Tapis/Tapisserie: Marie Cuttoli, Fernand Léger and the Muralnomad

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Summary

In the 1920s, when French art collector Marie Cuttoli brokered a marriage between France's tapestry manufacturers and modernist artists, she sought to identify the industry as authentically French and stabilize its status as an art. By 1952, however, architect Le Corbusier characterized tapestry as a »muralnomad« due to the mobility of the modern family. This article aims to show how Cuttoli's process of reviving tapestry manufacture was contingent upon and operated within colonial, national, gender and aesthetic hierarchies that are inherently unstable. Tapestry's success in the French context was dependent upon its ties to national institutions such as royal and aristocratic patronage in the sixteenth century and museum formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French claims to tapestry as cultural patrimony obscure its Arab origins while appropriating Orientalist motifs. Cuttoli's revival of French manufacture in collaboration with modernist artists was preceded by her revival of indigenous carpet production in Algeria. The medium's oscillations between artist and artisan, fine art and craft, and carpet and tapestry confounded aesthetic categories. Fernand Léger, who collaborated both with Cuttoli and Le Corbusier, figures importantly within tapestry's history as muralnomad. His painting, mural and tapestry productions represent modernism's simultaneous crisis in aesthetic hierarchies while also asserting a gendered, racial and national identity. In one important case, Léger's vertiginous series of paintings, Les Plongeurs (1940–45), later made into tapestry, reveal just how dependent meaning and value are upon the nation, its institutions and discourse about cultural patrimony.

Notes

1. Dominique Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli: Myrbor et l'invention de la tapisserie modern, Paris, 2010; Chantal Morelle et Pierre Jakob, Henri Laugier, un esprit sans frontières, Paris, 1997.

2. Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall painting 1927–37, New Haven, Connecticut, 2009, p. 2.

3. Golan, 2009, p. 202.

4. Mayer Thurman, »The Tapestry Medium: An Introduction«, in Koenraad Brosens (ed.), European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven, CT, 2008, p. 17.

5. Cuttoli's essay on tapestry refers to the legend of Penelope. Marie Cuttoli, »La Tapisserie«, in Paulvé, 2010, pp. lxviii–lxx.

6. Mayer Thurman, »A Collection and Its Donors«, in Brosens, 2008, pp. 7–16.

7. Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siècle France, Aldershot, 2003, p. 4.

8. Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, pp. 68, 72, 134–138, 172.

9. Romy Golan, »From monument to muralnomad«, in Karen Koehler (ed.), The Built Surface: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the Twenty-First Century, Aldershot and Burlington, 2002, pp. 186–208.

10. Pascal Ory, La Belle Illusion: Culture et Politique sous le signe du front populaire, 1935–1938, Paris, 1994, pp. 252–255.

11. Ory, 1994, pp. 401–408; Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall painting 1927–37, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 2.

12. Sophie Bowness, »Adam et Eve de Léger et la Renaissance du theatre médieval dans les années 30«, Europe, Vol 75, No 818–819, 1997, Special Issue on Fernand Léger, pp. 148–56.

13. Claude Roy, Jean Lurçat, Geneva, 1956, p. 57; Robert Guinot, La Tapisserie d'Aubusson et de Felletin, Saint-Paul, 2009, pp. 8–9.

14. Michel Florisoone, »Classical Tapestry from the 16th to the Early 20th Century«, in Pierre Verlet (ed.), Book of Tapestry: History and Technique, New York, 1978, pp. 61–113, 70, 84.

15. Morelle et Jakob, 1997, p. 6, citing »Notre-Dame d'Aubusson, partonne d'art moderne«, Réalités, No 162, 1959.

16. Paulvé, 2010, pp. 9–45; Morelle et Jakob, 1997, pp. 2–3.

17. Paulvé, 2010, pp. 56–64.

18. Paulvé, 2010, pp. 73–89; Morelle et Jakob, 1997, pp. 6–8.

19. Guinot, 2009, pp. 80–130; Gérard Denizeau, Denise Majorel: Une Vie pour la tapisserie, Aubusson, 2007.

20. Patrick Cazals and Laurence de Lamaestre, Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie, Aubusson, 1981, p. 15.

21. Jean Cassou, »Lurçat vivant«, in Jean Lurçat et la renaissance de la tapisserie, pp. 9–12.

22. Paulvé, 2010, pp. 6–7.

23. Morelle et Jakob, 1997, p. vii.

24. Paulvé, 2010, p. 120.

25. See, for example, Laugier's essay in Special Issue on Fernand Léger, Cahiers d'art, 1933, and preface to Christian Zervos, L'Histoire de l'art contemporain, Paris, 1938, pp. 9–14.

26. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire and the Popular Front: Hope and Disillusion, New York, 1999, pp. 1–29; Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (eds.), Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, New York, 2002.

27. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity 1900–1945, New York, 1992.

28. Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886–1940, Bloomington, 2008, pp. 124–126.

29. R. P. Giacobetti des Pères Blancs, Les Tapis et Tissages du Djebel-Amour, Collection du centenaire de l'Algérie, 1830–1930, La Vie Intellectuelle et artistique, Paris, 1932.

30. Morelle, 1997, pp. 4–5; Paulvé, 2010, pp. 29–31.

31. Paulvé, 2010, p. 47.

32. »Art: Twentieth Century Tapestries«, Monday, April 13, 1936, Time Magazine.

33. Nelly Maillard, Fernand Léger et les arts décoratifs, Biot and Aubusson, 2003.

34. Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven and London, 1976, pp. 230–231.

35. Christian Derouet, »Léger 1934: la tentation du realism«, in La poésie de l'objet, Paris, 1981, pp. 12–16.

36. Paulvé, 2010, pp. 64–68.

37. Paulvé, 2010, p. 40; Yvonne Brunhammer, Fernand Léger: The Monumental Art, Milan, 2005, p. 57.

38. Paulvé, 2010, p. 38, 44.

39. Paulvé, 2010, p. 80.

40. Le Corbusier, Introduction, in Denise Réné (ed.), Douze Tapisseries (1952), quoted in Adolf Hoffmeister, »Contemporary Tapestry«, in Verlet, 1978, pp. 115–136, 118.

41. Golan, »From monument to muralnomad«, p. 186.

42. Announcement card for Bucholz Gallery's exhibition of Fernand Léger's gouaches and drawings, October 12 to 31, 1942. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Artist Scrapbooks, Chadwyck-Healey (Arlington, VA, 1988). Fernand Léger, letter to Louis Carré, in Derouet, »Chronologie et bibliographie« in Fernand Léger (Centre Pompidou, 1997), p. 337.

43. This argument about the Plongeurs series is more fully developed in my forthcoming monograph, The Colorist Doctor: Fernand Léger and the Aestheticization of Trauma.

44. François Mathey, Fernand Léger, 1881–1955, exhibition catalog for the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1956, p. 296.

45. Carolyn Lanchner, Fernand Léger, New York, 1998, p. 53, translation of letter dated 28 May [1941] from Léger to Le Corbusier, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

46. Meyer Schapiro, »Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art«, in Semiotia Vol 1, 1969, pp. 223–242. For an account of Schapiro's meeting with Léger, see Helen Epstein, »Meyer Schapiro: A Passion to Know and Make Known«, Art News, Vol 82, No 5, 1983, p. 61.

47. Yve-Alain Bois, »Winks of Recognition«, in Beyeler Foundation, Fernand Léger: Paris-New York, Basel, 2008, pp. 139–146, 141.