Jean Lurçat
He was born in Bruyères, Vosges, the son of Lucien Jean Baptiste Lurçat and Marie Emilie Marguerite L'Hote.
After his secondary education at Épinal, he enrolled at La Faculté des sciences de Nancy and studied medicine.
He went to Switzerland and Germany (Munich) and in leaving his educational path, he went to the workshop of Victor Prouvé, the head of the École de Nancy.
He met painters such as Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir; his friends included Rainer Maria Rilke, Antoine Bourdelle, and Elie Faure.
Lurçat and three associates founded the Feuilles de Mai (The leaves of May), a journal of art in which these celebrities participated.
He then became an apprentice of the painter Jean-Paul Lafitte with whom he had an exhibition at La faculté des sciences de Marseille.
Back in France, Lurçat joined the infantry, but was evacuated on 15 November after falling ill. During his recovery to health, in 1915, he practised painting and lithography.
In 1917, Jean Lurçat made his first tapestries: Filles Vertes (Green Girls) and Soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Grenada).
At the end of the war in 1918, he returned to Switzerland where he had a holiday in Ticino (Swiss Italy), with Rilke, Busoni, Hermann Hesse and Jeanne Bucher.
In 1921, Jean Lurçat met Louis Marcoussis, he discovered Picasso and Max Jacob, and created decoration and costumes for Le spectacle de la Compagnie Pitoeff: "He who receives slaps", and then spent the autumn near the Baltic sea.
He revealed, at the home of Jeanne Bucher, elements of decoration (carpets and paintings) of Le Vertige, a film by Marcel l'Herbier.
In 1930 he had exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, and Chicago; he created nine drypoint illustrations for Les Limbes (The limbo) by Charles-Albert Cingria; and he made another visit to America.
In December, 1932, Lurçat participated in the exhibition Sélections with Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain and Raoul Dufy; the event was organised in New York by the Valentine Gallery.
In order to fully appreciate and understand the works of Jean Lurçat, one must view them in the context of the history of tapestry, in particular, the downfall of its existence during the rise of the Renaissance.
Western European tapestry history spans the foundation of the Gobelins manufactory 1662 to the beginning of the third republic of France in 1871.
[2] Furthermore, in the 1500s, painters (with paint) and later designated specialized glazers (with only ink, wild-grain colour or chalk) were commissioned to touch up and create defined lines around the shapes on the surface of woven tapestry.
[1] He came away from this experience more sure that emotional content and reduction of means, or "scale of pre-arranged colour" [1] were of ultimate importance to tapestry design.
[1] The artist asserts: "I want to remind you that Tapestry knew its proudest moments in a time when a style of extremely grandiose architecture reigned supreme".
[1] In 1934, Lurçat returned to New York where he participated in the creation of new decoration and costumes for a choreography of Balanchine; which he unveiled in Chicago and Philadelphia.
Then, he followed, with Malraux and Aragon, the Journées d'Amité pour l'Union Soviétique (The Journeys of Friendship for the Soviet Union).
In September, he took up residence in Aubusson with Gromaire and Dubreuil in order to renovate the art of tapestry, which at the time had fallen to a low point.
