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Aubusson tapestry woven by the Picaud workshop. Complete with signed label, n° EA. Circa 1960.
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Composition
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Tapisseries de France workshop. Circa 1960. -
Belzébuth
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Goubely workshop. With label. Circa 1950.Lurçat’s artistic production was immense : it is however his role as the renovator of the art of tapestry design which ensures his lasting renown. As early as 1917, he started producing works on canvas, then in the 20’s and 30’s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins workshop dates back to 1937, at the same time he discovered the tapestry of the Apocalypse which was essential in his decision to devote himself to tapestry design. He first tackled the technical aspects with François Tabard, then on his installation at Aubusson during the war, he established his technique : broad point, a simplified palette, outlined cartoons with colours indicated by pre-ordained numbers. A huge production then follows (over 1000 cartoons) amplified by his desire to include his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapiisserie) and the collaboration with the art gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then by his role as a tireless advocate for the medium around the world. His tapestries reveal a pictorial world which is specifically decorative, with a very personal symbolic iconography : cosmogony (the sun, the planets, the zodiac, the four elements…) stylised vegetation, fauna (rams, cocks, butterflies, chimera …) standing out against a background without perspective (voluntarily different from painting) and, in his more ambitious work, designed as an invitation to share in a poetic (he sometimes weaves quotations into his tapestries) and philosophical (the grand themes are broached from the wartime period onwards) vision whose climax is the “Chant du Monde” (Song of the World) (Jean Lurçat Museum , ancien hôpital Saint Jean, Angers) which remained unfinished at his death. Beelzebub is a demon : the billy goat in Lurçat’s personal bestiary represents evil, the demonic force often associated with and couterbalanced by the cock. But it is also a living force incrusted, as here, in vegetation and the natural world. All the artist’s particular iconography is here in these goats, cocks and lizards. Bibliography : Exhibition catalogue Jean Lurçat, Tapisseries nouvelles, Maison de la pensée Française, 1956 Exhibition catalogue Les domaines de Jean Lurçat, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la tapisserie contemporaine, 1986 Symposium Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie in Aubusson, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie 1992. Exhibition catalogue Jean Lurçat, Donation Simone Lurçat, Académie des Beaux-Arts, 2004 Jean Lurçat, le chant du monde Angers 2007. -
Composition
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Picaud workshop. Circa 1960.Born in 1912, Farvèze is one of the second generation of painter-cartonniers whose heyday dates from the end of the 1950’s, with the likes of Grékoff, Ferréol, Petit, Potin, … Influenced both by his meeting with Gleizes and a trip to Senegal which brought prestigious state commissions, he would be chosen to participate in the second Biennale de Lausanne in 1965. This piece is characterised by a highly stylised and very colourful design ; the absence of the certificate of origin means that we have no indication of the title or subject - although various animal-shaped forms can be distinguished. -
Composition
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Pinton workshop. N°1/6. Circa 1960. -
Vercors
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Pinton workshop. With signed label, n°2/6. Circa 1965.Maurice André settled in Aubusson for the duration of the second world war. A founding member of the group “Tapisserie de France” and a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), he developed a personal style, different from that of Lurçat, characterised by rigorous, cubist-influenced flat areas of colour, often using a limited palette ; he received large-scale public commissions for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (“L’Europe unie dans le Travail et la Paix”) or for the French pavilion at the Brussels Exhibition in 1958 (“La Technique moderne au service de l’Homme”). Gradually (as with Wogensky and Prassinos,...) his style evolved towards more abstraction, firstly lyrical and then more and more geometric, in a way very similar to Matégot. In the mid 1960’s André’s style becomes comparable to that of Matégot, where battage, pick and pick and shading are the norm. Varying shades of green and triangular shapes are the means of evoking the peaks of the Vercors. -
Flore des Baronnies (Baronnies's Flora)
Aubusson tapestry woven in the Andraud workshop. With label, n°1/6. 1974.A student of Léon Detroy, Gaston Thiéry is one of the last representatives of the Crozant school of painting. Established in the Creuse region of France, he started working on tapestries in 1965 with the Andraud workshop for whom he designed cartoons inspired by the local flora, in a decorative style which can be situated somewhere between that of Dom Robert and Maingonnat, a world away from his landscape paintings which were strongly influenced by the impressionists. -
Les Jumelles (the twins)
Tapestry woven in the Moulin de Vauboyen workshop. With signed label, n°3/8. 1966.Carzou is one of a number of artists whose work was woven at Bièvres at the Moulin de Vauboyen (hence the mark MV woven into the tapestries), which was transformed by Pierre de Tartas into an arts centre in 1959 and devoted to figurative art. Many noteworthy names would pass through including Cocteau, Foujita, Erni, Volti ... among others, who would produce much work, often monumental, as well as realisations in the applied arts (notably book illustrations) Carzou was most noted at the start of his career as a decorative painter (notably for the theatre), and his work for tapestry is relatively rare. His style is immediately recognisable in this cartoon, the busy hatching illustrating dream-like subjects, not unlike work produced by Lucien Coutaud. -
Allégorie des métiers (Allegory of trades)
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Braquenié workshop. 1958.A curious cartoon where, against a vaguely hexagonal (reference to France, often referred to as “l’hexagone”) star-shaped background are pictured the family, traditional trades (fisherman, farmer,...) placed in front of gasometres, cranes and other emblems of modernity : a hymn to reconstruction, a political allegory, a work of propaganda,... ?