Birds of Prey
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Goubely workshop.
With its selvedge signed with the stamp and the artist's son, no. 6/6
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.
“Birds of Prey” is one of the 5 cartoons designed by Gromaire for the Goubely workshop during the War, and it is emblematic of his style: inspiration from local landscapes, absence of perspective, abundant and rigorously ordered decorative aspect, restricted chromatic range (we will also note, in this occupied France, the tricolor dominance of the cartoon)... The atmosphere is also more disturbing than in the other tapestries woven at the time.
Bibliography:
Contemporary Tapestries: Lurçat and Gromaire, Braun et Cie, 1943, ill. Le Point, Aubusson and the Renaissance of Tapestry, March 1946, reproduced p. 35;
Jean Lurçat, French Tapestry, Bordas, 1947, plate 27
; J. Cassou, M. Damain, R. Moutard-Uldry, French Tapestry and the Cartoon Painters, Tel, 1957
; Exhibition Catalog, Gromaire, Woven Works, Aubusson, Tapestry Museum, 1995, reproduced p. 49;
Colloquium, Jean Lurçat and the Renaissance of Tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Departmental Tapestry Museum, 1992, ill. 14 (detail)
; Exhibition Catalog, The Gobelins Manufactory in the First Half of the 20th Century, Beauvais, National Tapestry Gallery, 1999
