Maurice André

Maurice André stayed in Aubusson throughout the war. He founded the cooperative group “Tapisserie de France” and was a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie). He developed a personal aesthetic, far from Lurçat, made up of rigorous cubist flat fields, in a chromatic range that was often pared back, and he received ambitious public commissions, for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (“L’Europe unie dans le Travail et la Paix”), or the French Pavilion for the 1958 Exhibition in Brussels (“La Technique moderne au service de l’Homme”). Naturally (as did Wogensky, Prassinos, …), he then moved toward abstraction—first rather lyrical, then in an increasingly geometric style—in a trajectory very close to that of Matégot.

By the mid-1960s, André’s style came closer to Matégot’s, where beatings, prickings, and dotted accents became the norm. By virtue of its subject matter, its treatment, its chromatic palette, and its format, our Cartoon is close to “Grand nocturne”, kept at the Musée Jean Lurçat and to the contemporary tapestry from Angers.