Georges Mathieu was a French painter and theorist credited with launching the Lyrical Abstraction movement and the greater trend of Informalism in post-WWII Paris. He was associated with Tachism (French for stain-making), a style of painting practiced in Paris through the 1950s.
Background
Georges Mathieu was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais, in 1921. His father Adolphe Georges Mathieu, bank manager at Barclays, and his mother Madeleine Durpé, who taught him drawing as a child, lived besides the ramparts of the city, 38 boulevard du Prince Albert. In 1933 Mathieu's parents divorced and he was placed in the care of his aunt in Versailles. He moved to Versailles at the age of 12.
Education
Georges Mathieu studied Literature, Law, and Philosophy at the University of Lille, after which he obtained a degree in English in 1941.
Career
Georges Mathieu produced his first oil paintings in 1942. He worked as a teacher for some years before embarking on an artistic career. He was an English teacher at Douai high school in the North of France in 1943 and French teacher at the American University in Biarritz in 1945.
In 1946 Georges organized his first exhibition at the Salon des moins de trente ans in Paris. He was the first in France to violently react against geometric abstraction and organized a series of demonstrations in 1947 in favor of an art freed from all constraints and traditional habits he called the «Lyrical Abstraction», of which he would be the promoter. The same year he was upgraded to Director of Public Relations for the American company United States Lines in Paris.
In 1950 Georges Mathieu produced his first paintings. The following year, he made a study trip to Positano, Italy, where he began to conciliate the Gestalt theory with Lyrical Abstraction. From 1953 to 1963 he was editor in chief of the United States Lines Paris Review. In 1954, he executed his first great paintings, left for Japan and was given a triumphal reception in 1957. He then stayed in the United States. By 1959, retrospectives of his works were held in museums in Cologne, Basel, Krefeld, Neuchâtel, and Geneva. He then went to Brazil, Argentina, Lebanon, Israel, Canada, and in almost every country of Europe.
In 1962, convinced of the need to create harmony between man and environment, he recognized one of the major duties of the artist to the city and tried to turn his «language» into «style». He then created new forms of furniture, jewelry, produced tapestry cartoons for the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins, designed plates for Manufacture de Sèvres, established a factory in Fontenay-le-Comte, realized a series of posters for Air France, medals for the Monnaie de Paris, and created a new coin of 10 francs.
After more than one hundred solo exhibitions around the world, after four major retrospectives, Georges Mathieu had undertaken monumental sculptures as the one at the Neuilly sports complex. By 1964, Georges Mathieu had launched a crusade for an education that would not emphasize reason over sensibility, nor economic progress to the detriment of human progress and that would give access to the greatest number of people to the simplest and most exciting joys of life.
He also participated in the development of the new village of Castellaras, Var, in collaboration with Jacques Couëlle. In 1976 he became Director of the Society of Encouragement to Arts and Crafts professions, but also a member of the Commission for the Reform of Art Education (Ministry of Education). He participated in works of the Institut de l'Entreprise. Georges Mathieu became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1975, and his works are today exhibited in the world’s greatest museums. Mathieu died on June 10, 2012 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France at the age of 91.
Views
A sentence from Galbraith he liked to quote, sums up his philosophy: «The artist is now called, to reduce the risk of a social wreck, to leave his ivory tower for the control tower of society». Mathieu identified painting with action itself. Having created a spiritual vacuum, he set his expressive potential free which, through the agency of the gesture, combined with his energy potential.
Mathieu considered later art movements as Dadaism, Nouveau réalisme, Arte Povera as a relapse, because they appeal to representations of visible real. In addition, he criticized them for their so-called nihilist dimension, as their interpretation does not call on human sensibility.
Quotations:
“I do not meet anybody who seems to feel even vaguely that we are witnessing a special moment, a liberating ascension. It is not at all a matter of preparing a mad maelstrom of destruction or self-destruction of the forms preceding our culture, rather that we must introduce in the West ‘the advent of a new awareness of being, a new freedom and a new history of the world.”
“The most important moments are clearly when I paint in public. It is the joy of communion with the other. A little like what happens in love. What defines love is this tension between two beings with a shared focus.”
Membership
In 1976 he became Director of the Society of Encouragement to Arts and Crafts professions, but also a member of the Commission for the Reform of Art Education (Ministry of Education). Georges Mathieu became a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1975.