3 exhibitions that highlight sumptuous contemporary tapestry

Is the art of tapestry experiencing a resurgence of interest? Seven pieces intended for seven chapels will be commissioned for Notre-Dame de Paris, while the fourth tapestry in a cycle of six devoted to the animated films of Japanese artist Hayao Miyazaki “fell off the loom” in the spring of 2023 in Aubusson (Creuse). Also in Aubusson, until the end of September, you can admire all sixteen recent weavings based on JRR Tolkien’s illustrations for The Lord of the Rings ; in Sorèze (Tarn), Dom Robert is in the spotlight and, in Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales), Jean Lurçat is the subject of an exhibition. “Lurçat seemed unsurpassable for a long time, intimidating his contemporaries”, confirms Emmanuel Gérard. The director of the Cité internationale de la tapisserie in Aubusson observes that attention is being rekindled for all artistic crafts, that museums are once again exhibiting textile works and that art schools are also returning to them. So much so that young artisans and artists are discovering these techniques and their aesthetic possibilities. This revival is also due to the commissioning and promotional work that the Cité has been carrying out for around fifteen years, transmitting declining techniques such as that of “faireur de chair”: a weaver specializing in weaving faces.

Dom Robert, painter of joy

Located since 2015 in the Sorèze abbey-school, at the foot of the Montagne Noire, in the Tarn, the Dom Robert museum is an exceptional place. On the top floor of an imposing building that was a royal military school in the 18th century and then a boarding school for boys until 1991, visitors discover a museum with a warm and intimate scenography. The new exhibition presents dozens of tapestries by Dom Robert (1907-1997), a painter and cartoonist who was also a monk at the Benedictine abbey of En Calcat.

The exhibition allows us to discover his solar pictorial universe and, in the background, his journey as a man of faith. Trained at the Decorative Arts School in Paris in the late 1920s, the young Guy de Chaunac-Lanzac, known as Dom Robert, committed himself to monastic life at the age of 23. He first embarked on illumination and then, impressed by his meeting with Jean Lurçat in 1941, he became a cartoon painter. Inspired by the “mille-fleurs” tapestries of the Middle Ages, Dom Robert took up some of their motifs.

But, by freeing himself from scale relationships – this is one of his trademarks – he enjoys subverting certain traditional codes. This is the case in Full field a tapestry in which he gives the same size to a poppy as to the head of a leaping goat. In these works woven in Aubusson, the artist monk casts a tender and joyful gaze on his bestiary, topping a hermit crab with a bishop’s mitre in Mermaid Garden or letting loose a spirited pony in the middle of a flowerbed of wildflowers in Leprechaun .Butterflies in vibrant colors, meadows saturated with daisies or dandelions, mischievous animals: these works are odes to nature that express the energy and beauty of life.

A ray of life and light

Discreet, the silhouette of Dom Robert appears through a few photographs and videos presented along the route. Drawing in the middle of a field of broom or strolling along the paths, wearing a straw hat, the monk whispers to visitors: “The nature that surrounds us and meets us under our feet can be in itself a field of research and discoveries as inexhaustible as the field of stars…” Like a ray of life, Dom Robert’s inner light survives him in his works.

Jean Lurçat, the song of the world

His triumphant roosters reproduced in all directions on plates, vases or fabrics have ended up tiring the public. However, Jean Lurçat (1892-1966), a jack-of-all-trades creator, enjoyed resounding success during his lifetime. The Hyacinthe-Rigaud Museum in Perpignan aims to make us rediscover him, in particular through his ceramics, produced from 1951 a few kilometers away, in the Sant Vicens workshop.

Monumental dimensions

The retrospective does, however, give a place to tapestry, thanks to which the Vosges painter, trained at the École de Nancy, made a name for himself. In 1937, in Angers, the forty-year-old experienced an aesthetic shock when faced with The Apocalypse Tapestrya medieval wool fresco over 100 m long. “He then devoted himself to the renovation of this language: cardboard numbered according to the colors, broad-point weaving and a reduced palette of shades,” explains the exhibition curator, Pascale Picard.

His tapestries, even more than his paintings and earthenware, exalt the harmony of a universe of monumental dimensions. Men, animals, plants and minerals frolic there to the point of hybridization. Among the jewels of the exhibition, Freedom (1952), imagined during the Occupation, depicts the words of Paul Éluard’s poem, swirling around an immense sun, filled with foliage and crowned with bull horns. Five years later, Lurçat, a survivor of the Great War and opponent of Nazism, would complete his work dedicated to hope, by starting a set of ten panels called The song of the world .