The Woman Who Rewrote Rug History
In the London boutique of The Row on New Bond Street, among the most considered retail interiors in the city, a rug sits beneath an ochre sofa as if it has always been there. It hasn't. It was made a century ago, in a workshop in Algeria, at the instruction of a woman most people have rarely heard of.
Her name was Marie Cuttoli.
Born in 1879, Cuttoli — née Bordes — was a French-Algerian patron who moved between Paris and Algiers with the ease of someone equally at home in both worlds. She was married to a French senator, she collected Picasso, and she had a particular eye for the point at which craft and art become indistinguishable from one another. In 1920, she installed two looms in her home in Algiers and hired four local weavers. What followed was one of the more quietly radical interventions in the history of decorative art.
The weavers she inherited were skilled but conventional — their repertoire drawn from a tradition of ornate patterns, gaudy colours, familiar motifs. Cuttoli's ambition was different. She wanted to know what would happen if a rug carried no decoration at all. She commissioned a piece in plain white wool. The weavers' families were, reportedly, furious.
To calm them, she offered something better than plain white. She asked them to weave from designs by a then-unknown artist named Jean Lurçat.
Lurçat's early designs were unlike anything the weavers had produced before — figurative but not decorative, rooted in a visual language closer to fresco or tapestry than to the ornamental carpet tradition. One piece, a plain ground with green and yellow markings, was acquired by the Japanese ambassador. The other, known as Garden, was bought by the couturier Jacques Doucet after he encountered it on the Myrbor stand at the 1925 International Exhibition in Paris.
Encouraged, Cuttoli opened the Maison Myrbor — a gallery on the rue Vignon near the Champs-Élysées — with showrooms designed by André Lurçat, Jean's younger brother. It was the first gallery to specialise in limited-edition rugs woven from works by the major painters of the moment. The inaugural exhibition, held in December 1926, displayed rugs by Lurçat alongside work by Louis Marcoussis and Fernand Léger. Picasso followed shortly after. Then Miró, Calder, Klee, Ernst, Arp, de Chirico, Dufy, Derain.
Myrbor was not merely a rug shop. It sold paintings, supplied embroideries to haute-couture houses, and ran an interior decoration department. But the rugs were the thing — the proof that the flat woven surface could be as serious an artistic medium as canvas or stone.
Helena Rubinstein acquired a Picasso Myrbor rug for her New York apartment, where it lay in the hall next to a Lurçat. The designs were registered trademarks. These were not reproductions or decorative interpretations — they were editions, authorised and limited, in the same spirit that a print or a cast sculpture is an edition.
That distinction matters. It is the same logic that governs the Editions at Scott's Shop: the idea that a rug can be a work, not merely a surface. That naming a rug after Albers or Prouvé is not a marketing decision but a statement about lineage — about where this object sits in the longer history of things made with care and intention.
The Lurçat rug at The Row has been there for years. It is not for sale. It is there because it belongs — because The Row understands, as Cuttoli understood, that a room is not finished until its floor is considered.
Marie Cuttoli died in 1973, ninety-three years old. Much of her personal collection was donated to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Maison Myrbor is largely forgotten outside specialist circles. But the idea she advanced — that the rug is a legitimate site of artistic ambition, not a background for other things — has proven more durable than the gallery itself.
It is an idea worth returning to.
Explore the Editions at Scott's Shop — hand-knotted limited edition rugs made by Goodweave-certified artisans in Nepal.
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