Roger BEZOMBES

Roger Bezombes became interested in monumental art from the very start of his artistic career. He received numerous tapestry commissions from the French state, woven first at the Gobelins and then at Aubusson, notably with the Hamot manufactory, whose dyers obtained wools for him in the exact tone of his Cartoons (which he also painted to scale). In 1952–1953, he created a monumental ensemble (300 m2) for the Pavilion of France Overseas at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. He abandoned the lisse technique in the late 1950s in order to produce wall hangings made from assembled fabrics.

Precisely, his “wall murals” (“one of the first,” “Music,” 25 m long, was commissioned for the Maison de la Radio) are patchworks of assembled fabrics, sometimes with various material objects added, sewn, glued, or stapled. Nevertheless, as here, some wall murals would be reproduced in high-warp tapestries by the Saint-Cyr workshop of Pierre Daquin. The theme of the fish is then omnipresent; Bezombes is not an ichtyologist, but a poet: it is the cardinal purple that interests him, not the homonymous species.