Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, first a decorator, then creator of objects and furnishings (an activity he gave up in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945, and provided him with his first Cartoons, figurative at first and then soon abstract, from the 1950s onward. He became a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie) in 1949, took part in numerous international exhibitions (Matégot, as Lurçat had done before him, proved to be an indefatigable activist for tapestry), responded to many 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 fewer than 629 Cartoons into the 1970s. In 1990, the Matégot Foundation for Contemporary Tapestry was inaugurated in Bethesda, in the United States. Matégot belonged, along with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière, or Prassinos, to those who decisively redirected wool toward abstraction, lyrical at first and then geometric in the 1970s, drawing on various technical aspects of the craft: gradations, beatings, pricks, dotting… Our Cartoon forms part of an important corpus of tapestries with exotic intonations: “Acapulco”, “Mindanao”, “Santa Cruz”… but whose treatment is abstract. At this time, his tapestries were resolutely partitioned (but not geometric) before the more lyrical phase of the 1960s. Bibliographie : J. Cassou, M. Damain, R. Moutard-Uldry, la tapisserie française et les peintres cartonniers, Tel, 1957, ill. p.141 Waldemar Georges, Mathieu Matégot, numéro spécial Prisme des Arts, 1957, reproduite Cat. Exp. Matégot, Angers, Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine, 1990-1991, reproduit p.33 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014, reproduite p.96 au Salon des Artistes décorateurs de 1954