“Artistic License. Six takes on the Guggenheim Collection.” is an exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum in New York from May 24, 2019, through January 12, 2020, curated by six artists. Richard Prince offers a section entitled “Four Paintings Looking Right,” in which he has included two major works by Georges Mathieu from the museum’s collection. In an accompanying text that is not lacking in courage in the context of an American exhibition, Richard Prince writes:
With the reshuffling of the world order at the end of World War II and the simultaneous dawn of the Cold War at the end of the 1940s, American abstract painting and sculpture gained a new prominence in the international cultural consciousness. This emergent, developing art form was premised largely on an embrace of subjectivity and chance, with roots in Native American iconography, the improvisational elements of jazz, and the influence of Surrealist artists living in exile in the United States during wartime. The ascendency of American Abstract Expressionism here and abroad was catalyzed by a strategic effort on the part of the U.S. government—the CIA in particular—to spread an ethos of liberalism in the face of encroaching Communist ideology in Eastern Europe. The bold drip paintings of Jackson Pollock were pitted against the Socialist Realism of the USSR. Abstract Expressionism, unwittingly, became an American brand for export, a propagandistic arm of the State Department.
But what is lost in this art-historical assessment is the equally persuasive argument that postwar abstraction—as an immediate rejection of the more traditional classicism and realism that emerged during the 1920s and ’30s—was largely a transnational movement. Art Informel in France; CoBrA in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium; Zero in Germany; and Gutai in Japan all promoted the idea of abstraction as a liberating aesthetic strategy in the face of war-wrought devastation.
Left on the photo: Composition, 1959.
Right on the photo: Black and White Abstract (La mort de la Reine Edith), 1957.
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🇫🇷 L'exposition des œuvres sur papier de Georges Mathieu chez Perrotin est ouverte du mardi au samedi, de 11h à 19h, jusqu’au 30 septembre, au 2bis avenue Matignon.
« Georges Mathieu, fondateur de l'Abstraction lyrique, est reconnu internationalement pour ses œuvres sur toile énergiques, parfois monumentales. Il est aussi renommé en France pour sa production d’artiste total, dans les domaines les plus variés, des affiches aux médailles et pièces de monnaie, en passant par les tapisseries des Gobelins, les porcelaines de Sèvres et même l’architecture d’avant-garde.
Au sein de cette multitude de supports et de techniques, ses œuvres sur papier, qui furent souvent exposées au côté de ses peintures, ont rarement fait l’objet d’une présentation dédiée. Elles méritent pourtant qu’on leur prête une attention particulière, à la fois en tant qu’illustrations supplémentaires du talent protéiforme de Mathieu, et par leurs qualités propres, leurs caractéristiques distinctives qui nous offrent un récit sur l’évolution du style de l’artiste, parallèle à celui que nous offrent ses peintures. » – Édouard Lombard, Directeur du Comité Georges Mathieu
🌏 ‘Georges Mathieu, the founder of Lyrical Abstraction, is internationally renowned for his dynamic, sometimes monumental works on canvas. In France, he is also known as a total artist, working in a wide variety of fields, from posters to medals and coins, from Gobelins tapestries to Sèvres porcelain and even avant-garde architecture.
Amidst the vast array of media and techniques, his works on paper, although often exhibited alongside his paintings, have rarely been the subject of a separate exhibition. Yet they deserve special consideration, not only to showcase Mathieu's protean talent but because of their unique qualities that demonstrate the evolution of his style in parallel with his paintings.’
On view until September 30 at 2 bis avenue Matignon
Tuesday-Saturday 11AM-7PM
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#georgesmathieu #PerrotinMatignon #Perrotin
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Views of Georges Mathieu’s exhibition at Perrotin 2 bis Matignon, 2023
Photo: Tanguy Beurdeley
© Comité Georges Mathieu / ADAGP, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the estate & @Perrotin](https://georges-mathieu.fr/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
