The Cassin Collection at Auction (III) Jack Runs the Voodoo Down
The third part of the series on the occasion of the upcoming sale of Jack Cassin's collection is about Anatolian kilims. Jack had been lucky enough to find his masterpieces already in the late 1970s, before a British archaeologist, James Mellaart, became involved and Anatolian kilims became so popular. It was in fact Cassin, the spin doctor, who had contacted Mellaart in the early 1980s, and both developed the idea that Anatolian kilims might echo cults in neolithic societies of that region, an absurd and ludicrous hypothesis to the extreme. Textile and weaving expert Marla Mallett had long debunked the major claims in Mellaart, Hirsch and Balpinar's Goddess of Anatolia (1989) as utter nonsense. Cassin, who had initiated the project, later withdrew his collaboration when he noticed, already in the 1980s, that Mellaart was a fraud who had invented findings at the Çatal Hüyük excavation site in Anatolia. Cassin wrote about that in some detail in what he called his Anatol...