Jean Lurçat

Lurçat’s work is vast: it is, however, its role in the renewal of tapestry art that earned him a lasting place in history. As early as 1917, he began with canvas designs, and then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins dates from 1937, when he simultaneously discovered the “Apocalypse” tapestry series in Angers, which definitively prompted him to devote himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions first with François Tabard, and then, at the time of his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: coarse point, counted tones, drawn Cartoons, Numbered. A gigantic production then began (more than 1,000 Cartoons), amplified by his determination to bring along fellow painter-friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and the collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then through his role as an tireless promoter of the medium throughout the world. His Woven work bears witness to an art of the imaginative specifically decorative in character: in a very personal symbolic iconography, cosmogonic themes (sun, planets, zodiac, the 4 elements…), stylized vegetation, and animals (goats, cocks, butterflies, chimeras…) stand out against a background without perspective (deliberately set at a remove from painting). In his most ambitious Cartoons, it was also meant to share a vision that was both poetic (he sometimes even enriches these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes were addressed already during the war: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…). Its culminating point would be the “Chant du Monde” (Musée Jean Lurçat, former Hôpital Saint-Jean, Angers), left unfinished at his death. The motif of the butterfly is linked to his journey to South America and populates the exotic evocations inspired by it. Sometimes, as with the cock, Lurçat made oversized vertical “portraits” of butterflies (“Blue Sphinx,” “sphinx and cock”….), in a striking break in scale. Bibliography : Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957 Cat. Expo. Lurçat, 10 ans après, Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1976 Cat. Expo. Les domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1986 Colloque Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie à Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992 Cat. Expo. Dialogues avec Lurçat, Musées de Basse-Normandie, 1992 Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, Donation Simone Lurçat, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004 Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013 Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, Meister der französischen Moderne, Halle, Kunsthalle, 2016 Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat au seul bruit du soleil, Paris, galerie des Gobelins, 2016