Linarès
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Tabard workshop.
With its ribbon.
1954.
Matégot, first a decorator, then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he renounced in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945, and gave him his first cartoons, figurative at first, then soon abstract, from the 50s onwards. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painters-Cartonists of Tapestry) in 1949, participated in multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was a tireless advocate for tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental (« Rouen », 85 m2 for the prefecture of Seine-Maritime, but also tapestries for Orly, for the Maison de la Radio, for the IMF…) and produced no less than 629 cartoons until the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, USA. Matégot was part, with other artists like Wogensky, Tourlière or Prassinos, of those who resolutely oriented wool towards abstraction, lyrical at first, geometric in the 1970s, exploiting different technical aspects of the craft: gradients, beatings, stitched, dotted…
Our cartoon is part of an important corpus of tapestries with exotic intonations: 'Acapulco', 'Mindanao', 'Santa Cruz'... but whose treatment is abstract. At this time, his tapestries are resolutely compartmentalized (but not geometric) before the more lyrical phase of the 60s.
Bibliography :
J. Cassou, M. Damain, R. Moutard-Uldry, French tapestry and cartoonists, Tel, 1957, ill. p.141
Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, special issue Prisme des Arts, 1957, reproduced
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Jean Lurçat Museum and Contemporary Tapestry, 1990-1991, reproduced p.33
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduced p.96 at the 1954 Decorative Artists' Salon
