The Fox of Paris

Paris Painter Georges Mathieu appears to be crazy like a fox--one with a particularly long and wavy brush. A slim, trim dandy of 34, he has made a good living as a pressagent. And by adroitly publicizing himself, Mathieu has recently become the reigning darling of advance-guard art, has no trouble selling (at prices ranging from $600 to $3,400) pictures that take only from a few minutes to a few hours to paint. Last week a new exhibition of Mathieu's paintings was on view at Manhattan's Kootz Gallery, and proved him to be one of the most forceful practitioners of the rock 'em, sock 'em school of abstract art.

Mathieu's own name for the school is "lyrical abstractionism." In London it is "action painting," in Manhattan "abstract expressionism." By whatever name, the school stands for huge canvases covered with fervent swirls and splashes of paint.

It is important that the swirls and splashes convey nothing at all to the viewer, except an uneasy feeling that the artist must be energetic and very angry. But Mathieu's paintings surpass the average of their kind precisely because they fail to be quite meaningless. Despite himself, Mathieu's interlocked squiggles of toothpaste white, tarry black smears, and ocher, green and crimson flashes bring to mind the night driver's world of electric lights, flashing neon and high speeds.

History to Order. Nothing could be further removed from Mathieu's announced intentions. Mathieu, who has learned Salvador Dali's stunt of playing the caped and haughty aristocrat, takes the titles for his pictures from early French history. He claims to be reproducing old battles and honoring the deeds of ancient noblemen on canvas.

On his outings around Paris, Mathieu drives a Rolls-Royce, and according to one admirer he "is quite capable of making long trips through the most beautiful countryside without even seeing a thing." A laudatory essay in the current Art News seems to show that Mathieu paints as he drives--as much to be seen as to see. To paint an abstraction of the 13th-century Battle of Bouvines (in which one of Mathieu's forebears had a part, of course) he dressed up in black silk pants and jacket, a white helmet, and greaves fastened to his shins with white cross-straps. Then he called in some admiring friends to watch the show.

Ballet of One. "It was our good fortune," the writer recalls, "to witness the most unpredictable of ballets, a dance of dedicated ferocity, the grave elaboration of a magic rite. In the hodgepodge of paint tubes by the hundreds, of brushes as long as halberds, of spilt oil cans, Mathieu, demiurge of destiny, summoned onto his canvas in a few hours (exactly the time taken by the fighting) first the army of the King of France . . . then the armies of the coalition; above there spurted onto the canvas splashes of larger characters and many colors, used for their own sake just as much as for the pure joy of the symbol.

"These represented wherever and whenever necessary the Bishop of Beauvais, Mathieu de Montmorency and his eaglets, the Bishop of Laon . . . and Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, whose flight was finally indicated by a trail of black, almost ten feet long, beginning at the center of the canvas and descending to its lower right-hand corner . . . When, by evening, the painting was completed, the magic world determined by it evoked in its turn the spell of this extraordinary adventure, linked in the most suggestive equivocation to historical fact and its reverberation in a work of art."

"Equivocation" and "reverberation" apply equally well to Mathieu's art and to the feverish demon of publicity that he has evoked in its behalf. Mathieu's ultimate goal, according to Art News, is "cornering himself and the public completely, back against the wall." He will have to hurry; art fashions change fast, and not always for the worse.

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