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Jean Miotte at the Chelsea Art Museum
Art in America, Sept, 2007 by Raphael Rubinstein
Since opening in 2002, the Chelsea Art Museum has hosted numerous enlightening exhibitions. It has also been the home of the Miotte Foundation, which is devoted to archiving and conserving the work of Jean Miotte, a French painter, now 81, who practices a form of gestural abstraction with roots in the 1950s. For the exhibition "Jean Miotte: Spirit of Defiance," a large part of the museum was given over to a survey of the artist's work from the late 1940s to today. Born in Paris in 1926, Miotte came of age during the Second World War. His earlier works, from just after the war, are moody landscapes and urban scenes populated, barely, by gaunt, solitary figures. While they convey the deprivations and traumatic memories that marked postwar France, stylistically these small paintings look back to turn-of-the-century symbolism. At the end of the 1940s Miotte was working abstractly, with geometric compositions that feature irregular shapes, thickly applied paint and, at times, residual references to the figure. By the middle of the 1950s he had discovered gesture, favoring abbreviated brushstrokes of reds, blacks and yellows. Sometimes light pours out from a central gash of white amid the dark gestures. The effect suggests Nicolas de Stall at a larger scale and decoupled from landscape.
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Miotte continued to mine this vein until the 1970s, when his paintings opened up dramatically. The gestures were reduced to just a few per painting and large areas of linen were either left unprimed or slathered with blindingly white paint. His shift, in 1971, from oil to acrylic no doubt had something to do with his change of manner. Also significant was the fact that from 1972 he began spending part of the year in New York.
Many of these large, spare, acrylic-on-linen works evoke Chinese brush-and-ink painting, an affinity that became stronger following Miotte's travels in China and other Asian countries in the early 1980s. In 1980, he became one of the first Western artists to be invited to exhibit in China after the death of Mao. Gradually, as the 1980s progressed, Miotte allowed more color and density back into his compositions.
Like many French artists of his generation, Miotte has formed close connections with writers in the course of his career. Chester Himes and Fernando Arrabal are among those who have written about his work; in 1999, he was the subject of a 78-minute film by avant-garde director Raul Ruiz.
Although often working in a familiar gestural style, Miotte is capable of creating dramatic paintings that translate the freedom of an ink drawing into epic scale. Between 1994 and 1998, he made a series of paintings such as Le Debat (1998) in which he used big brushes to inscribe twisting black gestures across white fields. These were perhaps the most impressive works in this tribute to a European painter who remains little known in this country.
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
