Muristek
She was taught by Josef Albers, bought rugs for Stanley Kubrick, and lives where Dr Guillotin experimented with his equipment. Yet, at 87, there’s only one person the great textile artist wants to impress
Sheila Hicks – American-born textile artist, Parisian since 1964 and, at 87, en pleine forme – has a plan for my visit, but it’s not entirely clear to me what it is. She greets me outside her studio – the platonic ideal of a cobbled courtyard in the Latin Quarter, with creeper-draped buildings of startling beauty, an ancient well, even an elderly gent processing elegantly out the gates on a bicycle. Speaking in the soft but decisive tones of a lady of great age who knows precisely what she’s about, she points to various windows – here Hockney had a studio, here Tony Richardson, you know? He was married to Vanessa Redgrave. Here Robert Carsen, the opera director. Balthus had his studio up here. She proceeds at a stately pace towards the courtyard’s back entrance. Here Dr Guillotin experimented. He placed his equipment here you see and the blood ran downhill, here. He tried it out on sheep.
We pass into the street. It eventually transpires, via more points of interest (here, a revolutionary newspaper was produced), that we are going for lunch at the platonic ideal of a Parisian bistro; I half expect us to wander off to Les Deux Magots for coffee with Gertrude Stein. We are also, at last, going to talk about her work as an artist – if that one word does not seem too flimsy when one considers an oeuvre that has encompassed design and magazine editing and tapestry and sculpture and weaving and painting and collaboration with architects. She is about to open an exhibition of her work at the Hepworth Wakefield, just the latest chapter in a long life that began in Nebraska in 1934. Her artistic lineage is mighty: it stretches back to the Bauhaus, since it was the great German painter Josef Albers who trained her at Yale – Josef being the husband of the also great German weaver Anni Albers, both of whom had been stalwarts of the school during the Weimar republic before fleeing to the US.
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