Butterflies
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton brothers workshop.
With a ribbon.
Circa 1960.
Lurçat's body of work is immense; however, it is his role in the renewal of the art of tapestry that has ensured his lasting legacy. From 1917, he began with needlepoint works, and then, in the 1920s and 30s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins Manufactory dates from 1937, when he simultaneously discovered the Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, which definitively inspired him to dedicate himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions initially with François Tabard, and then, during his time in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: large stitches, counted tones, and numbered, drawn cartoons.
A gigantic production then began (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by the desire to involve his painter friends, the creation of the APCT (Association of Tapestry Cartoon Painters) and the collaboration with the La Demeure gallery and Denise Majorel, then by his role as a tireless propagator of the medium throughout the world.
His woven work testifies to a specifically decorative art of imagery, in a very personal symbolic iconography, cosmogonic (sun, planets, zodiac, 4 elements…), stylized vegetal, animal (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras…), standing out against a background without perspective (deliberately far removed from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he sometimes embellishes these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…) and whose culmination will be the “Song of the World” (Jean Lurçat Museum, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), unfinished at his death.
His trip to Brazil in 1954 was a decisive source of inspiration for Lurçat: the flora and fauna (especially butterflies, a frequent theme) of the Amazon appeared repeatedly: “What interests me in the butterfly… is the extraordinary invention constituted by the interlacing of forms, the sparkle of colors, this gratuitous aspect of coloring…” (Claude Faux, Lurçat à haute voix, 1962, p. 151). Butterflies on a yellow background reappear in several series: “Peacock Moth,” “Copacabana,” “Marcenac Butterflies,”…
Bibliography:
Exhibition catalog, Jean Lurçat, New Tapestries, Maison de la Pensée Française, 1956;
Exhibition catalog, The Domains of Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1986;
Colloquium, Jean Lurçat and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée Départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992
; Exhibition catalog, Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004;
Jean Lurçat, The Song of the World, Angers, 2007
