Ulla Vilhelmina Schumacher was born in 1918 to a prosperous middle-class family in Stockholm. She studied drawing and painting for several years after her primary schooling attending a school run by one Otte Sköld, who later became head of Sweden’s Nationalmuseum. Deciding she wanted to go into textile work, she then spent two years training at the Teckniska Skolan (Stockholm’s leading design school, later called Konstfack), apparently gaining a firm grounding in weaving, embroidery, and tapestry work.
With the world at war, she could hardly have picked a worse time to start a career. Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway in 1940 and both had capitulated. And the Soviet Union had invaded nearby Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Meanwhile Sweden maintained its status as a neutral country. After completing her training in 1941, Ulla created a home for herself in a boathouse in Tullinge, a small town which had become a Stockholm suburb. Located southeast of the city center. Tullinge occupies a somewhat inland part of the Stockholm archipelago, overlooking water and hills. Here Ulla opened a small business called Linen Thread (“Lintråden), designing embroidery patterns, printed textiles, sheer draperies and other textile work. She often used naturalistic plant motifs, and seemed to find consistent inspiration in nature.
Tullinge view, a screenshot of a 2014 Tube video posted by Rusakov Particles.
In 1945 Ulla married Paul Carlsson-Percy, a young architect who was the son of one of Sweden’s best known ceramicists, Arthur Percy. Together they settled in Tulllinge, taking the name Percy, and adding an studio, designed by Paul, to their boathouse home. They had three children, two boys and a girl. Although she kept the name Schumacher-Percy, this marriage lasted only eleven years, until 1946. Ulla continued to live and work in this house for the rest of her life, however— I assume with her children, initially. Surprisingly, I find no further record of Paul Percy.
Ulla began to do free-lance work, in part for hemslöjd organizations. She designed a number of rya rugs which could be produced at home, as well as taking on commissions in theater curtains, carpets and tapestries. I don’t have much information on this early work, although biographical accounts note that she did work for hospitals, schools and libraries. Perhaps some of that was at this time.
The earliest image I have of Ulla is from a 1949 issue of HusModern, working on a rya rug with her contemporary, Ingegard Silow.
Photo of Ulla Schumacher-Percy (on left) with Ingegard Silow (on right), HusModern, 1949, no.14. at work on a rya (long-pile) rug.
The first rug of Schumacher-Percy’s I have found is a rya called Gold Labyrinth, composed in 1953 and woven by her in 1956. It has an abstract pattern of circles within circles and was apparently owned originally by Gosta Werner, early director of experimental and non narrative film, film historian, and writer.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, rya rug Gul Labyrint, 241.5 x 120.5 cm, sold Bukowskis Modern Sale 553, 2009, item no. 894.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, tag to rya rug Gul Labyrint.
Shumacher-Percy had collected a number of old rya rugs, and she began to explore, in a series of modern designs, the question of how she could use historical rug motifs. The Skane province of southern Sweden had a long tradition of cushion covers (called “agedyna”) in röllakan or flat-weave, made for the hard benches of horse-drawn carriages. These used primarily the colors of yellow, red, green, black and white, with the occasional blue; and featured standard motifs: eight-pointed star, hour-glass, tree of life, and river horse among others. Below are several undated examples:
Agedyna, 46 x 100 cm, sold at Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, 1/31/2016.
Agedyna, unfinished (unused), 95 x 56 cm, Laholms Auktionskammare, 1/31/2022
Agedyna, with river horse, 57 x 63 cm, Helsingborg’s Auktionskammare 6/16/2021
Rya (high pile) rug, signed by ED, 1815, First Dibs Auction site, previously sold, so size is unknown.
Several of Schumacher-Percy’s rya rugs drew on the hourglass shapes used in this traditional textile iconography. The hourglass had been used historically as a visual reminder of man’s mortality, but Shumacher-Percy used the shape more for its graphic character, and made it more interesting through repetition and color variation. Although she seems to have been initially unsure about exhibiting her work, her rya rugs were rich and intensely colored, and quickly attracted attention. One of her hourglass designs, titled Cathedral Window, was designed in 1949 and not woven until 1957. The example of the rug shown below is worn down to the white backing material, and in poor condition, but its coloration captures the combination of dim light lit by brilliantly colored windows in a cathedral.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, rya rug, titled Cathedral Window, 296 x 199 cm, designed 1949, woven 1957 by Walter Huber. This example sold by Bukowskis 11/14/2018.
Ulla Schumacher Percy, tag from back of rya rug titled Cathedral Window.
Another hourglass design, called simply “Indigo rug,” is particularly stunning, but Schumacher-Percy apparently didn’t show this until 1958 at the important exhibit mounted in Stockholm by the Swedish Society of Industrial Design (Slöjdföreningen).
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, rya rug titled “Indigo Rug”, designed 1949, woven 1957 by Walter Huber, 279x 194 cm, sold Bukowskis Modern Sale 553, 2009, item no. 893.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, tag from back of rya rug titled “Indigo Matta”
For some period in the 1950s, around 1957-58, a younger artist named Walter Huber seems to have lived with Ulla (several of his signed paintings from this period give dates and are labeled, “Tullinge”). He seems to have helped her with a number of projects while also working on his own paintings. It was he who wove the two rugs shown above. He and Ulla seem to have moved in the same artistic circles in Stockholm, and both showed with others in 1960 at a show at Villa Paviljongen which was also his debut exhibition.
Huber was born in Switzerland in 1933, but came to Konstfack on a grant from a Swiss art school in Zurich, Kunstgewerbeschule in 1957, and remained in Sweden for the rest of his life, with some years away to study or teach. Huber became a graphic designer, lithographer, cartoonist, painter and well-respected drawing teacher who founded and ran a drawing school in Stockholm. He well-connected in the world of Swedish artists and a person with many friends and. Like many artists, he and his friends exchanged paintings with each other, and paintings inscribed to him attest to Hubers broad network of Swedish painter and lithographer friends.
Huber studied in Denmark from 1963-69. Having returned from Denmark, Huber seems to have again lived in Tullinge with Schumacher-Percy in the 1970s. This is indicated by the presence of that signatures, dates and the Tullinge location noted on a number of his Ravenna series of paintings from that period.
For someone who seems to have been uncertain about her talent, Ulla Schumacher-Percy found professional success quite rapidly. In 1957, she designed a rya rug called Fire Flame (“Eldslågen), which was commercially produced in Lund. With this rug Schumacher Percy managed to render the evanesce of fire with colored wool. The purchase of Eldslågen by the National Museum of Sweden vaulted her into the world of national and international museum shows.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, rya rug entitled Fire Flame (“Eldslågen) 290 x 170 cm, knotted at Borgs Factories in Lund, 1957. This copy sold at Kalmars Auktionsverk, 10/19/23.
According to Ulla Åschede, Schumacher-Percy showed “exquisite impressionist” embroideries at the National Museum exhibit of decorative textile art in 1961. In 1963 she showed nine new rugs, again influenced by nature. She showed at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, at the Historiska museet in Stockholm and at exhibitions in Trondheim, Bergen and Oslo. She taught for sometime at Sätergläntan, the weaving school run by The Friends of Handicrafts (Handarbetets Vänner) where she was admired as a constructive and helpful teacher and appreciated as a person who welcomed students to her home for conversation. She also had considerable physical presence, as shown in this newspaper photograph, from 1969.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy in Svenska Dagbladet, Feb 15, 1969.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Schumacher-Percy began to play with new ways to use yarn and combine it with her love of nature. A 1966 collage combines an intense blue yarn, sparkling blue sequins, bird feathers and paper images of birds, to slightly startling and surreal effect.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, collage of yarn, sequins, feathers, and paper images of birds on a navy or black background, 58 x 53 cm, 1966. Sold Stockholms Auktionsverk, 9 August, 2022.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, signature and date on bird collage.
In 1974, using a much lighter palette and exploring tapestry weaving techniques, Schumacher-Percy constructed a tapestry of two albatross, one in flight and one dropping for a landing on water. This large weaving, almost 6 feet by 4-1/2 feet seems to mark a new direction in her work. This piece is more abstract, more impressionistic than her embroidered renditions of nature. It is new in both its scale and its dynamic composition, arriving at something profound: a moment in nature captured in fiber work. The fact that the one bird is apparently moving out of the picture frame, or actually, off the edge of the loom, creates a sense of time. The rendering of the other bird, even seen incompletely, creates a sense of weight. The bird, still flying above, is in profile, a silhouette seen with generalized color. The bird landing has become much more of a specifically-colored and rounded body, large and ungainly as it drops its feet to enter the water. And the water! How about those vertical blue wiggles? To me they are evocative of both a rippled water surface and the splash as the bird touches down. This is a fantastic and mature piece of textile work.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, Tapestry weave, Albatross in a lull, (Albatross i stiltje) 179 x 138 cm, sold Stockholms Auktionsverk 6/1/17.
Ulla Schumacher Percy, tag on Albatross tapestry.
When the national bank Riksbanken) commissioned Swedish architect Peter Celsing to design a new Stockholm headquarters in 1970, Celsing chose a dark black granite from Skane to make the building look as impregnable as possible. But he hired several artist collaborators with the intention of making the interior of the bank as light and cheerful as the exterior was heavy. The walls and ceilings of the buildings are wrapped in a thin cut birch veneer from Norrland and Finland and the furniture follows suit, in pale wood. Walls are white, decorated with bright colored art and under the dome of the attic story is a swimming pool and recreational facilities for the staff.
Riksbank building on Brukenbergstorg in Stockholm, Peter Celsing, architect, completed 1976.Photo from riksbank.se.
In 1973, the bank announced a competition for a tapestry to furnish an important interior wall. For this large project, Schumacher-Percy proposed to use a similar palette and technique as used for her Albatross tapestry. The theme of her proposed work was related to Stockholm’s maritime history and source of early wealth. She titled her proposed suite of tapestries, Galjonsfigur or Figureheads. These were to be woven images of ship figureheads, classically statuesque, otherworldly and somewhat inscrutable. She apparently planned these images to be standing, or floating, unattached to ships; each would have had a kind of goddess-of-the- sea aspect. A color lithograph by Schumacher-Percy from this same period juxtaposes an albatross with what seems to be a standing figurehead, still regal and massive if somewhat eroded. I’m not sure, but this looks to me like Schumacher Percy working out what she wanted these figures to be and in what context. The albatross has long symbolized good luck to sailors, so it’s not surprising to see her considering incorporating this bird in the proposed work. The very large woven tapestry, about 7´ 8” x 5´ 7”, shown below, seems to have been one of her proposed figures. Apparently, in order to awaken the viewer´s memory not just of these long-gone maritime sculptures, but to evoke even the sense of ocean smells as well, Schumacher Percy wove into the tapestry submitted as her competition proposal, a number of threads dipped in fragrant tar! Unfortunately, even this surround-sense approach did not win her the competition.
Ulla Schumacher Percy, Tapestry weave, Figurehead with red seaside (Galjonsfigur vid Röde Havet) 243 x 170 cm, woven in 1975, sold Stockholms Auktionsverket 11-14-17.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, Drapery detail of Galjonsfigur tapestry, showing how different sizes of stitches and variations in color create the sense of depth and drapery in the tapestry weave.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, Reverse side of Galjonsfigur tapestry with tag.
Ulla Schumacher-Percy, “Albatross,” Colored Lithograph, #145/170, undated. Sold Kalmar Auktionsverk 11/4/2017
Beginning with her own small textile studio and working, rug by rug and embroidery pieces upon embroidery piece, Ulla Schumacher-Percy built a satisfying and varied career in textiles, including exhibitions of her work at home and abroad. Her work culminated in the design of several series of significant series of large tapestries. In 1979, she was awarded the Prince Eugen medal, an important annual award from the King for “outstanding artistic achievement.”
At the beginning of the 1980s, Schumacher-Percy began to composed what would be her major and final series of woven tapestries, known as the Adelcranz Weavings. But that’s a story for another post!
Bibliography
https://auctionet.com/en Online auction archives and artist biographical information
bukowskis.com, Stockholm Auction house
Garpenhus Auktioner via auctionet
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/about-the-riksbank/history/the-building/the-architecture/
https://www.suzystrindberg.se/copy-of-om-suzy An embroidery student of USP.
theswedishrugblog.wordpress.com 