Yvette Cauquil-Prince

Who is Yvette Cauquil-Prince?

Yvette Cauquil-Prince was a Belgian-born weaver and master craftswoman who created tapestries in direct collaboration with renowned 20th-century artists and/or their estates. She is best known for her association with the artist Marc Chagall, which resulted in over 40 tapestries, but she also created tapestries of art works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Brassai, Alexander Calder, Niki de Saint Phalle, and others.

Cauquil-Prince attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Belgium, but her mastery of tapestry weaving was largely self-taught, inspired by her study of Coptic textiles and tapestries from the Renaissance and Middle Ages.

She established her first studio in Paris in the late 1950s and later worked in Corsica. In 1963 Marie Cuttoli engaged Cauquil-Prince to weave Picasso tapestries, under the condition that she would remain in the background and never meet the artist personally. One of these tapestries, La Fermière, is now in the Picasso Museum at Antibes.

Cauquil-Prince was awarded the Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite in 1977 by the French government.