03/04/2025
“Lurçat was an artist completely engaged in his time”
Xavier Hermel administrator of the Jean and Simone Lurçat Foundation
Jean Lurçat, peintre et peintre cartonnier (1892-1966) this weeks and his home Villa Seurat, an enclave in the 14th arrondissement. The short street is where Jean Lurçat, the French painter and tapestry master, lived in a white stucco-and-glass house—designed in collaboration with his brother, the modernist architect André Lurçat built 1925—until he died in 1966. The house—constructed primarily to function as an artist’s studio, as many artists were leaving the too-expensive Montparnasse neighborhood for a less costly place in which to live and work—was the first of eight similar buildings on the street, which André built in the style of the avant-garde architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement.
After Jean Lurçat’s death, his widow, Simone, lived there until 2010, willing the house and its contents—all of the Lurçats’ original furnishings—with pieces by the renowned French architect Pierre Chareau and designer Mathieu Matégot—as well as over 1,400 drawings, numerous paintings, diaries, and some of the best examples of both Lurçat’s ceramics and the beautifully detailed bright tapestries for which he became famous.
The sitting room features a custom-designed wall covering by .
The design of the textile on a denim sofa has been recolored as a fabric. The painting above the sofa is the 1925 Turkish Woman, and the one leaning against several canvases is Arcade from 1925—both by Lurçat.
The dining area’s wall tapestry was made by Aubusson in 1945; the rooster, a symbol of the French Republic, was a favorite Lurçat image. The vessel on the shelf is a Picasso design, made by , a pottery in Vallauris, France.
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Photo: Francis Amiand