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Art of the 20th Century
Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu
(b Boulogne-sur-Mer, 27 Jan 1921).
French painter, sculptor, designer and illustrator. He left Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1933 to attend the Lycée Hoche in Versailles, where he learnt Greek, Russian and Spanish. Over the next few years he was educated at various secondary and university institutions in Rouen, Cambrai and Douai, studying law at Douai in 1941. He started to paint landscapes and portraits in oils in 1942 and the following year taught English at the Lycée in Douai. He worked as an interpreter for the US Army at Cambrai in 1944 and in that year read Edward Crankshaw’s Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel (London, 1936), which impressed upon him the importance of style; he cited it as an influence on his first experiments with abstraction, such as Inception (1944; artist’s col.), with dark amorphous forms suggestive of primordial creation. The following year he began to use drip techniques, as in Evanescence (1945; artist’s col.). After spending several months in Paris in 1945, later that year he became professor of French at the Université Americaine in Biarritz, a post he held until 1946.
