DEGOTTEX UNFOLDED
By Gwenaël Kerlidou
Pli X pli bleu, 1980, acrylic and glue, loose cotton canvas, 22” x 27.75” ”, courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C and the Estate of Jean Degottex, photograph by Inna Svyatsky.
Unfolding Jean Degottex: Plis and Déplis (1979-80)
Bienvenu Steinberg & C
9/05 to 10/04 2025
October 1, 2025, New York
​
The latest installment in the ongoing saga of the American reappraisal of French abstract painting from the nineteen sixties and seventies is now playing at Bienvenu Steinberg & C in Tribeca. After Georges Mathieu, Simon Hantaï, Martin Barré, Claude Viallat and Noël Dolla’s recent shows in New York, among many others, it is now Jean Degottex’s (1918-1988) turn to step into the spotlight of the New York art world.
If he was quite extensively exhibited in French galleries and museums in his lifetime, Degottex’s first substantial exposure to the contemporary American art public in decades came in 2001 with the seminal exhibition “As Painting: Division and Displacement” at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. But it may still come as a surprise, for anyone who would have been loosely following the development of this artist’s career, to realize that the current posthumous exhibition is his first one-person show in New York.
Even if he was a key figure of the French art scene for almost forty years, Degottex, an autodidact, was a very reserved and humble person, with the reputation of being a kind of uncategorizable artist’s artist. He stubbornly resisted promoting his own career, against the advice of his dealers, a reticence which may only partly explain this very late exposure in the US.
Dépli-Umber, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 23.75” x 23.75”, courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C and the Estate of Jean Degottex , photograph by Inna Svyatsky.
In the wake of Clement Greenberg’s initial lack of interest for any painting coming out of Paris (or of the rest of the world, for that matter) after World War Two, the New York art world withdrew onto itself and on its self-satisfied market hegemony, to the point that any abstract painting developments from outside the US, between the late fifties and the late seventies, was deemed irrelevant and became almost undecipherable to the US art public. All that while, the latest American art ideas were being closely followed and debated all across Europe. In that light, today’s American political isolationism is not really new, it is just made worst by its fascination with intellectual obscurantism.
​
Degottex’s career spanned from the “informel” works of his beginnings in the fifties, such as the “métasignes”, large and spare black brushstrokes on white grounds, strongly influenced by Chinese calligraphy, to the more analytical and deconstructed work from the seventies and eighties which may have prepared the ground for Supports/Surfaces. He shared that post-war Paris scene with the likes of Henri Michaux, Georges Mathieu, Simon Hantaï, Judit Reigl, Pierre Soulages and Pierrette Bloch, all trying to find a viable way out of Surrealism and post-cubist space. In the seventies his best-known rivals would be painters like Simon Hantaï and Martin Barré,
​
Degottex and Hantaï’s work trajectories ran peculiarly close to each other in the early fifties. In both cases, André Breton originally misread their work as related to Surrealist automatic writing. Both Artists would break-up with him very shortly after their own solo exhibitions at “L’Etoile scellée”, in 1953 for Hantaï and 1955 for Degottex. But in Degottex’s case his discussions proved very fruitful as it was Breton who would introduce him to Zen Buddhism, an interest which remained with the artist throughout his career.
​
From 1955 to 1979, on and off, Degottex was represented by Galerie Jean Fournier who was also Simon Hantaï’s dealer. The first of many discords with Hantaï developed over their relationship to Georges Mathieu. In 1956-57, Degottex disapproved of Hantaï’s short lived involvement with Mathieu’s project about 13th century philosopher Siger de Brabant on account of Mathieu’s royalist politics. Even if at that time Degottex’s “Métasignes” paintings seemed to be formally close to Mathieu’s, the main difference between them was their views on the role of the artist’s ego. Where Mathieu emphasized the work as an oversized signature of a spectacularized ego, Degottex insisted on its withdrawal, on the paradox of a deeply personal non-egotistic work, on gesture as inscription, rather than as expression. But Hantaï’s work from the late fifties, up to his very large “Ecriture rose” of 1958-59, which directly preceded his folding method breakthrough, was also very close to Degottex’s “Métasignes” and other “écritures.”
​
Around 1962-63, there is a marked turn to darker, often black backgrounds and larger formats which brings that part of his career closer to Soulages’ black paintings, and which for some critics turned him into the missing link between the esthetics of Soulages and that of Supports/Surfaces.
The artist described his own evolution, based on continuity rather than rupture, in this well-known quote: “From the gesture to the sign, from the sign to écritures, and from écritures to the line”; An esthetic program which may be summed up as a search for the tableau as space of inscription and for a spirituality of materials.
​
If the esthetic world of French painting in the sixties and seventies had to be divided between the two opposed philosophical categories of Idealists (i.e. the school of Paris, Hartung, Soulages, etc.) and Materialists (i.e. BMPT, Supports/Surfaces, etc.), then Degottex would be the perfect example of the improbable combination of a transcendent Materialist (in both senses of the word), a Materialist who still believed in the metaphysical power of painting.
ST série pli sur pli, 1980, acrylic or ink juice, relief and glue on folded cotton canvas (unstretched), 18.75” x 17.5”, courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C and the Estate of Jean Degottex, photograph by Inna Svyatsky.
Pli X pli, terre, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 10.25 ” x 8.75 ”, courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & C and the Estate of Jean Degottex, photograph by Inna Svyatsky.
As Pierre Wat pointed out arguably, BMPT looked at Hantaï, while Supports/Surfaces looked at Degottex, or rather what we have with Hantaï is the disappearance of the painting as willed product, versus the disappearance of the painter behind the work with Degottex. But the main difference between both their approaches and that of the next generation of BMPT and Supports/Surfaces is the choice to keep political and artistic discourses clearly separate.
​
The current exhibition focuses on a specific series of late, mostly small, works revolving around the folding process, often involving paper glued on unstretched canvas. Even if it can’t possibly give a proper sense of the full range of the artist’s evolution over some forty years, it is a good introduction to an oeuvre which defies easy classifications.
​
The physicality of paper has been a mainstay of Degottex’s work, as much as the materiality of the canvas weave. Folding the loose canvas was a fairly common practice since the sixties in French abstraction, ranging from Hantaï and Michel Parmentier to André-Pierre Arnal, Louis Cane, Noël Dolla, Patrick Saytour and André Valensi. Degottex’s insistence on painting as an unpretentious artisanal activity might have been instrumental in Supports/Surfaces defining their own painting methodology. But where Supports/Surfaces, using similar methodologies of cutting, folding, stitching the unstretched canvas, was mostly interested in its rhetorical aspect (trying to make a specific point about Deconstruction), Degottex was more concerned with a meditative approach to materiality and process. His predilection for cheap, often discarded materials and for a bricolage-based practice also showed affinities with Arte Povera, which understood economy of means as an ethical choice as well.
​
If the Degottex from the fifties was closer to Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde movement, the Degottex from the seventies exhibited a particular kinship with the esthetics of Dansaekhwa, the South Korean art movement from the sixties and seventies. Perhaps, instead of obsessing on the Paris-New York axis, would it be more productive to examine the connections between the South Korean artists who resided in Paris at that time and their French counterparts. But also, rather than fixating on the articulation of support and surface, structured on a linguistic model in a very French way, and at the risk of breaking a few entrenched historical orthodoxies, let’s propose that to better understand Degottex, it might be useful to look at Dansaekhwa and at its approach to the artist’s subjective involvement with process, materials and forms.
​
It is unclear how much Degottex knew about the work of the few South Korean artists who lived in Paris at some point in the seventies and who would later be regrouped under the banner of Dansaekhwa, but it is quite probable that they crossed paths. If they knew of Degottex‘s work, the South Koreans must have found in him a kindred spirit. Lee Ufan, a founding member of the art movement, exhibited his “From Line” and “From Point” paintings of repeated fading brushstrokes Galerie Eric Fabre in 1975, 1977 and 1980, while Degottex showed regularly in a least three different galleries in the same time period. Ufan’s friendship with the members of BMPT is well documented, going back to his original inclusion in the 1971 Biennale de Paris. Coincidentally, Ufan and Degottex are now both represented by Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris.
​
Another good example is Kwon Young-woo who lived shortly in Paris and exhibited there in 1976, Galerie Jacques Massol. His torn paper paintings from the sixties and seventies are very close to Degottex’s own exploration of materials. It’s not clear if Kwon Young-woo and Degottex knew of each other’s work, but they were bound by such a community of spirit that looking at Degottex’s work through the lens of Kwon Young-woo (and vice-versa) can only help a viewer understand and contextualize each work better.
​
The reason this exhibition is important is that during that specific period, between 1960 and 1979, in Europe and Asia a different approach to painting, a different path and a different narrative of the transition from Modern art to what came afterwards, was articulated which both critiqued the American modernist position and offered an unheeded alternative to the dead ends of Formalism and of the knee-jerk reaction to Modernism that Postmodernism has become.
​
Jean Degottex’s show at Bienvenu Steinberg and C is a welcome addition to the never-ending project of filling in the blanks towards a comprehensive picture of abstract painting at the end of the twentieth century. The gallery must be commended for seeing through the project of bringing this important and under-recognized body of work to our shores, while recently imposed international trade tariffs made it all the more improbable.