Jean Lurçat

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.

"Vegetable Universe" is a paradox: it features more animals than plants. We can already observe (as early as 1944) this desire to compartmentalize space, a theme Lurçat would later develop in his cabinets and other bestiaries: stuffed animals, like those in a cabinet of curiosities, rest on shelves suspended by chains against starry skies, in a poetic extension aimed at conveying the Unity of Nature.
The tapestry was woven in various formats, as evidenced by the 1946 exhibition: vertical and square (2 x 2 m and 3 x 3 m), for Jansen, a Parisian decorator, whose mark appears woven into the tapestry, even though he did not have a workshop in Aubusson (the Dumontet workshop handled his weaving).

Bibliography:
Cat. Expo. French tapestry, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1946, n°278-279
Sieben Jahrhunderte Französische Wandteppiche, Wort und Tat, ill.
Tapestries by Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957, ill n°31, 99 (details)
Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, tapestries from the Rothmans foundation, Metz Museum, 1969, cat. No. 6
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;
Exhibition Catalog: Dialogues with Lurçat, Museums of Lower Normandy, 1992
; Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004;
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