Jean Lurçat

L’Œuvre de Lurçat is immense: nonetheless, it was his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him a place in posterity. As early as 1917, he began with works on 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 Angers Apocalypse tapestry set, which definitively prompted him to devote himself to tapestry. He first addressed technical questions with François Tabard, and then, upon his installation in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: gros point, tons comptés, cartons dessinés numérotés. A vast production then began (more than 1000 Cartoons), amplified by the desire to bring his painter friends into the project, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and the collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then through his role as an indefatigable propagator of the medium throughout the world. His woven work bears witness to a distinctly decorative art of the “imagier,” with a highly personal, symbolic, cosmogonic iconography (sun, planets, zodiac, the 4 elements…), stylized vegetal motifs and animals (goats, cockerels, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a non-perspectival background (deliberately distanced from painting), and, in his most ambitious Cartoons, intended to share an outlook that was at once poetic (he even sometimes interweaves these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes were already addressed during the war: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…)—whose culminating point would be the “Chant du Monde” (“Musée Jean Lurçat”, former Hôtel Saint-Jean, Angers), left unfinished at his death. The synthesis of recurring motifs remains always the same: vines, clusters of grapes, and glasses usually appear in the artist’s set tables, while the birds usually respond to the fish. Fewer symbols here, as the title testifies—purely descriptive—evoking the nuisances suffered by the winegrowers. Bibliography : Tapisseries de Jean Lurçat 1939-1957, Pierre Vorms Editeur, 1957 Cat. Expo. Lurçat, 10 ans après, Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de 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, 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