MIRIAM SACKS (SOUTH AFRICAN-BRITISH 1922-2004)
STARRY NIGHT
signed with initials lower right; signed and dated Miriam Sacks 1962 on the reverse
handmade tapestry
81 x 103cm; 32 x 40 1/2in
unframed

MIRIAM SACKS (1922-2004) (LOTS 80-87)

Introduction
Miriam Sacks’ work is something of which one can properly use the word unique; it is the only one of its kind I know of, and it is a very particular and extraordinary kind.
Maxwell Fry

Miriam Sacks’ remarkable tapestries cover a wide range of themes with her work capturing a variety of images and ideas. Some are abstract, some symbolic and some realistic; all deploy vivid colours and explore diverse themes relating to man’s condition and struggles, his relationship with nature and mechanisation.

Sack's artistic vision was inspired by her childhood in South Africa: its distinctive landscape and coastline, its fauna and flora and its ethnic diversity. Her rigorous schooling was also formative: she became a talented pianist, studied ballet and was awarded a Masters in Social Anthropology at Cape Town University. But it was a trip to New York in 1956, and a visit to The Cloisters, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that transformed her artistic production. At The Cloisters Sacks was captivated by the seven late sixteenth century tapestries that comprise The Hunt of the Unicorn. Immediately thereafter she embarked on her unique, highly distinctive and much-fêted method of tapestry making.

Sacks had moved from South Africa to London after the Second World War while her husband was studying medicine at Oxford. Upon his graduation as an eye surgeon in 1950 they moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There Sacks collaborated with the painter Thea Hunt who had trained at the Slade School of Art and had set up an art school offering lessons for children. After Hunt stepped back from teaching due to ill health, Sacks took over running the school and championed the showing of children’s art both in the USA in the late 1950s and in London at the International Exhibition of Children’s Art in 1961. The following year she had her own first solo exhibition of her work at the Henry Lidichi Gallery, Cape Town.

Returning to the UK in 1964, Sacks’ gained international prominence when her tapestries were exhibited at the British Embassy in Washington. Four were shown to great acclaim at the Embassy in May 1965; the following year Sacks sent over a further sixteen works to form the highlight of a group exhibition promoting British tapestry in the Embassy’s Rotunda; the exhibition subsequently toured to other locations across America. Sacks’ acclaim in the USA brought her to the attention of curators in the UK. In 1967 her work was included in exhibitions at the Design Centre, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Camden Art Centre. And two years later she had a solo exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, then in Soho, where the opening address was given by the prominent architect, artist and writer Maxwell Fry.

In 1970 she shared an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge with leading potters Bernard Leach (1887-1979) and Lucie Rie (1902-1995), and her work was shown in Edinburgh, Leicester and at the Stellenbosch Museum in her native South Africa. More exhibitions followed: at Royal Festival Hall (1971), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1971 & 1973), the South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Bevilacqua La Masa Art Foundation, Venice (1972), and a series of shows at Leighton House (1977, 1981, 1985, 1988). The last international exhibition of her work was at the Irma Stern Museum, University of Cape Town in 1996. It was post-apartheid, Nelson Mandela was President and the exhibition was opened by the new South African Minister of Culture.

As well as medieval tapestries, Sacks acknowledged other formative influences in her work including Louise Bourgeois, whose mother had been a weaver, and Jean Lurçat, arguably the leading tapestry maker of the twentieth century. However, she found the latter’s loom woven tapestries too machine-like and precise in surface finish for her taste. Describing the influences that shaped her work over the years Sacks wrote ‘Threads physically and spiritually interconnect with my life experiences, talents and knowledge, gained over decades. It combines sight and insight, enhanced by my knowledge… as a social anthropologist… as well as music, not to mention dance. It goes back to memories of childhood.’