Miotte Jean

Jean Miotte was a French painter known for his lyrical abstract work which channeled introspective thought and athletic movements. Miotte was a part of the Art Informel movement and compared his working style to that of jazz musicians or ballet dancers in its use of free-flowing movements within a structured practice. Born on September 8th, 1926 in Paris, France, the artist studied under Achille-Émile Othon Friesz and Ossip Zadkine in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. He later traveled to New York in 1961 where he met Modern painters Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work had a major influence on Miotte’s development, notably the incorporation of aggressive gestural forms. Miotte experiments in media ranging from oil to acrylic, gouache, ink, etching, lithography, and collage. His use of black paint on a white or raw surface frequently recalls calligraphy; when color appears, it ranges from primaries to earthy tones. Critics say he is unique among the Informels because he continues to grow, fighting repetition, questioning himself and his form of expression. In the 1990s, he began producing the canvases currently on display, the largest of his career. Today, much of his work is held at the Miotte Foundation, a part of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, as well as in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the National Museum of Singapore, the Contemporary Art Museum in Dunkirk, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others. Miotte lived between Paris, New York and Fribourg, Switzerland over the last decades of his life. He died on March 1, 2016, in New York.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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