Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, who first worked as a decorator, then became a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he abandoned in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first Cartoons, initially figurative and then, soon after, abstract ones, from the 1950s onward. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie) in 1949, participated in multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, would become an indefatigable campaigner 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 created no fewer than 629 Cartoons up to the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for contemporary tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot, together with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière, or Prassinos, was among those who decisively redirected wool toward abstraction, lyrical at first and then geometric in the 1970s, drawing on different technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, puncturing, dotted work… Our Cartoon takes up a title already used in 1954: the treatment bears witness to Matégot’s aesthetic evolution toward less compartmentalized, more pliant forms. It belongs to an important corpus of tapestries with exotic intonations: “Acapulco”, “Mindanao”, “Linarès”… Bibliography : Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, numéro spécial Prisme des Arts, 1957 Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduit p.33 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014