As the home of the Miotte Foundation—a dedicated archive of scholarship, research and artworks of and by Jean Miotte, vanguard of L'Informel movement— The Chelsea Art Museum presents 'The Nineties', a collection of Miotte's work from that decade.
Jean Miotte, (b. 1926) came of artistic age in ... Read more
As the home of the Miotte Foundation—a dedicated archive of scholarship, research and artworks of and by Jean Miotte, vanguard of L’Informel movement— The Chelsea Art Museum presents ‘The Nineties’, a collection of Miotte’s work from that decade.
Jean Miotte, (b. 1926) came of artistic age in the decade after World War II when non-figurative gestural abstraction was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic as the contemporary artistic language. The term “L’Art Informel”, was coined by the French critic, Michel Tapié to connote “without form”. The negation of traditional form, a radical break from established notions of order and composition, was particularly suited to a cultural environment born out of the circumstances of postwar Europe where abuse of morals and fascist ideology had led to such horror and destruction.
While Informel is often regarded as the European equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, it is distinguished from its American counterpart by a loss of faith in progress and the collective possibilities of an avant garde. Rather, the artists who came to be grouped as Informel – Jean Miotte, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Emil Schumacher and Kazuo Shiraga, among others – claimed an individual freedom embodied in the spontaneity of the gestural, abstract language to create a bridge between cultures, to break beyond national barriers of geography or expression to form a truly international language.
