Jean Lurçat

Lurçat’s oeuvre is immense: however, it is his role in the renewal of the art of tapestry that earned him a place in posterity. As early as 1917, he began with works on canvas, then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins dates from 1937, when he also discovers the Apocalypse tapestry of Angers, which definitively prompts him to devote himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions first with François Tabard, and then, at the time of his installation at Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: thick point, counted tones, and numbered drawn cartoons. A vast production then began (more than 1000 cartoons), amplified by his desire to involve his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and his collaboration with the Galerie La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and finally through his unflagging work as a propagator of the medium around the world. His woven work bears witness to an art of the image-maker, specifically decorative, with a highly personal symbolic iconography that is cosmological (sun, planets, the zodiac, the four elements…), stylized vegetal forms, and animal motifs (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a background without perspective (deliberately distanced from painting). In his most ambitious cartons, his aim was to share a vision that was at once poetic (he even sometimes punctuates these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onwards: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…), culminating in the « Chant du Monde » ( Musée Jean Lurçat, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), left unfinished at his death.

Fish in their habitat are framed by foliage, in the usual profusion for the artist. A owl, as sometimes, keeps watch.

Bibliography:
Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957
Exh. Cat. Lurçat, 10 years on, Musée d’Art moderne of the city of Paris, 1976
Exh. Cat. The domains of Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1986
Symposium Jean Lurçat and the renaissance of tapestry in Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie, 1992
Exh. Cat. Dialogues with Lurçat, Musées de Basse-Normandie, 1992
Exh. Cat. Jean Lurçat, Donation Simone Lurçat, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004
Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013
Exh. Cat. Jean Lurçat au seul bruit du soleil, Paris, galerie des Gobelins, 2016