DONAZIONE ELDA CECCHELE

19 November 2024 – 2 March 2025
Venice, Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo

A weaver, artist and craftswoman, Elda Cecchele (San Martino di Lupari, 1915 – Cittadella, 1998) expressed her talent with threads and ribbons of every material, from leather to plastic, silk, cotton, fur, trimmings and lace with all their colours. The natural world and her surroundings were often her source of inspiration. The originality of her achievement was to create textiles with an artistic value that far exceeded the level of what was normally produced by weavers in their country houses in the last century.

Elda began work by producing household linen and then moved on to the creation of art fabrics. She soon made a name for herself and was invited twice, in 1956 and 1960, to the Venice Biennale in the applied arts section (one of the fabrics on display at the time is preserved in the archives at Palazzo Mocenigo). She also worked with Roberta di Camerino and Franca Polacco in Venice and Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence in the 1950s and 1960s.

The museum hosts the Elda Cecchele Textile Archive: an important collection comprising all the documents and most of the textile materials left in the workshop of the Venetian weaver Elda Pavan Cecchele at the time when she ceased business (in 1981), and donated to the museum by her heirs in 2014. The museum has received not only textile materials, but also documentary materials, constituting a collection unique in the history of Italian 20th-century fashion, if we exclude the grand ateliers and great names of haute couture.

The archive preserved in the museum consists of two macro-sections: Documents and Materials. The documentary section contains some 2500 sheets and is organised into 15 series, including one that brings together all the technical-graphic material in 41 notebooks and some 500 technical entries, graphically representing the weaver’s whole oeuvre. The materials section in turn contains some 2200 pieces and is divided into 13 series.

Admission with the Museum’s hours and ticket.