Surprisingly, the term “mangle” is not unfamiliar to me. As a young man, I would deliver our household laundry to a commercial cleaners at an old brick factory on the edge of town. The building was always sweltering—winter or summer—as heat and steam escaped from windows and ducts into the cool air above the swift river cascading beside the building. One distinctive feature of the scene was their phalanx of manglers: large, flat ironing machines with rotating, heated rollers that pulled in and pressed bed sheets and other large, flat fabrics in a continuous action. Through my youthful eyes, these apocalyptic wringer-like devices appeared equally poised to “mangle” their subservient operators as anything their vulnerable hands might feed into them. xxxxxx

Fortunately, manglers have a more benign and artful history, one that is beautifully told in a recent publication by Jay Raymond. Mangle Boards of Northern Europe is a folio-sized book which lays out the extraordinary story of artfully-carved mangle boards, in use for centuries in parts of Europe for pressing laundry. While the history of mangle boards dates back to Roman times, the text and its collection of 267 mangle boards in museum and private collections throughout Northern Europe, focuses on the 15^th-19^th centuries.

Considered folk art by many, the appearance of figures, animals, rondels and intricate geometrics can be found in sophisticated, fine furniture designs from countries where mangles were in general use: Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, the Scandinavian countries, and a host of Eastern European nations, as well. Remarkable in their complexity and aesthetic appeal, mangle boards were a utilitarian feature in most households. These planks of wood (primarily birch, beech or oak) were used in conjunction with a rolling pin to smooth wrinkles from linen. A flat board, measuring 5” wide and 26” long would have a smooth underside, leaving the top surface for the introduction of a handle and a wide range of designs inspired by local tastes and the imagination of the carver.

Jay Raymond, who researched 7,000 mangle boards for their unique design characteristic, then describes how a mangleplanken might be used: “After being washed and almost dried, the cloth would be folded into a long, narrow band and rolled onto a rolling pin. With the tightly wrapped rolling pin set upon a table, the user placed the mangle board on top at a right angle to the direction of the roll. With one hand on the mangle board handle, the user pressed down on the closest end. With the other hand she or he pressed down on the opposite end. While pressing, the user pushed the board back and forth, rolling the roller. By shifting the mangle board from one side of the roll to the other, the user pressed the cloth’s entire surface.”

The book layout, itself, is stunning. Generously formatted on 15 x 12” pages, the use of spot gloss on heavily coated stock calls attention to the artwork itself. Enlargements of detail enrich and enliven the material, bring home the concept that mangle boards are a beautiful—but often obscure and overlooked—contribution to the European art scene. Raymond, who spent six years on this project, has assumed an analytic approach to parsing and categorizing mangle boards. In addition to considering the craft of design and decoration, country-by-country, he also groups mangle boards by categories like “decoration, Illustration and expression.” He explains, “…a mangle board is not an essay: It does not tell a story. A mangle board is made of wood, carved and sometimes painted. The language of the mangle board is visual, taken in by the eyes. Shapes, patterns, texture, line, composition, color, light, space, and so on are the components of the language, and these are the means by which a mangle board visually expresses what the board maker strived for.”

 

Dipping into the text becomes a guided tour of Renaissance and Reformation Europe at the dawn of the Modern Age. In, The Mangle Board’s Niche in Courtship in Sweden (examples, left, 1686 and 1765), we learn that the mangle board, crafted by a male suiter, “served as an engagement ring, presented to the woman of his heart’s desire as a proposal of marriage.” This and other objects of daily use continued to be exchanged as the seriousness of the suitor’s intent increased. A 1910 text on Northland courtship suggests that, “The twist and turns on the scotching-knife or mangle-board are, therefore, emblematic of the tortuous dreamland ways along which the lover’s thoughts wandered while he plied his knife and chips fell fast to the floor. The human heart remains pretty much the same, no matter how times and manners may change.”

In the chapter on Norwegian mangle boards (examples, below, right, not dated), Raymond points out that historians, exploring the treatment of fabrics and lace “before the iron,” relied on other objects to flatten and smooth clothing and accessories. Rubbing stones made of polished moraine stone or glass were in use well into the 1800s. Lace was treated, until recently, as well, with the jawbone of a cow or a pig tooth. Mangle boards were in use in Norway, however, with the earliest dating from 1590. One of Raymond’s sources (Fett) states that around 1700, “a new kind of style of folk art came into being, one that expressed ‘a more direct sense of the natural world…the vine was reborn and achieved a dramatic predominance. It was as almost as if no other motifs existed. In their forms, all things were forced into the power of the vine.” The text then explores the fascinating history of the acanthus leave as a predominant natural design element with origins back to the Greeks, becoming a ubiquitous feature of Norwegian ornamentation, including mangle boards.

Sampling another chapter in the book, Iceland’s mangle boards (trafakefli), left, side and top view (1685), occupy a unique position in the multi-nation study of the object. Iceland’s geographic isolation contributes significantly to the evolution of its mangle board motifs. The absence of wood sources (birch forests were depleted during the Middle Ages) made driftwood and imported material the principle sources for carved mangle boards. The author points out that “Except for sharing a common purpose, the mangle boards of Iceland stand apart from [others] by making explicit and complex use of three dimensions and, thereby, existing within the realm of sculpture. So, regardless of Iceland’s historic, centuries-long connections to Denmark and Norway, “its mangle boards look as if they developed outside of any foreign influence.”

Animal heads, human hands, and plant forms appear regularly on Icelandic mangle boards. But, in spite of their sometimes “inelastic” properties, “the boards of Iceland are not primitive…The animal head handles and grips and the dismembered human body parts convey a quality of the primitive temperament. The idiosyncratic character of the boards adds to this quality, making it seem as if they are aliens, i.e., completely outside the European culture. [But], there is too much sophistication and evidence of practiced hands to say that the surviving boards are the once-in-a-lifetime efforts of men producing them for their intended brides or wives. It is clarifying to say that they are sophisticated folk art.”

Left: Mangle Board, Iceland (detail), 1632.

For the reader, Mangle Boards of Northern Europe will be an eye-opening experience. This monumental effort on the part of its author, Jay Raymond, sheds new light on an ancient, time-honored art form. Going well beyond the realm of ‘craft,’ the wide variety of mangle boards pictured in detail, along with the supporting text, opens the door to new levels of curatorial scholarship and public interest in these extraordinary sculptural forms. Like most ‘outsider’ or folk art, most of the artisans are known only to history. But the legacy they left behind, in a time when human effort, time and skill were still very much a part of the fabric of civilization’s Coming of Age, we can now assign the lowly mangle board a vaunted place in the history of Western European art.

By Richard J, Friswell, Managing Editor

The book, Mangle Boards of Northern Europe can be purchased at Amazon:

“This folio book is a visual feast in all aspects. Two hundred sixty-seven boards from eighteen European and American museums and four private collections were carefully selected. Each of the countries; Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, has a chapter of its own. Mangle Boards of Northern Europe is prodigious: 288 pages, 15″ high x 12″ wide, weighing 8 lbs! The reader will end their journey delighted, with a new and deeper appreciation for these works of art.”

http://www.amazon.com/Mangle-Boards-Northern-Europe-Raymond/dp/0578158035/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439401485&sr=1-1&keywords=mangle+boards+of+northern+europe