Butterflies
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Atelier Pinton brothers.
With its bolduc.
c. 1960.
The work of Lurçat was immense: yet it was his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him lasting renown. 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 discovered at the same time the Angers tapestry series of the Apocalypse, which definitively prompted him to devote himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions first with François Tabard, and then, when he settled in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: gros point, counted tones, drawn Cartoons, Numbered.
A gigantic production then began (more than 1000 Cartoons), amplified by his determination to involve his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then by his role as tireless propagator of the medium throughout the world.
His Woven work testifies to an art of the imaginer that is specifically decorative, with an iconography that was highly personal and symbolic, cosmological (sun, planets, zodiac, the four elements…), stylized vegetal forms, animal motifs (goats, cocks, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a background without perspective (deliberately distanced from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious Cartoons, to share a vision that was at once poetic (he even sometimes embellishes these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes were addressed from the war onward: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…); and whose culminating moment would be the "Chant du Monde" ( Musée Jean Lurçat, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), left unfinished at his death.
His journey to Brazil in 1954 provided a decisive source of inspiration for Lurçat: the Amazonian flora and fauna (notably butterflies, a frequent theme) then appeared again and again, in recurring form: "What interests me in the butterfly, … is the extraordinary invention constituted by the interlacing of forms, the lively sparkling of the colours, this gratuitousness of the colouring…" (Claude faux, Lurçat à haute voix, 1962, p.151). Butterflies on a yellow background recur in several Cartoons: "Paon de nuit", "Copacabana", "Papillons Marcenac",…
Bibliography:
Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, Tapisseries nouvelles, Maison de la pensée Française, 1956
Exhibition cat. Les domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1986
Colloquium Jean Lurçat and the renaissance of tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1992
Exhibition cat. Jean Lurçat, Donation Simone Lurçat, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004
Jean Lurçat, Le chant du Monde, Angers, 2007
