Travelling to Angers to See the Song of the World

My wanderlust went dormant for seven days when I arrived in Nantes.

Strangely enough, the transition from Brazil to France was easy. I did trade a colourful country with steamy hot weather for a monochromatic cityscape in early European spring—why do French people all dress in black and why are all façades so depressingly grey?—but I’m comfortable in both countries so all I had to do was to remember where I was and adjust accordingly.

But wanderlust being wanderlust, by the following Tuesday, I was looking for opportunities to go somewhere and do something. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m bored in Nantes, it’s just that the urge to explore other places is stronger.

I went for an easy trip—Angers, a 45-minute train ride from Nantes.

I’ve been to Angers many times, so I needed a new goal. This time, it would be the Jean Lurçat and Contemporary Tapestry Museum because I still need to see beautiful things to stay sane in this crazy world (honestly, try it, it’s better than any drug on the official or black market!)

Why tapestry? Well, I like textile arts because I like texture (including in my food, which is why I don’t find candies or ice cream very interesting).

And also, why not.

I was expecting a small museum with a few tapestries since the most famous ones, the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry, at the Château d’Angers.

Instead, I discovered the museum was in the 12th-century Hôpital Saint-Jean, a stunning example of Gothic architecture with a chapel, cloister and a “Great Hall for the Sick.”

I admired the work of contemporary artists playing with textures, colours and themes for a while then I moved on to the masterpiece in the “Great Hall for the Sick”—the “Chant du Monde” (“Song of the World”) by Jean Lurçat, created in 1957 for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

The tapestries are the contemporary echo of the Apocalypse Tapestry. Jean Lurçat lived through both World Wars and this is how he expressed his symbolic and humanist vision of the 20th century. The result is a dark, slightly esoteric series expressing fear and hope, life, death and rebirth.

Tapestry is crazy masochist work, by the way. The artist starts with a cartoon, a full-sized sketch with annotations on colours and techniques that serve as a guide. Then the tapestry is waived manually on the reverse side in a workshop—the most famous ones were in Aubusson.

And then at one point large decorative wall hangings stopped being ordered because there were fewer castles to decorate and this time-consuming art almost died.

Not quite.

Fortunately, there are still people waving, creating and making beautiful things, just because.

We need more of that.

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