ABSTRACT
Messiaen was elected to the music section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1968. New members of the Académie are required to give a speech about one of their predecessors. Since Messiaen was the first occupant of the newly-created ‘Fauteuil VII’ of the music section, there was no obvious choice of musical predecessor as his subject. Thus, on the occasion of his installation, on 15 May 1968, Messiaen spoke not about a fellow-musician, but about the artist and tapestry-maker Jean Lurçat. Lurçat was a singularly apt choice for Messiaen, since many of his greatest tapestries are on religious subjects, notably his extraordinary apocalyptic vision in the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Plateau d’Assy (Haute-Savoie), which he conceived in the late 1940s, and his monumental cycle of ten tapestries known collectively as Le Chant du Monde (Musée Jean Lurçat, Angers), which occupied Lurçat for the last ten years of his life.
