Mathieu Matégot

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, initially figurative, then soon abstract, from the 1950s onwards. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painters-Cartoonists of Tapestry) in 1949, participated in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an indefatigable advocate of 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, United States. 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: gradations, beatings, stitched, pointillist..

Our cartoon is part of a significant corpus of tapestries with exotic connotations: 'Acapulco', 'Mindanao', 'Santa Cruz'... but with abstract treatment. At that time, his tapestries were resolutely compartmentalized (but not geometric) before the more lyrical phase of the 60s.

Bibliography:
J. Cassou, M. Damain, R. Moutard-Uldry, French tapestry and cartoonist painters, Tel, 1957, ill. p.141
Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, special issue Prisme des Arts, 1957, reproduced
Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduced p.33
Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduced p.96 at the Salon des Artistes décorateurs of 1954