Lurçat, Jean

Lurçat, Jean (zhäN lürsă`), 1892–1966, French artist and writer. Lurçat worked as a painter and lithographer, illustrating numerous books. He is best known, however, as a tapestry designer. His brightly colored tapestries hang in many European royal and presidential palaces. A major example hangs in the Musée national d'Art moderne, Paris. Lurçat's writings include Designing Tapestry (tr. 1950). His brother

André Lurçat, 1894–1970, architect and city-planner, worked extensively on the rebuilding of French cities after World War II.

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Lurçat, Jean 

Born July 1, 1892, in Bruyères, Vosges; died Jan. 6, 1966, in Saint-Paul-de-Vanse, Maritime Alps. French painter and tapestry designer instrumental in initiating the French revival of weaving tapestries. Brother of A. Lurçat.

Lurçat was basically a self-taught artist. Basing his work both on the traditions of the French gobelins and contemporary styles of decorative art, he tried to create impassioned and fantastic symbolic images (The Song of the World, 1957-63, in the Town Hall of the city of Angers). Lurçat’s tapestries, with their contrasts of bright pure colors and dark somber colors, their fractured forms, and their brittle vibrating contours, combine human figures, fantastic animal and plant forms, inscriptions, and heraldic emblems to create varied associations. The designer’s best tapestries were made at a factory in Aubusson. Lurçat also did book illustrations, ceramics, and theater design.

REFERENCES

Roy, C. Jean Lurçat Geneva, 1957.
Tapisseries du Chant du monde. Preface by J. Lurcat. Annecy, 1963.