William A.

Southworth

Southeast Asian Textiles

7

Southeast Asian Textiles

The donation of 129 textiles from South and Southeast Asia to the Asian
Art Society in the Netherlands (VVAK) in 2016 has opened up an entirely
new area of study and collecting for the Society. Remarkably, the only
Southeast Asian textile in the Society’s collection before this date was a
Burmese kalaga or wall tapestry purchased in Amsterdam in 1964 (fig. 1).
The pictorial quality of this tapestry underlines the figurative emphasis
of the Society’s Southeast Asia collection, which from its inception
was clearly focused on the traditional academic arts of stone religious
sculpture and bronze casting.

The appreciation for Southeast Asian textiles not only as items of

ethnographic interest, but also as great works of art, has a long history
in the Netherlands. However, it was not until the exhibition Splendid
Symbols, curated in Washington by Mattiebelle Gittinger in 1979, that
the aesthetic quality of the region’s textile traditions received full
international recognition.

The collection, carefully assembled over 15 years by Jan Dees and René
van der Star and previously exhibited in the former Museum Nusantara
in Delft, is an almost textbook selection of highlights from the region. It
includes examples not only from the varied and complex textile traditions
of Indonesia but also from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos; while
two superb silk patola from Gujarat in Northwest India supplement and
complete its geographical range.

This remarkable acquisition also provides a new, thematic context for a

number of otherwise isolated and largely neglected textiles from Sumatra
and Sumba that were previously housed in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
and are a fitting complement to the superb collection of Japanese kimonos
donated by the same collectors in 2009. We hope that both will inspire a
renewed appreciation and interest among our members and visitors for
the artistic quality of textiles across Asia as a whole.

• William A. Southworth is curator of Southeast Asian Art at the Rijksmuseum in

Amsterdam.

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