Butterflies
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton brothers workshop.
With a ribbon.
Circa 1960.
Lurçat's work is immense: however, it is his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him a place in posterity. From 1917, he began with canvas works, then, in the 1920s and 30s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins dates back to 1937, when he simultaneously discovered the Apocalypse tapestry of Angers, which definitively encouraged him to devote himself to tapestry. He will tackle technical issues first with François Tabard, then on the occasion of his installation in Aubusson during the war, he will define his system: large stitches, counted tones, numbered drawn cartoons.
A gigantic production then begins (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by the desire to involve his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Tapestry Cartoonists) and the collaboration with the La Demeure gallery and Denise Majorel, then by his role as tireless propagator of the medium around the World.
His woven work testifies to a specifically decorative art of imagery, in a very personal, cosmogonic symbolic iconography (sun, planets, zodiac, 4 elements...), stylized vegetation, animals (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras...), standing out against a background without perspective (deliberately distant from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he sometimes enameled these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the great themes are addressed from the war: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth...) and whose culminating point will be the 'Chant du Monde' (Jean Lurçat Museum, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), unfinished at his death.
His journey to Brazil in 1954 was a decisive source of inspiration for Lurçat : the flora and fauna (particularly the butterflies, a recurrent theme) of the Amazon appear repeatedly : “What interests me with the butterfly, ... is the extraordinary inventiveness of the interlacing forms, the sparkling colours, the total freedom of their coloration...” (Claude Faux, Lurçat à haute voix, 1962, p. 151). Butterflies on a yellow background are a motif which recurs in several cartons : “Paon de nuit”, “Copacabana”, “Papillons Marcenac”...
Bibliography :
Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, New Tapestries, House of French Thought, 1956
Cat. Expo. The domains of Jean Lurçat, Angers, Jean Lurçat Museum and Contemporary Tapestry, 1986
Colloquium Jean Lurçat and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry, 1992
Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004
Jean Lurçat, Song of the World, Angers, 2007
