'Art and Soul: The old skill of marbling

When we were small, and still at school, I remember walking down, taking all our new soft-cover books, to the jildsaaz – bookbinder – for having them bound, for after all they were going to last us a whole year. And the bookbinder in our little town would take out a whole sheaf of sheets, each different from the others in colour and swirling patterns, and ask us to select the ‘abri—I remember the sound of the word clearly till now—we wanted him to use as the cover on our jilds.

It was not easy to make our minds up, for the range of abris on view was dazzlingly wide, and enticing, but eventually we would make our selection, hoping that he would remember. And then go and collect the books on the appointed day. It was an annual routine.

Little did we know then, or for long years afterwards, that abri was derived from a Persian word, ‘abr, meaning cloud—so appropriate to the swirling patterns one saw on those sheets—which in turn was related to the technique of marbling that the Turks had developed and perfected. Ebru it is called in Turkish, and it has been in use in that land for close to a thousand years even though there is still some disagreement among scholars there whether the word comes from ‘abr, meaning cloud, or aab, meaning water.

The childhood ‘abris, however, started coming to mind when I saw in a catalogue recently the back of an Indian painting to which had been stuck a sheet with the wonderful marbled design reproduced here. Earlier, one had seen, somewhat casually, Mughal paintings or specimens of calligraphy with marbled borders; and also known that marbling was an art practised in the Sultanates of the Deccan: Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmednagar, and the like. But seeing the reproduction this time, I decided to investigate.

To do that, however, was to be buried under piles of information. But, first, a quick word about marbling, or marblising as it is sometimes called, just in case the term is unfamiliar. Simply put, it is a technique for producing colorful patterns on paper by swirls of paint, traditionally water-based paint, floating on water.

On the thickened liquid surface on which colours keep moving and forming changing patterns, a sheet of paper is placed and then lifted, leaving a print, an impression, upon it. Wonderfully decorative patterns, each of them unique, appear sometimes; the sheets are then dried and used for diverse purposes, mostly as endpapers or borders. Simple methods can yield remarkably complex, and delightful, results.

To go back to information, however. Marbling, which I had thought belonged to an era now past, is apparently alive and well. There are practitioners of it everywhere, and it is no longer confined to paper: there is marbling on glass and ceramics, on textiles and quilts; courses are being offered in schools and colleges; international organisations like the Society of Marbling, with a sizeable membership, have sprung up; every now and then a new book on marbling appears, devoted either to techniques, or history, or even with limited edition samples by reputed marbling artists. As an activity it is truly flourishing, and for this personalised, hand-made art/craft to survive in this machine-age of ours I find gratifying.

When it came to learning something about the history of marbling, however, I was not aware of how tangled it was, and how many versions of it exist. The Ebru of Turkey apart – for a long time, marbled paper which was imported into Europe was simply called ‘Turkish paper’ – there was marbling elsewhere in the Islamic world: in Central Asia and Persia, for instance, and of course in India.

The Venetians are said to have brought marbled paper from these lands to Europe first. Then there was marbling in Japan, known as Suminagashi, meaning, literally "ink-floating", which is said to have come from China: close to two thousand years ago, according to some, only eight hundred or so years ago, according to others.

As almost always was the case, the Japanese refined the art that they had picked up, and produced some exquisite works, originally said to have been used by Shinto priests in their rituals. But everywhere, it seems, the technique of the art was a closely guarded secret, kept within families, or between masters and disciples.

Once introduced to marbled paper, with its marble-like veins, its smoky swirls, however, the Europeans found the art irresistible. The making of beautiful books was a rage, and marbled papers could only add to their lustre. The Dutch, the Italians, the Spaniards, all tried their hands at producing marbled ‘Turkish paper’, but it was not until 1853 when an intrepid Englishman, Charles Woolnough, revealed the secrets of marbling in a book that he published. This naturally angered the community of master marblers for the secrets were all out; but this also led to other developments.

A rival of Woolnough, James Sumner, published Marbler, or the Mystery Unfolded: Showing How Every Bookbinder May Become a Marbler. A Hungarian bookbinder, Josef Halfer of Budapest, went on to publish in 1894 his famous book, Die Fortschritte der Marmorierkunst which was later published in the United States as The Progress of Marbling.

From then on, the mystery from the art was truly gone. But, fortunately, not the art. Today, bookbinders and stationers can do with machine-produced marbled paper— ‘faux marbling’ is the term used —; true devotees of the art, however, are engaged differently. Their tools and materials, have become very sophisticated. But, like the great Suminagashi artists of the past, they—a number of them are still Turks—are constantly extending the frontiers, pushing at the limits, to create some luminous pieces. One can see tulips beginning to blossom on sheets, slender-stemmed vines throwing out delicate tendrils, and great flourishes of calligraphic lines take sudden leaps.

All on sheets that we, in our childhood, knew simply as ‘abris.

This article was published on September 17, 2006