Jean Lurçat

The work of Lurçat is immense: it is nevertheless his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that has earned him a lasting place in posterity. From 1917, he began with canvas-gauged works, 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 Angers Apocalypse tapestry cycle, which definitively led him to devote himself to tapestry. He first addressed technical questions with François Tabard, and then, on the occasion of his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: gros point, tones counted, Cartoons drawn Numbered. A gigantic production then began (more than 1000 Cartoons), amplified by his desire to bring along his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie) and his collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then by his role as an tireless propagator of the medium throughout the world. His woven work bears witness to an imaginer’s art specifically decorative, with a highly personal symbolic iconography that is cosmogonic (sun, planets, zodiac, 4 elements…), stylized vegetal motifs, and animal figures (goats, cocks, butterflies, chimeras…) set against a background without perspective (deliberately distant from painting), and intended, in his most ambitious Cartoons, to share both a poetic vision (he even sometimes inscribes these tapestries with quotations) and a philosophical one (the major themes were already addressed during the war: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…). Its culminating point was to be the “Chant du Monde” (“Song of the World”) ( Musée Jean Lurçat, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), left unfinished at his death. If there is a motif that runs through Lurçat’s work, it is that of the cock, endlessly reinterpreted. Our model (truly scarlet, in this case) is an echo, larger and reversed, of “Ecarlate bleu” from 1953. Bibliography: Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957 Claude Roy, Jean Lurçat, Pierre Cailler 1966, reproduced no. 100 Cat.Expo. Jean Lurçat, Nice, Musée des Ponchettes, 1968 Cat. Expo. Lurçat, 10 ans après, Musée d’Art moderne of the city of 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, Denise Majorel, une vie pour la tapisserie, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie 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 Cat. Expo. Jean Lurçat, la terre, le feu, l’eau, l’air, Perpignan, Musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud, 2024