Lot 145 Jean Lurcat

Jean Lurcat, 1892-1966 COQ PAILLE Aubusson Tapestry by Tabard Frere et Soeurs, 60''x 52'' (152cm x 132xm), signed; inscribed label verso Jean Lurcat, one of France's finest exponents of tapestry design and was a major influence on Louis Le Brocquy's introduction to this medium. Le Brocquy, writing for Ark Magazine Royal College of Art, London 1956 stated: ''Lurcat's method of designing, already widely practised in France, has given new life to French tapestry, now more joyous and frank, more durable and economic than at any time since the end of the 16th century, when resistance to Renaissance idiom finally collapsed. His reconstituted technique imposes no particular style on the designer, as may be seen by comparing the quantity of stylistically varied work recently produced at Aubusson. It is essentially a return to medieval ways. In one form or another it represents the only practical and economic way of producing 'a very large work of woven and coloured wools': a tapestry. For any designer who has made a cartoon by this direct method of Lurcat and by the indirect, copy-a-painting method of, shall we say, Boucher, there can be no remaining doubt in eye or in mind as to the superiority of the former when comparing the two resultant tapestries. Only those can remain obdurate who insist on the virtue of cleverly and laboriously translating paint scumbles into weft''. Louis Le Brocquy, Ark Magazine, Royal College of Art, London 1956