Other Revivals

Joan Miró, Hirondelle Amour (Swallow Love), designed 1934, woven October 10, 1977–September 30, 1979, wool. Mobilier national, Paris, France, GOB-1239, © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Isabelle Bideau

Beyond the adherents of Jean Lurçat’s tapestry revival, other people worked in the 1930s and 1940s to modernize the designs of tapestry, but without linking them to medieval precedents. The entrepreneur and gallerist Marie Cutolli (1879–1973) recruited avant-garde artists to work in the medium. Many of these artists opted to translate existing paintings into textile, which due to their nontraditional styles proved a new challenge for weavers, even if the results seemed for some critics to be only reproductions of oil painting. The administrators of the Mobilier national and the Gobelins factory also recruited artists to work in tapestry, continuing to seek new ways for contemporary artists and weavers to collaborate.

In 1946 the interest in modern tapestry was stimulated by the first exhibition held after the liberation of Paris at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris (now the Centre Pompidou). Dedicated to the history of French tapestry, the show was intended to demonstrate how ancient French culture and tradition had endured and survived the chaos and rupture of the Second World War. Dating from the fourteenth century to the mid-1940s, the show contained 318 tapestries, about a quarter of which had been made within a few years of the exhibition. Versions of this show traveled to venues in Europe and the United States, including well-attended stops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, further stimulating the interest in contemporary French tapestries.