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Lot Essay
Innovative and without pomp. This carpet is like its patron, the last maharaja of Indore.
Yeshwant Rao Holkar II (1908-1961) is the very figure of the modern maharaja. From a mother who is the first woman to drive in India and a notoriously anti-British father with a strong interest in progress in all its forms, the Indian prince grows up during the British Raj in a relatively open, sometimes unconventional, environment. The studies he pursues in England as a teenager change his vision of ancestral India. His Belgian tutor, Marcel Hardy, opens doors to a new world to him. His curiosity and the encounters he makes in Europe - Henri-Pierre Roché (his factotum), the absolute figure of freedom who explores what it is to live in every possible way and Eckart Muthesius (the architect of the palace), the heir to the decorative utopias of the turn of the century - immerse him in a certain modernity, then misunderstood in India. The successive weddings with divorced Americans shock, the radical aesthetic choices surprise, the prolonged stays in the West annoy. The sovereign tries to lead his state with an elegant modernity, and ultimately a lot of detachment, for more than thirty years. Modernity is his form of resistance against the British and his way to feel free.
Lucid about his lack of political power and rich with billions, the young aesthete prince throws himself headlong into the construction of an ultra-modern palace in the heart of what is today Madhya Pradesh. It's unprecedented. The approach is all the more audacious as it takes place at the end of the 1920s, at the beginning of the Great Depression, in a traditional India still under British domination. It is the inspiring story of an iconic couple, formed with his first Indian wife, who plunges into the Roaring Twenties and who passionately creates a monument of taste dedicated to the European avant-garde. Designed as a private living space, the palace named Manik Bagh (the ruby garden) reflects their cutting-edge art de vivre. Cosmopolitan and so young - he is twenty years old, she is fourteen - they bring together around them, under the influence of a few European models, a constellation of fascinating characters: mentors, artists, architects, decorators, jewelers and designers. Nearly a decade is dedicated to beauty, elegance and creation in which the greatest talents of the time participate, from Man Ray to Constantin Brancusi via Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Marcel Breuer, Ivan Silva da Bruhns, Djo-Bourgeois, Desny et Clément Nauny, D.I.M, Michel Dufet, Hélène Henry, René Herbst, René Lalique, Hans et Wassily Luckhardt, Jean Perzel, Jean Puiforcat, Lily Reich, Louis Sognot and Charlotte Alix. This almost perfect moment unfortunately ends with the brutal and mysterious death of the maharani in 1937 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The beautiful story is interrupted, the artistic momentum is extinguished, the palace falls into oblivion and melancholy sets in.
This unique, custom-made rug for the living room on the first floor of the palace allows us to rediscover Manik Bagh and revives the desire of an oriental dandy to create a total work of art. Da Silva Bruhns is very busy working for the royal palace with a rug placed in nearly every room, a nod to Indian interiors. The primary function of the carpet is to magnify the furnishings with which it is associated to create coherent and harmonious sets. In the palace, paintings are not found on the walls but on the floor. Carpets act like abstract paintings with flat and architectural compositions. They are discreet ornamentation, just like the curtains and upholstery, whose chromatic range is in harmony with the rest. This brown and beige carpet dialogues perfectly with the beige-toned wall surface, the brown wood color cabinet for records and gramophone, the well polished bronze sculpture Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi and the cubist-African head sculpture of Gustave Miklos, Tête de Reine. With its geometric lines, clean shapes, sobriety and elegance, the rug is the outer body of the maharaja.
– Géraldine Lenain, art historian and author of Le Dernier Maharaja d'Indore (éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2022), a biography on the last Maharaja
Yeshwant Rao Holkar II (1908-1961) is the very figure of the modern maharaja. From a mother who is the first woman to drive in India and a notoriously anti-British father with a strong interest in progress in all its forms, the Indian prince grows up during the British Raj in a relatively open, sometimes unconventional, environment. The studies he pursues in England as a teenager change his vision of ancestral India. His Belgian tutor, Marcel Hardy, opens doors to a new world to him. His curiosity and the encounters he makes in Europe - Henri-Pierre Roché (his factotum), the absolute figure of freedom who explores what it is to live in every possible way and Eckart Muthesius (the architect of the palace), the heir to the decorative utopias of the turn of the century - immerse him in a certain modernity, then misunderstood in India. The successive weddings with divorced Americans shock, the radical aesthetic choices surprise, the prolonged stays in the West annoy. The sovereign tries to lead his state with an elegant modernity, and ultimately a lot of detachment, for more than thirty years. Modernity is his form of resistance against the British and his way to feel free.
Lucid about his lack of political power and rich with billions, the young aesthete prince throws himself headlong into the construction of an ultra-modern palace in the heart of what is today Madhya Pradesh. It's unprecedented. The approach is all the more audacious as it takes place at the end of the 1920s, at the beginning of the Great Depression, in a traditional India still under British domination. It is the inspiring story of an iconic couple, formed with his first Indian wife, who plunges into the Roaring Twenties and who passionately creates a monument of taste dedicated to the European avant-garde. Designed as a private living space, the palace named Manik Bagh (the ruby garden) reflects their cutting-edge art de vivre. Cosmopolitan and so young - he is twenty years old, she is fourteen - they bring together around them, under the influence of a few European models, a constellation of fascinating characters: mentors, artists, architects, decorators, jewelers and designers. Nearly a decade is dedicated to beauty, elegance and creation in which the greatest talents of the time participate, from Man Ray to Constantin Brancusi via Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Marcel Breuer, Ivan Silva da Bruhns, Djo-Bourgeois, Desny et Clément Nauny, D.I.M, Michel Dufet, Hélène Henry, René Herbst, René Lalique, Hans et Wassily Luckhardt, Jean Perzel, Jean Puiforcat, Lily Reich, Louis Sognot and Charlotte Alix. This almost perfect moment unfortunately ends with the brutal and mysterious death of the maharani in 1937 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The beautiful story is interrupted, the artistic momentum is extinguished, the palace falls into oblivion and melancholy sets in.
This unique, custom-made rug for the living room on the first floor of the palace allows us to rediscover Manik Bagh and revives the desire of an oriental dandy to create a total work of art. Da Silva Bruhns is very busy working for the royal palace with a rug placed in nearly every room, a nod to Indian interiors. The primary function of the carpet is to magnify the furnishings with which it is associated to create coherent and harmonious sets. In the palace, paintings are not found on the walls but on the floor. Carpets act like abstract paintings with flat and architectural compositions. They are discreet ornamentation, just like the curtains and upholstery, whose chromatic range is in harmony with the rest. This brown and beige carpet dialogues perfectly with the beige-toned wall surface, the brown wood color cabinet for records and gramophone, the well polished bronze sculpture Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi and the cubist-African head sculpture of Gustave Miklos, Tête de Reine. With its geometric lines, clean shapes, sobriety and elegance, the rug is the outer body of the maharaja.
– Géraldine Lenain, art historian and author of Le Dernier Maharaja d'Indore (éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2022), a biography on the last Maharaja