Salmiya

  According to his Anatolian kilim opus (p. 8), Cassin had found this gorgeous yellow ground rug fragment in 1981 when traveling on his own in Anatolia. He had left his German travel companion from Nuremberg in Istanbul as, according to Jack, the guy wasn't able to behave properly. The purpose of the trip was twofold: to find one or two collectibles in Turkey and "to do some first-hand research into early archetype rugs and kelim." As to the former, he only found one rug worth to take home (the above) but no kilim. Note that Jack always emphasized that the small collection of archetype kilims from Anatolia was already in his possession before he went to Turkey. At least seven of these kilims are currently at auction in Philadelphia (see my previous post ). The fragment is what he calls the "King of the yellow rug group". As far as we know, Cassin kept this rug for almost forty years and never even considered it for sale. I am quite sure that he did not s...

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...

"Why Michael Franses? Well, I suppose because he represents one large tail of the rug dealers’, highly skewed-to-the-right, distribution. Having tried for decades to paint himself an expert and collector of high-end oriental rugs and honorable dealer, the façade has apparently crumbled. That the Bellini carpet (the object of probably the most egregious fraud of the past 20 years or so in the world of antique rugs) was in his possession before he sold it to Dennis Dodds, I had also noted some time ago when browsing the internet. I did not pay too much attention then since I liked the decoration of Dodd’s home with certainly highly valuable pieces anyway, most probably the only honest reason why rich individuals should collect antique rugs: to display them at home not store them in an inventory. It’s interesting that a simple sting operation exposed Mr. Franses true colors to the interested public. Franses enjoys now, as an employee of the Qatar Museums Authority, life in one of...