Figure on Ground: Spectatorship and the Tapis Modernes of Ivan Da Silva Bruhns

During the interwar years, Ivan Da Silva Bruhns became one of France’s most celebrated designers of tapis modernes, or “modern rugs.” Despite the limited scholarly attention that Da Silva Bruhns has received, his rugs have long been considered a pinnacle of inter-war modernism. However, whereas most writers then and now have largely focused on the modernism of his rugs on a compositional level, this article considers what was quintessentially modern about their mode of addressing spectators. As the essay argues, the modernism of his interwar rugs turned on an evolving relationship between figure and ground—one in which a spectator assumed the role of figure-on-ground who both interrupted and completed the rugs’ compositions, as abstract or quasi-abstract pictures underfoot.