The sun of Apremont
Tapestry from Aubusson woven by the Picaud workshop.
With its bolduc signed, no. 1/4.
Circa 1965.
Maurice André stayed in Aubusson throughout the war. He founded the cooperative group “Tapisserie de France” and was a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie); he developed a personal aesthetic, far from Lurçat, made of rigorous cubist flat planes, in a chromatic range that was often pared down, and he received ambitious public commissions for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (“L’Europe unie dans le Travail et la Paix”), or the French Pavilion for the 1958 Exhibition in Brussels (“La Technique moderne au service de l’Homme”). Naturally (and like Wogensky, Prassinos,…), he later moved toward abstraction: first rather lyrical, then in an increasingly geometric style, in a path very close to Matégot’s.
In the mid-1960s, André’s style came closer to Matégot’s: made of lyrical assemblages of triangular forms, in a homogeneous chromatic range, and scattered with striations, stains, speckling,… often in black, where different techniques specific to tapestry were brought into play to accentuate the effect of volume and depth.
