Balkan Fabrications

Taking as its departure point the painting 'Serbian Women' by Fra Newbery, who, as Director of the Glasgow School of Art, had sown the seeds for the internationally acclaimed Scottish modern movement, Howard?s new book explores the nature and place of Newbery?s move to Balkan subjects in the 1920s. In so doing it simultaneously focuses on the work of his wife, Jessie Newbery, the original head of embroidery at Glasgow, whose interest in Balkan textiles proved an inspiration for her husband?s painterly experiments. Through probing the Newberys? interpretations of folk crafts and conventions of southeastern Europe, the book considers what they, and others whose gazes were similarly directed, have to say about notions of womanhood and modernity. Thereby it also reveals the refinement of their respective eyes as it charts their discernment of threads of quotidian beauty.