sometimes do a twist four, five times until I get the same tone the painter has". When she gets the final colour – with the essential aid of the window beside her and natural light - she writes down the combination and calculates the quantity of wool necessary according to the design, which is also noted. For each tapestry, the combinations and pieces of wool follow one another on the palette, which is then given to the weaver.

The most difficult tapestry she has ever done was Primavera (1989) by Mimi Fogt, a French artist based in Portugal (1923-2005). For this work, she managed to beat the record for mixtures (near 700). Vera Fino remembers a tapestry by Tom Phillips, Concerto Grosso (2002), while Lurdes thinks of those by Menez - in fact, she has one on her desk.

After the design is finished, the colour palette goes to the warehouse, where they check there’s enough wool available. If not, it has to be dyed. Manufactura’s wool warehouse is like a document. All the wools are stored with an indication of the year, place where they were dyed, and amount available. Stored in boxes with lids, one is 1966, the other 1985. The company uses Australian wool, which arrives already washed before being spun according to its own specifications, with virtually no twists, and dyed in Mira d'Aire, at Rosários 4.

When all the wool needed for the tapestry has been collected, it then proceeds with the palette and weaving design to the first floor, where the giant loom built by Guy Fino is located. This is where the weavers gather the woollen strands according to Lurdes’s instructions, until they form the woollen thread. Only then do they begin weaving.

Woollen harp

I hear a silence of threads and the slight creak of wood. It’s the sound of a tapestry being crafted. There are two weavers working in Manufactura today. It’s hard to imagine 300 in the convent, or the hundred that worked here previously. There are two. Filomena, who started in 1979, and Gisela, who has worked here since 1981. They also learnt from their predecessors, sitting side by side on that polished wooden bench.

They work back to front, weaving the woollen threads into the vertical cotton web. It’s a strange position. They sit like ancient Amazons, their legs crossed to the left, their torso slightly bent, sliding softly over the bench to the right as the work progresses. They do three centimetres of work a day. In Portalegre tapestry, the stitches density varies between 25.000 and 100.000 per square metre. They weave the famous woollen stitch on the cotton web, with a sequence of gestures reminiscent of a harpist.

From time to time, the swish of the threads is interrupted by the heavy blows of the metal comb compacting the stitches, and so goes the weaving. It takes days, weeks, months to complete the artist's design in tiny wool stitches. Such endeavour makes this a luxury product, with prices starting at 15,000 euros per square metre. "The price should be even higher. That way nobody would take them away," Namora writes, quoting Fernanda. "It is their flesh that is sliced and sold as the tapestries meet their destiny. The profane fate of collectors," the novelist would say, before saying farewell to Portalegre.

Before delivery, the tapestry is stretched, mothproofed and dried naturally. Only then is the bolduc attached to the back – a certificate of authenticity, the artist’s signature, dimensions, the number of copies produced and name. Full stop.

Portalegre Tapestries