Article No: 78J / 2909

Origin: portalègre

Period: 20th century

Provenance: Private Collection

Composition: Wool and cotton

Dimension: 1.49 L x 1.92 H

Jean Lurçat (1892 - 1966) - "Collections".

Biography :

Jean Lurçat is a French painter, ceramist and designer of tapestry.

He owes his fame mainly to his tapestry works, the language of which he renovated in depth.

After studying natural sciences, he decided to give up his medical career and left for Paris. There he attended the School of Fine Arts, then entered the Colarossi Academy, rue de la Grande-Chaumière, where he became a pupil of the engraver Bernard Naudin. The following year, he founded the review "Les feuilles de mai", in which Bourdelle, Elie Faure, Vildrac, Rilke collaborated ... His first tapestries were executed in point on canvas (1915-1932). It was in 1933 that his first works were produced on a low-rail loom, in Aubusson's studio for L'Orage, in high-rail at the Gobelins for Les Illusions d'Icare.

In 1937, he discovered the Apocalypse d'Angers tapestry: for him it was an aesthetic and technical revelation. He thus created cardboard in colors no longer painted but numbered and limited in number, a technical revolution which was to lead to a commercial revolution; the execution time is thus reduced, but the work of the weaver becomes purely mechanical.

The 1940 war steered her towards committed subjects: Es la Verdad (1942) and Liberté (1943, according to Eluard's poem) were woven clandestinely in Aubusson. Then he worked on monumental works for churches (Assy, 1947, Tapestry of the Apocalypse) as well as for public buildings (wine museum in Beaune, 1947).

It was in 1957 that Aubusson began working on this gigantic hanging, in ten panels, entitled Le Chant du monde. It illustrates over eighty meters long the anxieties and hopes of man in the atomic age, " L`Homme en gloire dans la paix " being the ultimate, optimistic and victorious response to the various aggressions represented essentially by L'Homme d'Hiroshima.