The painter Georges Mathieu has established himself among the great artists of the history of abstract art in the 20th century. Georges Mathieu’s paintings enjoy unanimous recognition in the art market, among art experts, museums of modern and contemporary art, art galleries and auction houses, and have found their place in art collections alongside other great artists.
Georges Mathieu was born on 27 January 1921 in Boulogne-sur-Mer and died on 10 June 2012 in Boulogne-Billancourt. Coming from a family of bankers, he first studied law, which he abandoned in 1942 to devote himself to the plastic arts.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was rebuilt. The pictorial art is in transformation. The art critic Jean José Marchand defined Georges Mathieu’s paintings in 1947 by evoking for the first time the notion of “lyrical abstraction”.
Indeed, the art ste is opposed to geometric abstraction, it frees itself from classical constraints and habits. The great rapidity of his gestures in painting translates into a strong emotion, in the absence of an exact representation of reality. The forms are clear and precise.
In 1957, Georges Mathieu stays a few months in Japan and discovers with deep interest his aesthetic and pictorial traditions. The art of calligraphy in particular attracts his attention. It is a very ancient traditional practice, which appeared in 206 BC during the period of the Han dynasty and was developed by Buddhist monks.
Georges Mathieu feeds on and is inspired by this extreme oriental calligraphy, but he uses the beauty and poetry of the gesture for a completely different purpose. Oriental calligraphy is linked to religion and therefore has a very important, even pregnant, spiritual significance. On the other hand, the artist constructs his compositions from abstract signs, which he denies meaning to explain that the meaning comes from a mental reconstruction made by the reader and not from the sign itself. It is for this reason, the negation of the sign as a signifier, that André Malraux will qualify the artist as a “western calligrapher”.
The auction house Aguttes Commissaire-priseur offered several works by Georges Mathieu for sale, each time with very satisfactory results. This was made possible by the dynamism of the Contemporary Art department, which offers to have Georges Mathieu’s works appraised and to respond to requests for appraisals in complete confidentiality. The international network built up over time by the auction house Aguttes enables all buyers and sellers, including international buyers and sellers, to be connected. Thus in 2019, Vieillesse des roses an alkyd on canvas, executed in 1983 (73 x 92 cm – 28 ¾ x 26 ¼ in.) was sold for €63,700.
