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 subjection of motifs to compartmentalization is recurrent in Lurçat's work (as seen in his "cabinets"); however, nature and flowers cannot be constrained and tend to escape the frame. The composition is a reprise of the right-hand part of "New Marcenac Garden", cartoon from 1955.

Bibliography:
Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957
Exhibition Catalog Jean Lurçat, Nice, Musée des Ponchettes, 1968
Exhibition Catalog Lurçat, 10 ans après, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1976
Exhibition Catalog Les Domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1986
Symposium Jean Lurçat et la Renaissance de la tapisserie à Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée Départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992;
Exhibition Catalog Dialogues avec Lurçat, Musées de Basse-Normandie, 1992
Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004;
Gérard Denizeau, Denise Majorel, une vie pour la tapisserie, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie;
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013;
Exhibition Catalog Jean Lurçat, Meister der französicher Moderne, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016;
Exhibition Catalog Jean Lurçat, Au seul bruit du soleil, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2016