Jean Lurçat

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 plant, animal (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras…), stand 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.

The butterfly motif is linked to the journey to South America, and populates the exotic evocations inspired by it. Sometimes, as with the rooster, Lurçat created oversized vertical "portraits" of butterflies ("Blue Hawk-moth", "Hawk-moth and Rooster"...), in a striking break in scale.

Bibliography:
Tapestries by Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
; Exhibition Catalog: Lurçat, 10 Years Later, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 1976
; Exhibition Catalog: 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
; Exhibition Catalog: Dialogues with Lurçat, Museums of Lower Normandy, 1992
; Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004;
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart,
2013 Jean Lurçat, Master of French Modernism, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016.
Exhibition catalog: Jean Lurçat to the Sole Sound of the Sun, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2016.