Pip Rau obituary | Collecting

My delivery mom, Doris Rau, generally known as Pip, who has died aged 86, was a seller in central Asian vintage textiles and costumes.

For 40 years she ran a store known as Rau in Islington, north London, that includes inventory that got here from Uzbekistan, northern Pakistan and above all Afghanistan, a rustic she adored and which for a few years she visited yearly.

Movie designers typically got here calling to make use of what she needed to provide, and The Shining (1980) and Gladiator (2000) have been amongst many films to characteristic gadgets borrowed from her assortment.

Her fabulous assemblage of ikat textiles, made with a posh resist-dying and weaving approach, was so good that that it was exhibited on the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007.

Pip was born in London to Jewish mother and father, Fred Rau, a commodities dealer, and his spouse, Hanna (nee Felsenstein). Rebellious by nature, she by no means settled in any faculty for lengthy and was repeatedly expelled.

In 1954, aged 16, she enrolled at St Martin’s Faculty of Artwork in London, however her father quickly packed her off to Israel, believing she wanted the self-discipline of kibbutz life. By the point she was 19, nonetheless, each her mother and father had died. She studied for 2 years at London’s Central Faculty of Arts and Crafts, in addition to at artwork colleges in Jerusalem, San Francisco and Paris, later boasting that she failed to finish any of the programs. In Paris she lived on the celebrated Beat lodge, and was given her first joint by the beat poet Gregory Corso.

In 1960 Pip travelled throughout the US, and in New York she was imprisoned for 5 days for her half in a nuclear disarmament rally. Later that yr, driving from London to Russia, she was nearly killed in a automotive crash. Whereas she was in hospital, a Russian military colonel fell in love together with her and proposed marriage. She declined. The next yr she grew to become pregnant with me and had me adopted. My delivery father was the potter Robin Welch.

In 1963 Pip married the Israeli actor Ili Gorlizki and had two extra sons, Yoram and Alexander. She and Ili have been divorced in 1975 after an extended separation.

By then Pip had purchased her store in Islington, stocking and re-stocking it with materials she gathered on frequent journeys to central Asia. She had first visited Afghanistan in 1973, driving with a buddy from London to Herat, on the Iranian border. In Kabul she grew to become well-known among the many sellers there for her adventurous spirit in addition to her eager eye and fierce negotiating abilities. She determined to shut Rau in 2014, feeling that it had run its pure course.

After on the lookout for me for about 10 years, Pip lastly contacted me in 1997 and we subsequently established a stunning relationship. In retirement she devoted extra consideration to her personal collections of Uzbek embroideries, ikats and early Twentieth-century central Asian images, and he or she continued to journey broadly. She had maintained her common visits to Afghanistan effectively into the Nineteen Nineties, even after the rise of the Taliban, however went there little or no after 9/11, a lot to her disappointment.

She is survived by me, Yoram and Alexander, and by her two older brothers, John and Stephen.