Jean Miotte (1926-2016)
Biography

THE YEARS OF STUDIES OF THE PAINTER JEAN MIOTTE

Jean Miotte was born in Paris on September 8th, 1926 and spent his youth in Occupied Paris: he was eighteen years old at the end of the war. “It was in this context of upheaval and planetary ideological turmoil that his desire for other values, other spiritual commitments was exacerbated. His hostility towards all forms of regimentation, group effects, dates from this time. At the age of nineteen, he had decided, his path would be solitary” wrote Serge Lenczner. After studying mathematics, Jean Miotte discovered painting during his military service in 1946. He painted the walls of the barracks and said: “I had been struck by the ugliness of the place and the surrounding wall decorations and I swore that as soon as I could I would transform it.” After this, Jean Miotte painted frescoes and theatre sets.
In 1947, Jean Miotte went to the studios of the painters Émile Othon Friesz and Ossip Zadkine. The same year, suffering from tuberculosis, Jean Miotte was hospitalized for many months during which he painted and made drawings. When he left, he painted from life and also created a few imaginary compositions.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DANCE TO JEAN MIOTTE’S ART

The painter Jean Miotte was influenced by the art of Jacques Villon, Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. He was invited to London by the Ballets Russes and to Monte-Carlo by friends who were dancers and choreographers. Dance is a vital element in his art. Jean Miotte was surrounded by friends who were dancers and choreographers such as Zizi Jeanmaire and Wladimir Skouratoff. Jean Miotte’s first figurative paintings often show dancers. Jean Miotte’s painting was nurtured by theatre and performance. He dreamed of a synthesis of music, painting and choreography. Jean Miotte received a commission from the city of Paris: a large format work entitled Sud which hangs in the main hall of the Bastille Opera House. The writer Castor Seibel wrote about Jean Miotte’s painting: “Beyond all realistic figuration, it is an event in itself that finds its expression in the gestural dynamic and its equivalence in colour… knowing how to combine the contradictory in the form seems possible for Miotte, serenity battles chaos, gentleness and the savage rub shoulders in happiness.”

JEAN MIOTTE’S EARLY SUCCESSES

Jean Miotte travelled to Italy and discovered Quattrocento art. He also met the artists Piero Dorazio, Lorenzo Guerrini and Achille Perilli. On returning to Paris, Jean Miotte was influenced by the paintings of Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger.

In 1950, Jean Miotte made his first abstract painting. At the time, he was living and working at Meudon where he met the artists Jean Arp and Gino Severini. In 1952, Jean Miotte met Sam Francis and visited his studio at Ville-d’Avray. The following year Jean Miotte exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles for the first time; he would continue to exhibit regularly there. The same year, the art critic Michel Seuphor contacted him for his publication Dictionnaire de l’art abstrait which was published in 1957. Miotte’s painting is described in it as: “highly coloured compositions with clearly articulated design that have wall power.” Jean Miotte is a personal work, between Lyrical Abstraction, Informal Art and Tachisme. “The names of the artists who, with their lyricism, are an exception to the general rule of coldness…Jean Miotte, by whom bright and airy painting transmits an undeniable emotion,” wrote the art critic Alain Jouffroy. Jean Miotte’s paintings were created with an immediate gesture, a dazzling energy. “Movement is my life” he recalled. In this, he can be compared to Jackson Pollock.

Jean Miotte never prepared his work with sketches. This differentiated him from Hans Hartung for example. The American art critic Harold Rosenberg appreciated this practice especially: “the most important thing in art is freshness”.
This free and instinctive form of painting was also influenced by Surrealism. The spirit was liberated of all constraints of reflection: “it is the intuition that counts above all when a work is born”. Jean Miotte evoked his work as the “result of internal conflicts, my painting is a projection; a succession of acute moments where creation happens in full spiritual tension. Painting is not a speculation of the mind or the intellect, it is a gesture that is carried within.” Jean Miotte met Roberto Matta who told him: “Surrealism is for me a battle. (…) You, too, you’re a fighter, you’re like me, your paintings aren’t abstract.”
The influence of Cubism is also present. Just as his predecessors decomposed to recompose, Miotte “unmakes”. According to Karl Ruhrberg, with Jean Miotte, it is “the orchestration of a world that explodes”. He also underlined Jean Miotte’s strong connection to his northern origins, especially Frans Hals, “who, like him allied spontaneous painting and harmony between impulse and balance.”

In 1954, Jean Miotte moved his studio to the townhouse of the sculptor Prince Youriévitch in Boulogne, where the artists Jacques Lanzman and Serge Rezvani were also living. The following year, the painter Henri Goetz brought his pupils to visit this studio.

In 1957, Jean Miotte participated in the exhibition 50 Ans d’Art Abstrait at the Galerie Creuse in Paris. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Lucien Durand in the same city. From 1958, Jean Miotte was represented in Europe by the dealer Jacques Dubourg. That year, Jean Miotte met the painters André Lanskoy, Serge Poliakoff and Pierre Dmitrienko.

Jean Miotte became successful in Germany where ten exhibitions were devoted to his work during the 1950s, for example at the Kunsthalle of Recklinghausen in 1958. He was also included in a group exhibition of 15 painters at the Cologne Kunstverein. The first work by Miotte to enter a museum was acquired by the Ludwig Museum of Cologne in 1960.

THE PAINTER JEAN MIOTTE’S FIRST TRIP TO THE USA

Jean Miotte exhibited at the first Paris Biennale in 1959 in the “Section Informels” with Raymond Hains, LeRoy Neiman, Peter Foldes and André Favory. The following year, two paintings by Jean Miotte were included in the inaugural exhibition of the Galerie Karl Flinker in Paris. Paintings by him were also included in the inaugural exhibition of the Galerie Iris Clert. In 1961, Jean Miotte participated with Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu and Jean-Paul Riopelle in the group exhibitions of the Galerie Swenska-Franska in Stockholm and the Galerie Bonnier in Lausanne. That year, he was awarded the Ford Foundation Prize and was invited to spend six months in the USA. The following year, a solo show of his work was organized by the Iolas Gallery in New York. Jean Miotte met the American artists Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Chaïm Jacob Lipchitz and Alexander Calder. He travelled around the USA and gave a lecture at Colorado Spring University.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION FOR THE PAINTER JEAN MIOTTE

In 1963, a Jean Miotte retrospective was organized by the Stedelijk Museum of Schiedam and it then transferred to the Gronginger Museum in the Netherlands. Jean Miotte participated the same year in the group exhibition Art Contemporain at the Grand Palais in Paris. In February 1964, the Portuguese art historian José-Augusto França wrote about Jean Miotte’s painting in the magazine Costruire: “A gestural painter in the French spirit, Miotte expresses himself in the constructive despite the impression of immediate vehemence that emanates from his paintings: his art goes beyond the post-war aesthetic, standing out in a more modern way by a conscience of the independence of the idea of creating.”
During the 1960s, many exhibitions of Jean Miotte’s work were organized in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and in Belgium. At that time, he worked in the south of France, at Pignans. In 1967, he was again included in an exhibition at the Schiedam Stedelijk Museum, the group show Huit peintres de Paris, along with Chafik Abboud, Olivier Debré, Karskaya, Jean Messagier, Carl Moser, Louis Nalard and Paul Rebeyrolle.

In 1970, Jean Miotte became a member of the Comité des Réalités Nouvelles. He exhibited forty paintings at the Fondation Prouvost at Marcq-en-Barœul. In 1971, Jean Miotte started using hessian bare canvas as an element in his compositions. The following year, he again spent time in the USA, this time in New York and Washington. Forty-six of his canvases were exhibited at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Jean Miotte moved his studio to Hamburg in Germany.
In 1975, a monograph on Jean Miotte was published, containing a text by the dealer Castor Seibel: “no imitation, no reproduction, but the internal event finds its expression in the colours and a gestural dynamic… Miotte’s painting is a place where the contradictions of our age are no longer expressed in a dualist way…. In this sense, J.M. is an important creator of new forms.”

The following year, Jean Miotte experimented with paper as a support and made eighty gouaches as well as collages of brown paper and newspaper. One of his works was acquired by the Museum of Maassluis in the Netherlands. He exhibited in Padua alongside Enrico Baj, Alexander Calder and Karel Appel. Jean Miotte moved his studio to Vitry. He exhibited at the Malines cultural centre in Belgium at the group show Kunst in Europa 1920-1960 which brought together the big names in contemporary art of the time.

In 1978, Jean Miotte was invited to speak in the context of exhibitions of his work at the French cultural centre in Damascus and then at the museum of Alep in Syria and finally in Amman in Jordan. The same year, he moved his studio to New York where he was represented by the Martha Jackson Gallery.
His work was shown at exhibitions about French painting from the 1950s at the Maison de la culture de Grenoble, at the Musée de Dunkerque and at the Musée de Saint-Omer in France.

JEAN MIOTTE’S TRAVELS IN ASIA

In May 1980, Jean Miotte exhibited fifty works in Beijing at the French cultural centre. He was the first western painter to be invited to exhibit his work in Beijing after Mao’s death. Jean Miotte took this opportunity to travel around China. In 1982, he exhibited 60 paintings at the Hong Kong Art Center and then at the Institut Franco-Japonais of Tokyo. The following year, Jean Miotte exhibited at the Singapore National Museum and at the National Museum of History of Taipei. In 1984, he was exhibited at the Striped House Museum of Tokyo.

The Guggenheim Museum acquired two works on paper by Jean Miotte in 1987. In 1991, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris exhibited the prints commissioned by Danielle Mitterrand for her album Mémoire de la liberté. Fifty-five artists were involved in this project including Jean Miotte, Roy Lichtenstein, Antoni Tapies, Sam Francis and Robert Rauschenberg. The following year, a Jean Miotte retrospective was organized at the Palais des Arts de Toulouse.

The Jean Miotte Foundation was opened in New York in 2002 with a permanent collection of his works. Jean Miotte died on March 1st, 2016 at the age of 89.

© Diane de Polignac Gallery
Translation: Jane Mac Avock

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