Windblown
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Tabard workshop.
With its label.
1962-1963.
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 1930s, 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 first tackle technical questions 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 involve his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painter-Cartoonists of Tapestry) and collaboration with the La Demeure gallery and Denise Majorel, then by his role as tireless promoter of the medium around the World.
His woven work demonstrates 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 distant from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he sometimes enlivens these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onwards: 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.
Spectacular cartoon (27 m² !) and exceptional private commission intended for a particular location (the hall of a dwelling) from Lurçat's later years, where he brings together a teeming profusion of his usual motifs: sun, stars, butterflies, but also, more rarely, tortoise, cat,… The correspondence between the artist and his client testifies to his availability (at a time when Lurçat, at the height of his fame, is constantly in demand, and when he is devoting himself to the "Song of the World"), and to the richness of his reflection, argued, in response to the commission: the self-proclaimed "doctor of woolens" recommends a yellow background (and rejects black, "too solemn for a hall inhabited by a very young couple"), "the wall covered from end to end…" a royal solution "in the great tradition of tapestry"… We see that the client found nothing to object to in these recommendations.
Provenance :
Private collection, Lyon (a copy of the correspondance between Lurçat, the Tabard workshop and the patron will be given to the purchaser)
Bibliography :
Exhibition catalogue Jean Lurçat, Tapisseries nouvelles, Maison de la pensée Française, 1956
Exhibition catalogue Lurçat, 10ans après, Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1976
Exhibition catalogue Les domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1986
Exhibition catalogue L’homme et ses lumières, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1992
Symposium Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie à Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992
Exhibition catalogue Jean Lurçat, Donation Simone Lurçat, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004
Jean Lurçat, le chant du Monde, Angers, 2007
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013
