Marc Saint-Saëns

Lurçat solicited Saint-Saëns—first as a fresco painter—from 1940 onward. And, during the war, the latter produced his first masterpieces of allegorical indignation, combat, and resistance tapestries: “les Vierges folles”, “Thésée et le Minotaure”. At the end of the war, naturally, he joined Lurçat, sharing his convictions (about the numbered Cartoon and counted tones, about the specific writing that tapestry requires, …) within the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-cartonniers de Tapisserie). His universe, in which the human figure—stretched, elongated—holds considerable importance (especially compared with the place it occupies in the work of his fellow artists Lurçat, or Picart le Doux), revolves around traditional themes: woman, the Commedia dell’arte, Greek myths, … sublimated by the brilliance of the colors and the simplification of the layout. He then evolved, in the 1960s, toward Cartoons that were more lyrical, almost abstract, where cosmic elements and forces predominate. Saint-Saëns’s bestiary remained less plentiful than those of his peers—Lurçat, Perrot, or Dom Robert, the principal illustrator of the peacock. Here, the treatment—so to speak, as if “out of its element”—of a similar motif (even though it resembles a rooster more than a peacock) testifies to the variety of solutions employed by the Painter-cartoonists of the period. Bibliography : Cat. Expo. Saint-Saëns, galerie La Demeure, 1970 Cat. Expo. Saint-Saëns, oeuvre tissé, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la Tapisserie, 1987 Cat. Expo. Marc Saint-Saëns, tapisseries, 1935-1979, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1997-1998