Flight
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Tabard workshop.
With its signed selvedge.
Circa 1955.
Lurçat's body of work is immense; however, it is his role in the renewal of the art of tapestry that has ensured his lasting legacy. From 1917, he began with needlepoint works, and then, in the 1920s and 30s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins Manufactory dates from 1937, when he simultaneously discovered the Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, which definitively inspired him to dedicate himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions initially with François Tabard, and then, during his time in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: large stitches, counted tones, and numbered, drawn cartoons. A gigantic production then began (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by the desire to involve his painter friends, the creation of the APCT (Association of Tapestry Cartoon Painters) and the collaboration with the La Demeure gallery and Denise Majorel, then by his role as a tireless propagator of the medium throughout 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 plant, animal (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras…), stand out against a background without perspective (deliberately far removed from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he sometimes embellishes these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…) and whose culmination will be the “Song of the World” (Jean Lurçat Museum, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), unfinished at his death.
His trip to Brazil in 1954 was a decisive source of inspiration for Lurçat: the flora and fauna (especially butterflies, a recurring theme) of the Amazon appeared repeatedly: “What interests me in the butterfly… is the extraordinary invention constituted by the interlacing of forms, the sparkle of colors, this gratuitous aspect of coloring…” (Claude Faux, Lurçat à haute voix, 1962, p. 151). The differences between the cartoons are sometimes marginal, for example between our “Flight” woven at Tabard’s, and “Vera Cruz,” slightly larger, woven at Simone André’s.
Bibliography:
Tapestries by Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
; Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, Nice, Musée des Ponchettes, 1968
; Exhibition Catalog: Lurçat, 10 Years Later, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1976
; Exhibition Catalog: The Domains of Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1986;
Colloquium: Jean Lurçat and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée Départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992;
Exhibition Catalog: Dialogues with Lurçat, Musées de Basse-Normandie, 1992
. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004;
Gérard Denizeau, Denise Majorel, A Life for Tapestry, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie;
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013;
Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, Master of French Modernism, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016;
Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat to the Sole Sound of the Sun, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2016
; Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Perpignan, Musée d'art Hyacinthe Rigaud, 2024
