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 first tackled technical questions with François Tabard, then, on the occasion of his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: thick stitch, counted tones, numbered drawings.
A gigantic production then began (over 1000 cartoons), amplified by his desire to involve his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painter-Cartoonists of Tapestry) and 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 symbolic iconography, cosmogonic (sun, planets, zodiac, 4 elements...), stylized vegetation, animals (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras...), standing out against a background without perspective (deliberately removed from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he sometimes sprinkles these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the great themes are addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth...) and whose culminating point will be the "Song of the World" (Jean Lurçat Museum, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), unfinished at his death.

This choice of a vertical rectangular format containing a delineated circular motif against a burgundy background recurrs regularly in Lurçat’s work in the later 1940’s (cf. “Bosquet” for example). If the owl motif referred to in the title is indeed often used by Lurçat, in this particular example it more closely resembles a cockerel, another frequently recurring motif, a confusion in which this artist delighted.

Bibliography:
Exhibition Cat. French Tapestry, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1946
Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
Exhibition Cat. Jean Lurçat, tapestries from the Rothmans Foundation, Metz Museum, 1969
Exhibition Cat. Lurçat, 10 years later, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 1976
Exhibition 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
Exhibition Cat. Dialogues with Lurçat, Lower Normandy Museums, 1992
Exhibition Cat. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013
Exhibition Cat. Jean Lurçat, Master of French Modernity, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016
Exhibition Cat. Jean Lurçat to the mere sound of the sun, Paris, Gobelins Gallery, 2016