Jean Lurçat

The work of Lurçat is immense: nonetheless, it is his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him a lasting place in posterity. As early as 1917, he began with works on the canvas, and then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins dates from 1937, at a time when he simultaneously discovered the Apocalypse tapestry cycle in Angers, which definitively encouraged him to devote himself to tapestry. He first addressed technical questions with François Tabard, and then, following his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: large-point weaving, counted tones, and drawn Cartoons, Numbered. A gigantic production then began (more than 1,000 Cartoons), amplified by his desire to bring his painter friends along, by the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and by his collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then, through his role as an indefatigable promoter of the medium throughout the world. His Woven work bears witness to an imaginative art that is specifically decorative, with a highly personal, symbolic iconography that is cosmological (sun, planets, zodiac, the four elements…), stylized vegetation, and animals (goats, cocks, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a background without perspective (deliberately distant from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious Cartoons, to share a vision that is both poetic (he even sometimes enlivens these tapestries with citations) and philosophical (the major themes were addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…). And its culminating point would be the “Chant du Monde” (Musée Jean Lurçat, former Hôpital Saint-Jean, Angers), left unfinished at his death. Often, Lurçat compartmentalizes; to his checkerboards and cupboards are substituted spiral forms cut like a snail (see also, for example, “Haut zodiac”), whose round shape evokes, with radiating rays, the solar star: here, the title leaves no room for ambiguity.

n°44. n°3