Jean Lurçat

L’Œuvre of Lurçat is immense: nevertheless, it is his role in the renovation of the art of tapestry that earned him lasting renown. Beginning in 1917, he started with works on the loom, then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked with Marie Cuttoli. His first collaboration with the Gobelins dates from 1937, when he simultaneously discovered the Apocalypse tapestry series of Angers, which definitively prompted him to devote himself to tapestry. He addressed technical questions first with François Tabard, and then, when he was installed in Aubusson during the war, he defined his system: large point, counted tones, drawn Cartoons, Numbered. A gigantic production then began (more than 1000 Cartoons), amplified by his desire to train his painter friends, the creation of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie), and his collaboration with the gallery La Demeure and Denise Majorel, and then through his role as an tireless promoter of the medium around the world. His Woven work bears witness to an art of the image-maker that is specifically decorative, with a highly personal symbolic iconography that is cosmogonic (sun, planets, zodiac, the 4 elements…), stylized vegetal motifs, and animal figures (goats, cocks, butterflies, chimeras…), set against a background without perspective (deliberately removed from painting), and, in his most ambitious Cartoons, intended to share a vision that is at once poetic (he even sometimes interweaves these tapestries with quotations) and philosophical (the major themes were addressed from the war onward: freedom, resistance, fraternity, truth…). Its culminating point would be the « Chant du Monde » ( Musée Jean Lurçat, former Saint-Jean hospital, Angers), left unfinished at his death. With Lurçat, the motif of the cock could take several titles: peacock, pheasant (to stick to ornithological headings, since the variations from plastic motif to its symbolic value are infinite). As for the treatment “in negative,” without flat areas, it appears regularly from “coq dentelle” (a program in itself, a play between textiles) from 1946. Bibliographie : 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, Denise Majorel, une vie pour la tapisserie, Aubusson, Musée départemental de la tapisserie, reproduit p.59 Gérard Denizeau, Jean Lurçat, Liénart, 2013, reproduit fig.154 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