Jean Miotte: The "Accidental-Alchemist" of Gestural Forms and Colors
by Valery Oisteanu
Jean Miotte is an artist an unconscious, subconscious, super-conscious abstract painter in a nonrepresentational category, and one of the cofounders of INFORMALE, a French abstract-art style. Miotte long ago rejected the rules of composition limited by the principles of classic/modern art, replacing them with a spontaneous "action-painting" such as paint flinging/splashing, gestural brush strokes, abstract expression with drippings and swirls of color pigments.
Miotte was born in France on September 8, 1926. He began painting at the end of World War II. In the 1950s, he met and befriended the American painters and writers who worked in Paris, including Abstract artist Sam Francis and Haywood Rivers. Ironically, his own work received the label "too American," although American painting was rarely seen in Paris at that time. But that made him curious.
In 1960, Miotte applied for a grant from the Ford Foundation for Cultural Exchange. To one question in the application "Why do you want to come to New York?" he replied: "My American friends say that Paris is a village. I want to see the big city." He won the award and came to the United States for six months in 1961-62.
Overwhelmed by the space, the energy and all of the contacts he was making, Miotte bought a car and traveled cross-country, lecturing at Colorado Spring University (his first conference before students). At that time, he met Motherwell, Rothko and Calder, and had multiple discussions and exchanges with other American artists. Thanks to the Ford Foundation, he met collectors and museum directors such as Henry Geldzhaler of the Metropolitan Museum, and Frank O’Hara of MoMA. He also succeeded in having a one-man show at the Alexander Iolas Gallery (1962). He returned to Europe, where he continues to work today, while returning regularly to New York. His lithographs, first shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC., are represented by the American Associated Artists in New York.
Miotte started painting in the late 1940’s when abstract art had been around for more than three decades (among them, Kandinsky’s works from 1910, Malevitch’s first in 1913 and Mondrian’s in 1914). Modern art has since shifted many times between rule and instinct, contemplation and exclamation, reason and fantasy, dream and logical thinking. Other influences included artists such as Ben Nicholson, Viera da Silva and Nicolas de Stael. The second wave of abstract art inspiration comes from American abstract expressionists such as Franz Klein, De Kooning (who painted his first abstract in 1934), Pollock, the Japanese Yuichi Inoue (an ideogram of gigantic proportion inspired by Oriental calligraphy) and, from France, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages.
Generationally, Miotte is part of the third wave of abstract artists that also includes Joan Mitchell (1925 -1992), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – ), Mary Heilmann, Philip Wofford, Jay De Feo (1929-1989), Ernest Briggs (1923-1984), Henri Michaux (French, 1899 – 1984), Karel Malich (Czech), Jack Bush (Canada, 1909 – 1977), Karel Apel (Holland) and Antoni Tapies (Spain), among others.
As Clement Greenberg once noted, "An artist has to develop to the point where his eccentricity blossoms." Miotte truly blossomed in 1972, the year that marks his important one-man show at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. By this time, his abstract language had matured and was recognizable as a personal, gestural abstract voice.
Back in Paris, Miotte became friends with the American writer, Chester Hines, with whom he produced a book, edited by SMI in Paris, in 1977. He made his first film, about the process of painting, called Lyrical Space, which was shot in New York by Vladimir Bibic, for UNESCO. Since then, he has made a second movie (1997, with Raul Ruiz), in which he introduces a performance ritual where he plays the Master of Ceremonies. He adds the translucency of one color overlaid with strokes and drips of other pigments until it creates non-identifiable painting, artwork with a perfect harmony of forms and colors.
In the 1980s, Miotte had a show at Evergreen State College and once again set off on a long car journey along the Highway One to see the redwoods in California. Garner Tullis invited the artist to his atelier, where Miotte created a series of 20 monotypes that were later donated to the Oakland Art Museum. In the late ’90s, Tullis invited Miotte to create a series of wax paintings, the only serious work on paper during this "black and white period."
Today, the artist lives and works in Provence, France, and in Soho, New York. A 72-minute documentary on his work and commitments was recently broadcast on the Arte cultural television channel in Europe. Lithographs in seven colors, numbered and signed, are on display in many galleries in the States, and the city of Prague inaugurated its festival year as European city of culture with a large- scale Miotte exhibition.
Miotte’s mural-size paintings are impressive not only in their size but also as a personal language, and in their striving toward universality a sort of hand-choreography using an oversized brush. His canvases convey personal memory translated to color, to black-brush strokes spasmodically undulating, curving like a dragon’s tail in a Chinese scroll.
Japanese and Chinese ideograms of myth and symbols certainly had some influence on Miotte’s painting technique. Each painting has a main central gestural image similar to the concept of space ritual used by Zen Sho calligraphers of Japan. The visual tempo here is of Japanese koto music that the artist plays while painting. Many art critics labeled his work as lyrical-abstraction, or post-painterly abstraction, but from my perspective he is closer to the abstract-expressionists and as such, more spasmodic and chance- operational, ironic, sarcastic and humorous.
Miotte is an intuitive painter who feels the canvas and the act of dripping the paint. The process becomes art, and the end art-product a witness to the art catharsis. His esthetic credo is neither fully Eastern nor totally Western (as in Tachisme), but an original mix of both. He is also an impulse painter, and as such he goes through a build-up period, a meditative sequence, and then to the liberating release as such.
His fort� is creating harmonies of color-fields, melodic lines often balanced by spontaneous, fluid, rhythmic, black line strokes crossing the canvas, and then bursts of color and finely texturalized 3-D surfaces, sometimes with collage elements like a newspaper or a tear from a poster, reminiscent of a dada/surrealist technique. Miotte creates an aurora borealis of colors on a grand scale, although chromatically quiet, simple and expansive — exploring not just the surface of the canvas, but the unlimited space around the artist, an open territory of the tangibilities of paint that goes beyond the canvas (Illimite cosmique,1999).
Miotte’s art travels outside of the zeitgest world. His energetic swing of the brush makes those strokes visible and moves our attention in twist and turns, bypassing spatters of pigment randomly pored and leaving us in midair, caught in a spatial dynamic of colors and forms, contemplating the webs of anxiety of his existential reality. But it is not a hard-edge abstraction, rather a lyrical polychrome. In his painting "La Brulure des tes yeux" (Gallery Guy Pieters-Paris, France), working bold black lines against each other creates tense diagonal movements punctuated by drips and spills illuminated by dashes of resonating blue ultramarine, mellowing green, brilliant red and yellow cadmium pigment. The light emitted by these colors softens and permeates the ferocious gestures of the black brush strokes.
Miotte’s aspiration, according to Robert C. Morgan is "to endow his painting with a spiritual vitality and significance" (Jean Miotte: The Gesture Within, 2001). In the documentary, Miotte by Ruiz, the painter declares: "I want to bring this painting to life. Thus far, only the intention exists." Further on, the artist notes that "The intention carried by the action cast a doubt on the desire for perfection and questions us about the gesture and its consequences. Painting is not a speculation of the mind or the intellect. It is a gesture that one carries from within."
In Miotte’s painting called "Supreme anarchie," with primal colors blue, red and yellow complemented by collage elements of newspaper print, we can detect an evacuation of intention and the struggle to distill the moment. His microcosms translate into a macro painting where every line gets a counterthrust, a sort of rebuttal of its own gesture. In "Floraision expansive," the artist penetrates invisible passageways beyond the painting, nonpedestrian, dissolving the limits, building a visual crescendo full of red explosions. Through the layers of color-chaos and texture-strokes, Miotte creates an illusion of unrepeatable spontaneity, fluidity and grace. For more than half a century, his art has assumed the virtues of modern classicism, implying through the gesture, the human dimension, a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, a struggle in search of a perfect synthesis.
