French painter, printmaker, theatre designer and tapestry designer, born in 1904 in the Gard, died in 1977 in Paris.
Life
The son of Adrien Coutaud, a jeweller, Lucien Coutaud attended the École des beaux-arts in Nîmes from October 1920 to June 1924, where the engraver Armand Coussens probably introduced him to printmaking. Having moved to Paris in October 1924, he frequented the independent academies of Montparnasse, then entered the École des arts décoratifs. Charles Dullin gave him his first theatre design, for Aristophanes’ The Birds adapted by Bernard Zimmer: its success launched his career as a set and costume designer, continued notably with Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de satin in 1943.
After his military service in the Rhineland, he held his first solo exhibition in 1931, at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins. In 1936 he married Denise Bernollin, a printmaker and illustrator. Close to the Surrealists, whose texts he read and whose events he followed, he never joined the group, and from 1940 described his art as “surreal” (surréel).
After the war he took part in the revival of Aubusson tapestry alongside Jean Lurçat, designing among others tapestries for the liner France (1962). He ran the printmaking studio of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts from 1964 to 1975. Alain Resnais devoted a documentary to him in 1948. He received the Grand Prix des Beaux-Arts of the City of Paris in 1967.
The work
The grey-blue landscapes of the Rhineland years were followed, in the early 1930s, by bouquets and esoteric compositions. During the war his figures became skeletal, fragmented and faceless, close to the mannequin or the automaton. Coutaud then invented “Éroticomagie”, based on metamorphoses with sexual connotations, and developed the series of Taureaumagies, nourished by bullfighting. Figures, vegetal or mineral houses, flat irons and vast landscapes make up his repertoire.
As a printmaker he illustrated Gilbert Lely’s Ma civilisation (1948), Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (1951) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la Lune (1971).
