Jean Miotte
(b.1926-d.2016)
Encaustic paintings
Jean Miotte was a French painter known for his lyrical abstract work which channeled introspective thought and athletic movements. Miotte was a part of the Art Informel movement, and compared his working style to that of jazz musicians or ballet dancers in its use free-flowing movements within a structured practice. Born on September 8, 1926 in Paris, France, the artist studied under Achille-Émile Othon Friesz and Ossip Zadkine in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. He later travelled to New York, NY in 1961 where he met Modern painters Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work had a major influence on Miotte’s development, notably the incorporation of aggressive gestural forms. Today, much of his work is held at the Miotte Foundation, a part of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, as well as in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the National Museum in Singapore, the Contemporary Art Museum in Dunkirk, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others. Miotte lived between Paris, New York, and Fribourg, Switzerland over the last decades of his life. He died on March 1, 2016 in New York, NY.