Wax resist on thin cotton textile, ca 1915-25
In the 1910s and 1920s, a revival of weaving and batik was born in the United States; the center appears to have been in New York's Greenwich Village. The artist Pieter Mijer was the leader of the movement, publishing articles and in 1919, at least one book on the topic. The leading exponents of the movement were modernist painters Marguerite Zorach and Bertram Hartmann, and the artist Martha Ryther(1896-1981). Many other artists essayed this ancient Javanese textile-dying technique, which is based on wax resist. I became aware of the batik revival in doing research for my doctoral dissertation on artist Henry Fitch Taylor, a gallery director and organizer of the 1913 Armory Show. I found many references to batik in period magazines and art reviews in newspapers, including an article on the topic that mentioned the artist Martha Ryther. Fast forward a few years when I gained access to the home of a remarkable art hunter-gatherer who seemed to share many of my tastes in art. When I mentioned early 1900s batiks he told me that he had a wonderful one but it took a few subsequent visits before he was able to find the particular textile storage bag that held the batik. When he showed it to me and told me the price I immediately agreed to buy it. Although it is not signed I knew it was something good from the early modernist period and I had never seen another for sale. When I got home and pulled out Hazel Adler's period article on batik, the image on the first page, of a work by Martha Ryther, was done in an almost identical technique, with sprigs of flowers and plants scattered across a background and swirling lines that defined simple biomorphic forms. I had trusted my gut level feeling and once again had been proven correct. This large batik is a rare survivor and its colors have only slightly faded with one century of age.