The Symbolic and Poetic
Jean Lurçat
“To Lurçat, tapestry and painting were two planets whose orbits might intersect but never merge. He attached great importance to the nature of his materials, choosing watercolor to express the dreamlike (1917-1920), oil for his ‘major’ paintings (1925-1931), and gauche for the work of his twilight painting years” — Gérard Denizeau
With an immense oeuvre of woven works, the largest left by any tapestry designer, Jean Lurçat (1892-1966) has been credited with reviving the lost art of tapestry-making in France in the mid-20th century. Through his otherworldly designs, unconfined by any specific school or doctrine, he imbued the medium with an avant-garde zeal, and in doing so, inspired scores of French artists to work in tapestry, which, a craft once prized in Northern Europe, had lost its distinctive characteristics and with it, its creative inspiration. Lurçat’s work was in close dialogue with the Cubism of Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), and often featured recurring motifs such as nature, animals, and the cosmos, becoming increasingly ambitious and detailed over time. Although Lurçat was heavily inspired by cubism, his works are singularly distinct, reflecting the great range of aesthetics of the early and mid-twentieth century, and combining elements of Surrealism, Cubism, Modernism, and Classicism. One of his most famous works, The Eighth Tapestry of the World’s Song (1957–1966), for example, depicts an entire cosmology of ancient world mythical figures. One of a generation of great artists, like Picasso, Braque and Fernand Léger (1881-1955), who lived and worked through the First World War, the trauma of that catastrophe caused not only Lurçat but many of his fellow modernists (in particular the Dadaists and surrealists) to question the very status of art and the artistic act.
Jean Lurçat (1946) by Robert Doisneau
Pair of chauffeuses, model no. MF 313 (c. 1926) by Pierre Chareau with tapestry by Jean Lurçat
Lurçat was born in Bruyères, France, and studied medicine before enrolling under the artist Victor Prouvé (The father of the architect and designer Jean Prouvé (1901-1984)), head of the Alliance provincial des industries d’art, better known as the Ecole de Nancy. In 1912 he went to Paris, where he put Prouvé’s ideas into practice at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and later at the famous Académie Colarossi. Immediately he began to move in artistic salons of the day, meeting Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and counting Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) and Élie Faure (1873-1937) among his close friends. Championing the causes of Fauvism and the avant-garde movement, Lurçat founded the art review Les Feuilles de Mai (The Leaves of May) which published essays of painting doctrine, as well as poetry and artworks by figures such as Faure, Rilke and Bourdelle (1861-1929) and his own essays on “the positive sense of life and art”.
In the opening issues, Lurçat presented a severe if veiled critique of La Maison Cubiste (“The Cubist House”) (an architectural installation in the Art Décoratif section of the 1912 Paris Salon d'Automne which presented a Cubist vision of architecture and design), countering such empty modishness, as he saw it, with an appeal to artisanal skills and workshop traditions. Although this might be seen as a precursor of things to come, given Lurçat’s strong attraction to the applied arts, it seems strange given his desire to place his work in dialogue with Cubism; testifying to this, the Surrealist Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) argued in 1928, “the ‘singular virtue’ of [Picasso’s] cubism... prohibited artists from pursuing his investigations. The strange novelty of Lurçat permitted him, after cubism, to find a new route and continue on.” Indeed, Lurçat’s interest in Cubism was such that, according to the recollections of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), Lurçat was among those young artists who took advantage of the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler sequestration sales between 1921 and 1923 to purchase works by Picasso and Braque at extremely low prices (This fact can be confirmed by the presence of Lurçat’s name among the list of buyers). One possible explanation was the fear, shared by many young artists, that if their aesthetic had too much in common with Cubism, they would be subsumed by the monumentality of the movement. Lurçat used a mixture of turbulent colours and a proclivity for the decorative, so as to demarcate his work from that of the Cubists. Never truly embracing abstraction, he believed that “To deprive a work of its subject is to deprive a sentence of its verb: meaning is lost, leaving the work devoid of all poetic impact.” [Denizeau, p. VI].
L’archer, tapestry (1927) by Jean Lurçat
In 1915, he participated in his first exhibition in Zürich (of paintings inspired by Cubism, in particular the work of Braque and by Matisse’s drawings), and in 1917, he exhibited his first significant tapestries, Filles Vertes (Green Girls) and Soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Grenada). Although he began his career as a painter, Lurçat had always been interested in textile art; at least in part, as his mother had sewn canvases based on his drawings. After the First World War, Lurçat’s style began to mature and he embarked on a period of great productivity. His designs combined exalted themes from human history with fantastic representations of the vegetable and insect worlds, and he succeeded in reconciling the stylizations of medieval religious tapestry with modern modes of abstraction. In 1921, Lurçat met Louis Marcoussis (1878-1941), he discovered Picasso and Max Jacob (1876-1944), and created decoration and costumes for Le spectacle de la Compagnie Pitoeff: Celui qui reçoit des gifles. For Lurçat, travel would continue to be a catalyst for artistic growth; he travelled extensively around Spain (1923) and to the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia (1924-1929), making tapestries along the way on commission and becoming one of the first Western artists to exhibit in Soviet Russia. From 1925, he began exhibiting regularly in Paris at the Georges Petit and Jeanne Bucher galleries, alongside artists such as Hans Arp (1886-1966), Braque, Max Ernst (1891-1976), Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), and Picasso, and enjoyed three solo exhibitions between 1930 and 1936. (Lurçat, along with Lipchitz, was one of the artists that led Jeanne Bucher to open her gallery.) By the end of the 1930s Lurçat had given up painting entirely, and dedicated himself to the reanimation of revered French textile companies like Aubusson and the Manufacture Gobelins.
In 1937, Lurçat turned his interest in tapestry-making into a professional business after signing contracts with the Beauvais weaving factories. During the German occupation of France, Lurçat remained in the rural south (a “free” zone until the end of 1942), part of the rural Maquisard, and with his giant mural tapestries of the wartime period (La Poete (1939), L’Hallali (1940), L’Apollianaire, Es la verdad, Liberte (1942) and La Ciel et la Terre (1944)), the artist discovered a means with which to confront both the Vichy and Occupation regimes governing France, and combated the Nazi “barbarian”. In themes and imagery, his works paralleled the efforts of French contraband and military poetry, and he included many such poems in his tapestries. Following the war, his aim was to take the “The tapisserie virus throughout the whole world”. In 1957, he began a series of monumental tapestries, the Chant du monde (Songs of the World), a ten-part work depicting a 20th century apocalypse. In 1959, Lurçat participated in II. documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition in Kassel and in 1962, he founded the International Centre for Old and New Tapestries, which organised the International Tapisserie Biennale in Lausanne.
As well as tapestry, Lurçat worked in a number of artistic mediums, including engraving, book illustrations and, perhaps most notably, ceramics. During the 1950's, Lurçat collaborated with the ceramic workshops of Firmin Bauby in Sant-Vicens, near the Southern French city of Perpignan. His designs included many plates, bowls, vases and jugs in unique pieces or in limited editions. While Picasso, who was working on ceramics at the same time in Madoura, tended to prefer the use of earthy tones, Lurçat’s ceramics stand out for their large areas of vibrant colour within sharp outlines, resembling the designs of his tapestries.
L'Arménien (1926) by Jean Lurçat
The subjects favoured by both Lurçat and Picasso are based on symbolism or mythology, creating a direct link with the Classical and Renaissance traditions, whilst stylistic elements are often borrowed from Mediterranean and North African cultures. Creatures taken from the Apocalypse and the Zodiac demonstrate Lurçat's fondness of the symbolic and poetic, which formed the core of his artistic expression. In his unsurpassed love for all things rural, Lurçat was particularly attached to the rooster and the owl. Receptively synonymous for the sunrise and wisdom, both symbolise the awakening of the spirit. Lurçat's association with the Saint-Vicens workshop gave it an international dimension, and other artists such as Jean Picard le Doux (1902-1982) and Marc Saint-Saëns (1903-1979) followed to work there. Lurçat's ceramics proved popular and were shown in 1952 at the Maison de la Pensée française, Paris, in 1963 at the Hannover Museum in Hannover, in 1964 at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. in 1965 at the landmark exhibition Ceramiche Lurçat-Picasso at La Bussola Gallery in Turin, and in 2004 at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Lurçat’s works are unique in that they reflect the great range of aesthetics from the early and mid-twentieth century — combining elements of Surrealism, Cubism and Classicism — whilst at the same time remaining singularly distinct. Throughout his career, Lurçat was careful not to associate himself too closely with any particular school, and as a result it’s hard to identify any precise sources of influence. Although a friend of the surrealists, he asserted his work was based on reason, as opposed to the principles of chance that resonated within the movement. Still, if we look at the entirety of his oeuvre, it undoubtedly includes some of the “devastated, lugubrious and sinister landscapes, the dream-like nature of which fits in perfectly with the Surrealist aesthetic” [Hermel, 28]. The reverberatory effect of the Great War, as with many artists of his generation, can be seen lingering in Lurçat’s work. “Mountains, horizons, desert landscapes, threatening clouds and fragmented walls,” characterized the artist’s paintings, echoing the state of “absurdity, the feeling of revolt, and the bitter renouncement” that loomed large over Europe, and carried on well into the post-war years [Albert-Birot, 50]. In this context, Lurçat found “the intellectualism of Cubism ill-suited to respond to the spiritual misery of man”, and through tapestry he was able to combine his passion for illustration with his love of literature and poetry. This can be seen in Liberté (1952) where he coupled the text of Paul Éluard’s 1942 poem, an ode to freedom under German occupation, with imagery of two overlapping suns, symbolizing new hope, and a rooster presiding over orbs, a sign of national pride and symbol of confident assurance. Looking at the multiplicity of his inspiration and the strongly poetic nature of his work, we’re reminded “how intensely important the internal necessity to create was to this artist”, an important voice of the avant-garde movement from the 1920s, and a pioneering figure today [Denizeau, p. VI].