Ingrid Dessau: A Swedish Designer in New York
September 03, 2019
The FJ Hakimian collection has four carpets by the mid-twentieth century Swedish textile designer Ingrid Dessau. All of these works are sophisticated compositions by an artist with an exceptionally refined sense of color and design. Ingrid Dessau (née Peterson, 1923–2000) was a master of her craft whose works are beautiful expressions of a type of sophisticated modernism rooted in Swedish traditions. read more
Natural Abstractions: Brita Grahn
July 17, 2019
The FJ Hakimian Collection includes five works by Swedish designer Brita Grahn (1907–2013). Each composition is a restrained, intellectual abstraction that hints at the natural world as a source of inspiration. read more
Elsa Gullberg-Design Pioneer
June 13, 2019
Elsa Gullberg could be called the mother of Swedish Modern. She was an extraordinary figure, far ahead of her time as a designer, a textile innovator, and an entrepreneur. Born in Malmo in 1886 into a bourgeois family, she had wanted to be a doctor but because of her father’s early death she was forced to take another, more traditional path for a woman in her time. read more
THE HOUSE THAT MӒRTA BUILT... 100th anniversary celebration
February 26, 2019
Märta Måås-Fjetterström (1873-1941), a trained Swedish Textile artist was bit of a revolutionary - her life story and the subsequent establishment of the MMF Workshop is legendary amongst Textile collector’s world over. Today when a public institution or a Hollywood movie star wants something out of the ordinary to rest their eyes on, then the choice is often an MMF rug. read more
Pioneers of Abstraction: Hilma af Klint and Sweden's Textile Arts
February 18, 2019
The Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim was without question the New York art exhibition of the past year. This turn-of-the-century Swedish painter created a truly radical body of work in an abstract mode that preceded the works of the painters considered the fathers of abstraction Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich. read more
Finnish Innovations: the Textile Works of Greta Skogster-Lehtinen
December 10, 2018
Greta Skogster-Lehtinen was ahead of her time both as a pioneer of Finnish textile art and as an entrepreneur. Her textile designs are full of warmth and strength; earthy and crafted of vernacular materials, they evoke the natural world of the ancient Finnish landscape in a dynamic and modern visual language. read more
Why Gray Matters
October 31, 2018
“The single most important lesson of architectural color is that every color only appears to be what it is relative to its surroundings,” explains Donald Kaufman, the famed color consultant. This is a lesson long known to artists who value gray for its supporting role—in the Renaissance gray was the preferred portrait background to emphasize the richness of the sitters’ costumes, while the Impressionists and Fauvists, for all their love of color, often used gray to make their other colors spark with life. read more
20th Century European Tapestry
September 21, 2017
The art of European tapestry was revitalized in the early 20th century by the avant-garde. The German Bauhaus was foundational in this renewal, with the ideas and techniques developed there proving deeply influential on later modernist movements. In France, designers incorporated new modalities and aesthetics while also looking back to the country’s artistic heritage, including five hundred years of tapestry arts. Artists and designers in Scandinavia created the most innovative and expressive forms in 20th century tapestry weaving—it was in the north that modern tapestry reached its apex. read more
Kips Bay Decorator Show House
June 05, 2017
FJ Hakimian was the unequivocal go-to source for antique and hand woven carpets at this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House. Inside the redbrick Georgian townhouse on the Upper East Side, five of the 18-total designers turned toward dealer Joseph Hakimian’s expertise in hand-selecting rugs to go with each designer’s theme. Vintage Swedish carpets and ornate French tapestries from the FJ Hakimian showroom on East 57th Street in Manhattan provide the thread that runs through these five rooms. read more
The House that Mӓrta Built….
May 06, 2016
Märta Måås-Fjetterström (1873-1941), a trained Swedish Textile artist was bit of a revolutionary — her life story and the subsequent establishment of the MMF Workshop is legendary amongst Textile collector’s world over. read more