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.

Man is the central theme of Lurçat's early tapestries, though he appears less frequently thereafter; the rooster, however, remains omnipresent, but with a significant evolution of the motif. At the dawn of his career as a tapestry designer, this association reveals the roles assigned to them: at this time (the beginnings of what would be called the "Tapestry Renaissance"), man, primitive in nature (clothed in leaves, he moves in an autumnal environment with muted hues), strives to domesticate roosters that are still very realistic, far removed from the symbolic dimension they would later acquire in Lurçat's imagination; a Lurçat here still inspired by bucolic themes.
A copy of "Cockfight" (and its companion piece "Garden of Roosters") is held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, acquired by the French State in 1940.

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 Museum of Contemporary Tapestry, 1986
; Exhibition Catalog: Jean Lurçat, the Struggle and the Victory, Centenary, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry, 1992, ill. p. 36;
Colloquium: Jean Lurçat and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Departmental Museum of Tapestry, 1992, ill. 6 p. 69 (detail)
; Exhibition Catalog: Dialogues with Lurçat, Museums of Lower Normandy, 1992
. Jean Lurçat, Simone Lurçat Donation, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004;
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013;
Exhibition catalog: Jean Lurçat au seul bruit du soleil, Paris, Galerie des Gobelins, 2016