Jean Lurçat

L’Œuvre de Lurçat is immense: however, it is his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him a place in posterity. As early as 1917, he began with canvas-based works, 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 Apocalypse tapestry series of Angers—a discovery that definitively led him to devote himself to tapestry. He approached technical questions first with François Tabard, and then, following his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: gros point, tons comptés, cartons dessinés, Numbered. A vast production then began (more than 1,000 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 gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then by his role as an indefatigable propagator of the medium throughout the World. His woven work bears witness to an art of the image-maker specifically decorative in character, with a highly personal, symbolic iconography that is cosmogonic (sun, planets, zodiac, the 4 elements…), stylized vegetal forms, and animals (goats, roosters, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a background without perspective (deliberately distant from painting). Moreover, in his most ambitious cartoons, it is intended to share a vision that is at once poetic (he even sometimes interweaves these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes are addressed from the war onward: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…)—whose culminating point will be the “Chant du Monde” ( Musée Jean Lurçat, former Hôpital Saint-Jean, Angers), left unfinished at his death. Our cartoon takes, inverted, that of “l’Homme” (one example of which is kept at the Musée d’Art moderne in Paris), with a few modifications. The message is the same: integrated with Nature, among the foliate suns, surrounded by animals (an owl tucked close to his breast, the blue dog—companion…), Man is the pivot around which all Creation revolves.

Bibliography :
Tapestries of Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957
Exh. Cat. Lurçat, 10 ans après, Musée d’Art moderne of the City of Paris, 1976
Exh. Cat. Les domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat and of contemporary tapestry, 1986
Colloquium 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