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.

An emblematic and synthetic work of Lurçat's inspiration: a war tapestry (though dating from 1947, it constitutes a kind of symbolic war memorial, on the scale of France, itself illustrated and adorned with a tricolor leaf), a tapestry-poetry (a Resistance poem, moreover), a tapestry with a recurring motif. Five copies were woven, three of which are in public collections, in Aubusson, Quebec, and Moscow.

Bibliography:
Tapestries by Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Publisher, 1957
; Exhibition Catalog: Lurçat, 10 Years Later, Museum of Modern Art 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: Jean Lurçat, the Struggle and the Victory, Centenary, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry, 1992, ill. p. 57
. Dialogues with Lurçat, Museums of Lower Normandy, 1992;
R. Guinot, tapestry, Aubusson and Felletin, Dessagne editions, 1992, ill. pp. 20-21
; Exhibition catalog: Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Academy of Fine Arts, 2004
; R. Guinot, the tapestry of Aubusson and Felletin, Lucien Souny, 2009, ill. p. 92;
G. Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013, ill. fig. 114 p. 111;
M. Mathias, Lurçat-Aragon, shared poetry, Memoirs of the Society of Natural, Historical and Archaeological Sciences of the Creuse, volume 60, 2014-2015, pp. 439-444
; Exhibition catalog. Jean Lurçat, to the sole sound of the sun, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2016, ill. fig.6 p.172