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.

Often Lurçat compartmentalizes; his checkered patterns and armories are replaced by spiral shapes cut out in a snail-like form (see also 'Upper zodiac' for example), whose round shape evokes, with radiating rays, the solar star: here, the title leaves no ambiguity.

Bibliography:

Exhibition Catalog. Lurçat retrospective, paintings, tapestries, Saint-Denis Museum, 1966, no. 44 (illustrated)
Exhibition Catalog. Lurçat, tapestries 1964-1965, La Demeure Gallery, 1967, illustrated no. 3
Exhibition Catalog. Jean Lurçat, Nice, Ponchettes Museum, 1968, illustrated.
Exhibition Catalog. Lurçat, 10 years later, Modern Art Museum 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, Lower Normandy Museums, 1992
Exhibition Catalog. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004
Gérard Denizeau, Denise Majorel, a life for tapestry, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013
Exhibition Catalog. Jean Lurçat, Master of French Modernity, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016
Exhibition Catalog. Jean Lurçat, at the mere sound of the sun, Paris, Gobelins gallery, 2016