Jean Degottex
French painter (1918-1988)
Jean Degottex (Sathonay-Camp 25 February 1918–Paris 9 December 1988) was a French abstract painter, known in particular for his initial proximity to the lyrical abstraction movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He is considered an important artist of the abstraction movement in the second half of the twentieth century and a significant inspiration for contemporary art. Degottex was particularly inspired by East Asian calligraphy and Zen Philosophy to achieve the erasure of the creative subject.
Life and art
Jean Degottex was born in Sathonay-Camp and spent his childhood in Lyon. Coming from a modest background, he was almost self-taught. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Paris with his parents, quit school and began to earn his living. In Paris, he made contact with the libertarian circles of the 1930s and occasionally practiced drawing in the academies of Montparnasse. He served in the military in Tunisia and Algeria from 1939 to 1941, the years during which he painted his first figurative paintings, under the influence of Fauvism.
He then decided to devote himself entirely to painting. From 1941, he took part in the "Salon for those under thirty" (Salon des moins de trente ans).
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Degottex” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.