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 tackle technical questions first 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 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 around the World.

His woven work reflects 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 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 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.

Something of a dog lover, Lurçat owned Afghan hounds. They can be found literally in his cartoons, the theme of the dog, always surrounded by sharp foliage, was omnipresent at the end of the 1940s: ‘Chien vert’ is particularly close to the contemporary ‘Basset’.

Bibliography:
Jean Lurçat Tapestries 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
Jean Lurçat Exhibition, Nice, Musée des Ponchettes, 1968
Lurçat Exhibition, 10 years later, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 1976
Exhibition: The Domains of Jean Lurçat, Angers, Jean Lurçat Museum and Contemporary Tapestry, 1986
Jean Lurçat Colloquium and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry, 1992
Exhibition: Dialogues with Lurçat, Lower Normandy Museums, 1992
Jean Lurçat Exhibition, 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
Jean Lurçat Exhibition, Meister der französischen Moderne, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016, reproduced p.76
Jean Lurçat Exhibition, at the mere sound of the sun, Paris, Gobelins Gallery, 2016
Jean Lurçat Exhibition, the earth, fire, water, air, Perpignan, Hyacinthe Rigaud Art Museum, 2024