Book of the day > Hannah Ryggen: Weaving the World. Walther König. The first substantial monograph on the Swedish-born, Norwegian modernist textile artist Hannah Ryggen, considered to be one of the most significant Scandinavian artists of the twentieth century. It includes works from her entire oeuvre, with an emphasis on tapestries from the 1930s pertaining to her political and social engagement.  She was the first female Norwegian artist to be represented at the Venice Biennale in 2012 six of her principal tapestries from the 1930s were exhibited at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel.  Self-trained, she worked on a standing loom constructed by her husband, the painter Hans Ryggen.  She lived on a farm on a Norwegian Fjord and dyed her yarn with local plants. Her tapestries are visual responses to major and minor events, conflicts and processes; she captured the world in her weaving. In the early 1930s, she addressed fascism and the destructive consequences of Nazi power. A pacifist who subscribed to Scandinavian feminist and leftist journals, she was active in the Norwegian Communist Party and international workers’ movements. Violence and abuse are visualised in an idiom reminiscent of modern, critical history painting. Her narrative drive goes hand in hand with a free accentuation of abstract patterns, shapes and colours.