Mathieu Matégot

Matégot, first a decorator and then a creator of objects and furniture (an activity he discontinued in 1959), met François Tabard in 1945 and gave him his first Cartoons, figurative at first, 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 multiple international exhibitions (Matégot, like Lurçat before him, was an untiring activist for tapestry), responded to numerous public commissions, sometimes monumental (« Rouen », 85 m2 for the Préfecture 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 was part, together with other artists such as Wogensky, Tourlière, and Prassinos, of those who decisively turned wool toward abstraction—lyrical at first, then geometric in the 1970s—by exploring different technical aspects of the craft: graduations, beating, pricking, stippling… If, at that time, interest in aeronautics was very strong for Matégot (especially his tapestry for Orly, dated 1959, « Cap Canaveral » from 1958…), he integrated here his taste for treating major myths: Icarus (there was also « Vulcan », « Daedalus »…), serving as a transition, in an identical treatment (to be compared rightly with « Orly »), to evoke the same conquest of the Air. 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, reproduite p.31 Patrick Favardin, Mathieu Matégot, Editions Norma, 2014