The alarm clock
Tapestry woven by the Baudonnet workshop.
With signed label.
1959.
Lurçat approached Saint-Saëns, initially a fresco painter, from 1940 onwards. And, during the war, he produced his first allegorical masterpieces, tapestries of indignation, combat, and resistance: 'the Foolish Virgins', 'Theseus and the Minotaur'. After the war, he naturally joined Lurçat, with whom he shared convictions (about numbered cartoons and counted tones, about the specific writing required for tapestry, ...) within the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painters-Cartoonists of Tapestry). His universe, where the human figure, stretched and elongated, holds a considerable place (compared in particular to the place it occupies among his colleagues Lurçat, or Picart le Doux), revolves around traditional themes: women, Commedia dell'arte, Greek myths, ... sublimated by the brilliance of the colors and the simplification of the layout. He then evolved, in the 1960s, towards more lyrical, almost abstract cartoons, where cosmic elements and forces dominate.
“Saint-Saens who produced a series of birds in 1949 only rarely represented the cock, a recurrent subject for Lurçat. In this piece the cock has no symbolic value but merely announces with gales of crowing and colour the arrival of the new day.” (Exhibition Catalogue Sain-Saëns, œuvre tissé, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1987 p.48)
Bibliography:
Exhibition catalog, Saint-Saëns, La Demeure gallery, 1970
; Exhibition catalog, Saint-Saëns, oeuvre tissé, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1987, ill. p.49;
Exhibition catalog, Marc Saint-Saëns, tapestries, 1935-1979, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1997-1998
