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 1930s, 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 begins then (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by the 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 promoter of the medium around 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 enameled these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war on: 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 theme of the set table is a leitmotif with Lurçat, from the 1940s onwards (cf. Les quatre coins, 1943, Atelier Goubely-Gatien, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine). These tables, sometimes very "cornucopias", and often accompanied by musical instruments (generally mandolin) recall 17th-century still life paintings, a theme foreign to the tapestry of the time.

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