Jean Lurçat

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 first tackle technical questions with François Tabard, then, on the occasion of his installation in Aubusson during the war, he will define his system: large stitch, counted tones, numbered drawn cartoons. A gigantic production then begins (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by the desire to train 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 across the World.

His woven work demonstrates 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 enlivens these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, brotherhood, truth... ) and whose culminating point will be the "Song of the World" ( Jean Lurçat Museum, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers) , unfinished at his death.

The motif of the butterfly is closely associated with his trip to Latin America and often figures in the exotic designs that were inspired by it. On occasion Lurçat designed vertical, oversized « portraits » of butterflies (« Sphinx bleu », « sphinx et coq ».... ), in a striking departure from scaled representation.

Bibliography:
Jean Lurçat Tapestries 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
Exh. Cat. Lurçat, 10 years later, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 1976
Exh. Cat. 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
Exh. Cat. Dialogues with Lurçat, Museums of Lower Normandy, 1992
Exh. Cat. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013
Exh. Cat. Jean Lurçat, Master of French Modernity, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016
Exh. Cat. Jean Lurçat to the mere sound of the sun, Paris, Gobelins gallery, 2016