The bird pond
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Goubely workshop.
No. II.
1941.
Gromaire's woven work is modest: 11 cartoons, designed between 1938 and 1944, most of them in Aubusson itself. "His rigorous constructions, his simplifications, his taste for grand composition and great fundamental ideas, his science as a colorist and to sum it all up his supreme quality as a master and craftsman, all this was bound to make him one of the most perfect tapestry weavers of his time," Jean Cassou would say (Cat. Expo. Marcel Gromaire, Paris, Musée National d'art moderne, 1963).
It was Guillaume Janneau, head of the Mobilier National (National Furniture Collection), who commissioned him in 1938, convinced that his style (simplified forms, geometric designs outlined in black, the influence of Cubism, a limited palette, etc.) would be ideally suited to the new aesthetic challenges that tapestry needed to overcome in order to be reborn (simplified color ranges, synthetic cartoons, etc.). He began with a commission on the theme of the four elements, followed by another ("The Seasons"), intended to be executed in Aubusson. In 1940, Gromaire joined Lurçat and Dubreuil there. Working alone, meticulously (many drawings were preparatory to the cartoon, which was painted, unlike Lurçat's numbered cartoons), in close collaboration with Suzanne Goubely, who wove all his cartoons, he spent four years in Aubusson, devoting all his creative energies to tapestry. At the end of the war, he left the Creuse region and would not produce any more cartoons, leaving Lurçat to take the place of great initiator of the revival of tapestry.
"The Bird Pond" is emblematic of Gromaire's woven aesthetic, with its highly decorative and almost dreamlike quality (quite unlike his graphic works), its choice of subject matter—animal, plant, and even architectural—strongly inspired by the Creuse region. What is most striking is the extraordinary density, the abundance, the profusion… that make Gromaire's woven work so inimitable.
This tapestry was featured in the exhibition "French Tapestry from the Middle Ages to the Present Day," held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
Bibliography:
Le Point, Aubusson and the Renaissance of Tapestry, March 1946, reproduced p. 34;
Muraille et laine (Wall and Wool), Pierre Tisné Publishers, 1946, ill. no. 51;
André Lejard (ed.), French Tapestry, Paul Elek Publishers, 1946, reproduced p. 103
; Exhibition Catalog, Aubusson Tapestries, Luxembourg, Municipal Art Gallery, 1982, no. 3
; Exhibition Catalog, Gromaire, Woven Work, Aubusson, Tapestry Museum, 1995, reproduced p. 51
; Exhibition Catalog, The Gobelins Manufactory in the First Half of the 20th Century, Beauvais, National Tapestry Gallery, 1999
