Birds of prey
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Atelier Goubely.
With its bolduc signed with the artist’s stamp and the artist’s cord, n°6/6
1941.
The woven work by Gromaire was modest: 11 cartoons, designed between 1938 and 1944, most of them in Aubusson itself. “His constructions were rigorous, his simplifications, his taste for large compositions and great fundamental ideas, his science as a colorist, and, to sum it all up, his supreme quality as both master and worker—everything about this was bound to make him one of the most perfect tapestry workers of his time,” Jean Cassou will be able to say (Cat. Expo. Marcel Gromaire, Paris, Musée National d’Art moderne, 1963).
It was Guillaume Janneau, at the head of the Mobilier National, who called on him in 1938, convinced that his style (simplification of forms, a geometric drawing outlined in black, the influence of Cubism, a limited palette …) would respond advantageously to the new aesthetic problems that tapestry had to solve in order to be reborn (simplified color ranges, synthetic cartoons, …): first 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, painted, and not numbered as with Lurçat), and in close collaboration with Suzanne Goubely, who would weave all his cartoons, he spent 4 years in Aubusson, devoting all his creative energies to tapestry. After the war, he left Creuse, and would no longer make cartoons, leaving to Lurçat the role of great initiator of the revival of tapestry.
“Birds of prey” is one of the 5 Cartoons designed by Gromaire for the Atelier Goubely during the War, and it is emblematic of his style: inspiration taken after local landscapes, absence of perspective, a richly teeming decorative aspect that is nonetheless rigorously ordered, a tightly restrained chromatic palette (it should be noted, too, that in this occupied France, the tri-color dominance of the Cartoon is evident)… The atmosphere here is also more unsettling than in the other tapestries then being woven.
Bibliography:
Contemporary Tapestries Lurçat Gromaire, editions Braun et cie, 1943, ill.
The 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 painters-cartoonists, Tel, 1957
Cat. Expo., Gromaire, woven work, Aubusson, Tapestry Museum, 1995, reproduced p.49
Colloque, Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie à Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie, 1992, ill.14 (détail)
Cat. Expo. La Manufacture des Gobelins in the first half of the 20th century, Beauvais, National Gallery of Tapestry, 1999
