Technique de groupe (group technique)
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Novion workshop.
With label.
1973.
A Benedictine monk and an illuminator, Dom Robert met Jean Lurçat in 1941 at the Abbey of En Calcat : while he never abandoned drawing (his watercolours, painted to life, would serve him as a reservoir of ideas for his tapestries), his work as a cartoonist (he was a member of the A.P.C.T. from its inception) would take on a considerable importance (at least a hundred cartoons, all numbered) and would be highly thought of. His immediately recognisable style, absence of perspective¸motifs inspired from the natural world (in a Paradisiac style) where stylised flora and fauna combine in a festive and extrovert exuberance, where the influence of mediaeval tapestry can be clearly felt ; poetic and colourful, Dom Robert’s cartoons are the incarnation of their author’s spiritual asceticism.
Inaugurated in the Spring of 2015, the musée Dom Robert opened its doors in in the monastery-school in Sorèze in the department of the Tarn.
Although the theme of horses runs through a lot of Dom Robert’s work (cf. “Dartmoor”, “Compagnons de la Marjolaine”, « Farfadet » …), what makes « Technique de groupe » particularly interesting is its origin and the technical aspects of its realisation : unusually, this cartoon is not numbered ; it was Novion, at the time a teacher at the Ecole Nationale d’Art Décoratif in Aubusson, who asked dom Robert to make a watercolour (now held at the museum in Sorèze), thus allowing the weaver more interpretative freedom, and a very different end result, from work made by the workshops of Goubely or Tabard.
Bibliography :
Cat. Expo. Dom Robert, tapisseries récentes, Paris, Galerie la Demeure, 1974, ill. p.9
Multi-authored, Dom Robert, Tapisseries, Editions Julliard, 1980, ill. p.68-69
Multi-authored, Dom Robert, Tapisseries, Editions Siloë-Sodec, 1990, ill. p.116-117
Exhibition Catalogue, Dom Robert, œuvre tissé, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1990, ill.
Multi-authored, la clef des champs, Dom Robert, Editions Privat, 2003, ill. p. 109
