Jean Degottex, French painter (1918-1988), first period : 1918-1954

            Chronology is essential to study the entire career of Jean Degottex. Because it enlightens the intern logic of his works, giving a way to go from a work or a series (called suite in his language) to the next one. It remains a lot to do for the young generation discovers the huge work of this artist, who knew better than any other one, how to listen and let do the material itself.

            From Sathonay-Camp (near Lyon) where he was born in 1918, Jean Degottex arrived in Paris in 1933. He left school and work for few times in the First War Veterans Independent Fund, under the head of André Thirion. He met there some surrealists, Georges Hugnet, Léo Malet and Henri Pastoureau. With them, he approached Trotskyism, Anarchism and drawing, playing with them to the “exquisite corpse” during the 1936 strikes. In 1939, he was sent to Algeria and Tunisia for his military service and he there self-taught painting. His first exhibition was at Marcel Sauvage’s gallery in Tunis. His first paintings were clearly influenced by Cubism and Fauvism. He said he was attracted by Gauguin and van Gogh, already influenced by the Far East aesthetic. But it was Matisse and his drawing which attired him even more, especially by those with solid lines and white spaces. During all his life, Matisse will remain the biggest French painter. Even if his chose those influences, he always refused to follow any surrounding currents, proclaiming himself as a self-taught artist and denying any affiliation whatsoever.

            After the Armistice of 1940, he returned in Paris where he rent his father’s studio, on the Saint-Jacques Boulevard, and kept it till its destruction in 1982. His neighbors are Samuel Beckett and his friend the photographer Brassaï. He took advantage of the cheap posing sessions in the free academies of painting, near Montparnasse, like the Grande Chaumière Academy. He never accepted a master. He first exhibit in Paris in 1941, under the name of Django, for the first Salon des Moins de Trente Ans (Under Thirty Year Old Salon). He still show there figurative paintings that he qualified himself as fauvist. From 1942, his researches direct him to post-cubism experience. He still draws a lot. He exhibited his drawings at Doirier Gallery in Paris in June 1944 and finally abandoned his pseudonym to sign his real name.

            He exhibited at Denise René Gallery for the first time in 1946 and the second time in 1949 when he shows his first non-figurative paintings. He received for that the Prix de la Jeune Peinture (the Young Painting Prize). He wrote in his personal notes that he “gradually arrived to the abandon of figuration by recognition of the practical ways of painting”. This sentence was certainly a reference to the notion of “concrete art” from theo Van Doesburg[i]. In October 1949, he took part in Présence de la Peinture exhibition, organized by both Charles Estienne, art critic in Combat and Art d’Aujourd’hui magazines, and Roger Van Gindertael, co-founder and chief redactor in Cimaise magazine. This exhibition took place for the opening of the gallery de Beaune. After the success of this exhibition, his abstraction was radicalized. Degottex became the partner of artist and poetess Renée Beslon met several years earlier. He exhibited again at the Gallery de Beaune, for a solo exhibition, from which he considered that his career really began. Picasso, impressed by this show, invited him in his studio and showed him only Matisse paintings.

Things gone fast after this exhibition for him and he received the Kandinsky Prize in 1951 with Victor Vasarely (who refuse it). Battle is hard between geometric abstraction painters and lyrical abstraction ones. The same choice of one or the other form of abstraction is almost an ideological and political choice at this moment. It was about a collective exhibition where Degottex take part that the art critic Pierre Guegun loose his famous insult, calling the lyrical abstractions painters of “tachistes” (that we could translate with “splashers”), a word that Michel Tapié re-used in its positive sense in 1952[ii]. Nevertheless, Degottex stayed independent and he took part, in one hand, to a collective exhibition organized by Charles Estienne, Les Peintres de la Nouvelle Ecole de Paris (Painters of the New School of Paris), at the Babylone Gallery in Paris, and in other hand, he was present in two other group exhibitions, Tendances, organized by Michel Seuphor at the Maeght Foundation and the Salon d’Octobre, show he was a founding member.

            In 1953, Charles Estienne organized a new group exhibition at the surrealist gallery “A l’Etoile Scellée” (At the Sealed Star, a pun with “Ah, les toiles, c’est laid “, translatable with “Ah, canvases, that’s awful”), gallery led by André Breton. Two of Degottex’s paintings exhibited then were exhibited later at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York during Youngers European Painters show and one of them were acquired by the same museum.

            During summer 1954, Degottex was invited by Charles Estienne in Britanny where he comes from, to paint on the beaches and to discover the fabulous landscapes of South Finistère. René Duvillier, Jaouen and Poliakoff were also invited. Degottex discovered there the infinite “Void” of the beaches and the power of Nature and chance. His important work of this period were shown in 1955 at L’Etoile Scellée in a solo exhibition[iii] named “L’Epée dans les Nuages” (The Sword in the Clouds). André Breton signed the preface of the catalog. Charles Estienne had presented Breton to Degottex in his studio. The surrealist writer considered that Degottex’s work is the evidence that automatic writing was not a myth, unlike the accusations from Surrealism critics. He wrote:

“(…) What the art of Degottex found of both what the Chinese called the ch’i fun (expression on the intimate soul of the painter, revealed first by his brush stroke) and sheng-toung (life motion, animation) fills my wishes in this regards.”[iv]

[i]               Théo Van Doesburg, Le Manifeste de l'Art Concret, 1931, in which we could read : « (l'art concret) est l'expression d'une pensée intellectuelle (…) ; (il) est le reflet de l'esprit humain pour l'esprit humain (...) ».

[ii]              Michel Tapié, Un Art Autre, Editions Gabriel Giraud et Fils, Paris, 1952.

[iii]              Charles Estienne, Préface of the catalogue of the exhibition Degottex, L’Epée dans les nuages, Galerie de l'Etoile Scellée, 1955.

[iv]              André Breton, Préface of the catalogue of the exhibition Degottex, L’Epée dans les nuages, Galerie de l'Etoile Scellée, 1955.