The images and information presented below are for the instruction of students and scholarly research.
Jean Degottex (1918-1988)
Born in Sathonay, France, Jean Degottex was a self-taught painter and was influenced early on by Kandinsky. He spent most of his life between Paris and Cordes. Degottex first began to paint in 1938, but did not show his work for nearly ten years after that. He would finally exhibit in Paris in 1949 at the Denise Rene gallery and was also introduced by Andre Breton at a 1955 exhibition. After this point, he was fairly prolific and showed his work often throughout Europe. Though his oeuvre is generally filled with Abstract work, Degottex is also grouped with the Surrealists.
Culture is Dead, 1968
Degottex leaned toward gestural lyric abstraction, which he created by incorporating text into his paintings. Particularly, he would incorporate Chinese text as a part of his Zen philosophy, which would also be incorporated in his art through composition. Along with artist Simon Hantai, Degottex is known as one of the forerunners of this movement.
Ken Do, 1961, oil
Writing 10.2.63
In the late 1960s Degottex embarked on series of paintings that were poetically linked to one another; these series were known as Metaspheres and Horspheres. The Metaspheres almost always included a circular disk, while the Horspheres dealt with the concave and the convex, and both had themes of existence and space.
Metasphere, 1966, watercolor ink
While Degottex was clearly focused on a textual Abstract style, he would experiment with a number of mediums. Besides oil paint, he was also known to work in watercolor, acrylic and ink and created lithographs. Whether working off an Oriental theme or for reasons only Degottex knows, he also used primarily white, black and red in almost all of his art.
1964, Indian ink on fabric
1986, acrylic on canvas
Today his work is housed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Pompidou Center in Paris and literally around the work from Japan to Austria, Israel, Amsterdam, Sweden, and widely throughout France. Because he worked nearly up until his death in 1988, it is highly possible that a number of his previously unknown works could be owned in private home collections worldwide as well.
