Spanish rug ca. 1950

Spanish rug ca. 1950.
Wool.
With label of "Patronato de la Fundación Generalísimo Franco, Industrias Artísticas de Madrid". Numbered on the back.
Needs cleaning.
Measurements: 440 x 310 cm.

Spanish rug made of wool, with a cream-colored field of rectangular format that presents in its center a rosette in cross surrounded by festoons. The border consists of three stripes, the central one wider and decorated by a fretwork of foliated motifs joined by golden crimping. The lateral ones are of synthetic vegetal type. The dominant colors are red, orange, green, blue, ochre and cream.

A representative example of the textile repertoire promoted in the post-war period under Franco's state programs for the recovery of traditional decorative arts, this carpet is part of the historicist aesthetic of the mid-twentieth century. Its monumental proportions suggest a protocol or institutional use. In the specific case of Persian style carpets, they denote the desire to emulate the formal and technical repertoires of this Iranian tradition. The fidelity in the design, the quality of the knotting and the use of noble materials reveal a clear desire to reinterpret, from an institutional framework, the oriental models that for centuries nourished the European taste for the exotic and the refined.