Georges Mathieu
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The dilemma is clearly shown in the work of Pierre Soulages, and in that of Georges Mathieu. Soulages can, on occasion, look like a sweeter and less committed version of Franz Kline, but his broad strokes of the brush do not have the energy or the constructional quality which one finds in the American artist. Mathieu is a more interesting figure than Soulages. His work has affinities with that of Pollock, though he started painting in a freely calligraphic way so early (1937) that there can be no question of direct derivation."--Movements in Art since 1945 (1969) by Edward Lucie-Smith |
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Georges Mathieu (January 27, 1921 - June 10, 2012) was a French painter in the style of lyrical abstraction.
Biography
He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and gained an international reputation in the 1950s as a leading Abstract Expressionist. His large paintings are created very rapidly and impulsively. Despite his unconventional technique, he considers himself an historical painter working with abstract subject matter. His paintings are related to American Lyrical Abstraction and to Art informel as well.
Georges Mathieu never had any art education. In 1947 he was working for American Express in Paris, France and rented a chambre de bonne near the Palais Luxembourg. There he executed a number of large canvases with a black background on which he painted colored scrolls, whorls and other shapes. He subsequently refined his technique, using a white background on which he painted simple geometrical forms, most often a single line in color. In the 1950s he exhibited fifty of these canvases at the Leicester Galeries in London
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