Georges Mathieu Candy Box for French Porcelaine de Sèvres Manufacture

Georges Mathieu was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais) in 1921. Mathieu studied literature and philosophy at Lille University before switching to art at the age of twenty-one. He taught English at Douai High School and French at the American University of Biarritz. After an interest in realistic landscapes and portraits, Mathieu developed a distinctive Abstract Expressionist style, which grew out of an emotionally driven, improvised, and intuitive act of painting. In 1946 his first exhibition was presented at VI Salon de moins de 30 ans at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His first personal exhibition was in 1950 at the Galerie René Drouin. In 1947 Mathieu worked with Camille Bryen to organize a tachist-oriented exhibition, which he designated as ‘non-figuration physique’. His painting defined ‘lyrical abstractions’, goes beyond traditional and formal constraints of regulative systems, placing Mathieu with Fautrier and Dubuffet as an important exponent of French Informel, as defined by the French art critic Tapiè. Up to 1951, Mathieu continued to organize group shows to demonstrate his interest in Jackson Pollock’s spontaneous gestural handling of paint. In those years he, among his numerous exhibitions, organized an event to show the difference between American and European painting styles at the Montparnasse Gallery.His artworks were appreciated internationally and exposed in London and New York. His first paintings were defined tachists by critics because of the artist’s use of lumps of color (tache, in fact, means stain) directly applied on canvas. His works are apparently confused but they all have a central axis from which curves and lines develop in a planned way.In 1950 his projects were no more focused on signs but on painting gestures and quickness. His painting was intuitive and irrational. From 1954 Mathieu staged the painting of large-scale works as theatrical events, culminating in utilizing 800 tubes of paint to create a painting measuring 4 x 12 meters in front of an audience of 2000 at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1956. Somewhere between Happening and Action Painting, Mathieu succeeded in producing a decoratively linear painting, reminiscent of calligraphy. Mathieu continued to perform his Action Paintings throughout Europe and Japan. He went to Japan together with Tapié to meet the Gutai Group. There he executed a kimono performance during an action-painting show. During this event, he also realized 21 artworks and among these, we find a 15 m painting. Mathieu’s works were shown at special exhibitions in Paris and New York in 1950 and 1952. He participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta II in 1959. In the early 1960s, Mathieu also created sculptures and designed furniture, tapestries, and frescoes. In 1975 he was elected a member of the Arts Academy in Paris and in 1986 he exposed his works at Biennale di Venezia. Georges Mathieu was defined as the founder of Tachism and art theorist in the essay “Au-delà du Tachisme”. He also composed essays on architecture, furniture, and typography.

A maker of exemplary European ceramics for hundreds of years, Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres has produced porcelain of the highest quality since 1740.

The factory enjoyed royal patronage from its earliest days, and its most prominent patrons in the late 1700s — King Louis XV of France and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour — commissioned some of the period’s most elegant and striking pieces (only the truly wealthy could afford porcelain at this time). The company was originally established in Vincennes but was moved at the request of Madame de Pompadour, in 1756, to Sèvres, near Versailles, so that its operations would be closer to her château.

Sèvres became a mighty and much-revered factory working under a special grant from King Louis XV — the company’s owner as of 1759 and whose abundance of orders for special state gifts put financial strain on the company. Madame de Pompadour is said to have commissioned Sèvres to create an entire indoor garden of porcelain botanicals, for example.

While Sèvres gained a sterling reputation for its soft-paste porcelain wares, the company was late in entering into the production of hard-paste porcelain.

Hard-paste porcelain is the most common type of Chinese porcelain, then a widely exported and profitable product that was not made in Europe until the 18th century. The resources at Sèvres were largely relegated to meeting the demands of Louis XV, and secondly, it did not acquire the secret formula for hard-paste porcelain until 1761.

Until it obtained the coveted secrets behind hard-paste porcelain from a chemist named Pierre-Antoine Hannong — and, years later, gained access to the elusive raw materials to make hard-paste porcelain — Sèvres produced soft-paste porcelain for decades that was widely celebrated but is comparatively a far weaker type as opposed to the hard-paste productions of the company’s rival, Meissen, in Saxony, the first to produce true porcelain outside of Asia.

The artisans at Sèvres applied the rarest and most difficult-to-produce colors to their decorative objects and dinner services. One such color, the bright bleu de roi, became the manufacturer’s signature shade and is found on many of their objects. Sèvres also experimented with rarely glazed or unglazed works that bore no decoration at all — bisque porcelain, French for “biscuit,” refers to unadorned white porcelain sculptures made at Sèvres that resemble white marble after being kiln-fired.

Sèvres marks were applied over the glaze or rendered with cuts by a sharp tool — authentic Sèvres porcelain is most commonly marked with two interlaced Ls that are painted in blue and enclose a third letter. Painters and potters were tasked with affixing marks to record their role in the creation of a particular piece, and as a lot of these artisans’ names are recorded in archival factory materials — and there is also much to be learned at the Sèvres museum — it’s likely that you can accurately identify your Sèvres piece.

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