Dom Robert (Guy de Chaunac Lanzac)

Born in 1907, he died in 1997.

Dom Robert began drawing as a young child and trained at the École des arts décoratifs in Paris in 1925. He entered the abbey of En Calcat in 1930 and was ordained as a priest seven years later. In the 1940s, encouraged by Jean Lurçat, he turned towards the practice of tapestry, which he designed as large-scale watercolours and then transformed into numbered cartoons. Towards the late 1950s Dom Robert stepped up his production and his work featured in numerous exhibitions. His great inspiration was nature, and he transcribed what he saw in colourful and luxuriant floral and animal patterns. The evocative power of his work, a direct response to the generosity of nature, filtered through his immediate perceptions, made it a natural choice for this edition of le Printemps de septembre, which sets out to focus on artists’ relation to their environment.