The Things France Tends in Unremarkable Places
In a business park northeast of Paris . Two people in their 80s spent 50 years weaving masterpieces by hand. Eight hundred tapestries. Man Ray carried up a staircase. And the world is only catching up
A story about what France hides in plain sight — and why it’s always worth looking closer. Curiosity rewarded.
The suburb is called Pantin. You won’t find it in most travel guides. It sits just outside the périphérique, northeast of Paris, in that particular zone of France that has a canal, a car park, and light industrial units that, on closer inspection, turn out to house the silk atelier of Hermès and the headquarters of Chanel.
France does this. It puts its most extraordinary things in unremarkable places and waits to see who notices. It has been doing this for centuries. The patience is almost a provocation.
I found out about Pantin the way I find out about a lot of things, (if you read my work regularly you’ll know what I’m about to say): a magazine, left in the pocket of an aeroplane seat, my sort of magazine, and a feature about two people in their eighties still working, still weaving — literally weaving — tapestries by hand in a business park northeast of Paris.
Eight hundred tapestries over fifty years. Man Ray. Basquiat. Steel threads woven into wool.
I kept turning the pages back, re-reading. The world was larger than I’d thought. And France, as usual, had been keeping secrets. [Ha! How often do I say that?]
Frédérique Bachellerie and Péter Schönwald founded Atelier 3 in 1972. She is now eighty-three. He is eighty-two. They are still taking commissions.
What they do — and the distinction matters more than it might first seem — isn’t really reproduction. It is interpretation. At Atelier 3, the weaver works from the front of the loom, watching the piece develop in real time. This is not the Gobelins method. At that great state manufactory in the 13th arrondissement, weavers have worked from the reverse of the fabric, executing numbered cartoons, for four hundred years. The outcome is decided before the first thread is laid. At Atelier 3, the weaver brings herself to the work the way a musician brings herself to a score — never playing it exactly the same way twice, the piece alive in the making of it.
Bachellerie and Schönwald rejected the reverse-loom tradition. Quietly, without a manifesto, in a business park in Pantin.
Their stories are as unlikely as their work.
→Bachellerie was born in France, raised in Hungary during the Communist era, and went to Chile in 1961 to study textiles at the School of Applied Arts in Santiago. South American folklore entered her bones and never left. She returned to Hungary with a diploma nobody recognised, made her way eventually to Paris, and kept pushing at the edges of a medium the art world had largely decided was finished.
→Schönwald arrived in Paris from Budapest, worked as a TV producer, as a bookseller, and had yet to weave a single thread when they met. He learned. They founded the studio together.
Then, in 1973 — one year after they opened — a nearby gallery was showing a lithographic series by Man Ray. The Revolving Doors: geometric coloured collages he had begun in 1919, formal and strange and full of interior logic. Bachellerie persuaded the gallery owner, Françoise Tournier, to let them interpret one. To echo Man Ray’s black pencil, they wove steel threads into wool. Tournier loved it and commissioned nine more.
Then she brought the artist himself to see them.
Man Ray was eighty-three. He couldn’t climb the stairs to the studio, so Schönwald — thirty years old, the bookseller turned weaver — carried him up.
At the top, Man Ray looked at the spinning wheels and said they reminded him of Marcel Duchamp. Then he was quiet for a moment.
“It’s a shame I’m this age,” he said. “We could do some very fun things. We could do some very fun things together.”
He died not long after.
The complete Revolving Doors series — all ten tapestries — was shown recently at Boccara Gallery in New York. Its first presentation in the United States. Fifty-two years after a thirty-year-old carried their maker up a flight of stairs.
The rest of this essay is for Annual Subscribers and Mighty Supporters. If France’s habit of hiding its most extraordinary things in unremarkable places is the kind of story you come here for — this is exactly why the PAID edition exists. Upgrade to become an Annual Subscriber or Mighty Supporter →