Art: In the End, Nothing

“Speed, intuition, excitement: that is my method of creation.” Thus natty George Mathieu. 36, French “action painter,” describes the process behind the globular, pyrotechnic displays that have earned him a reputation as one of the zaniest, smartest abstractionists in Paris.

To prove his mettle, he went to Tokyo last week for a one-man show, proceeded to paint the complete exhibition on the spot.

No man to ignore a good prop, especially in the presence of photographers, Mathieu once donned helmet and greaves to paint his The Battle of Bonvines (TIME, March 7, 1955). For Tokyo, what else, but a kimono? Arriving at the base ment of the Shirokiya department store, where a crowd of Japanese were already straining at the wire barrier, Mathieu stripped, donned a loose, flowing blue-and-white yukata. girded himself with a black waist sash, topped off with a red hachimaki wound round his head.

Visibly shaking with nervousness and anticipation, Mathieu paced barefooted beside a huge, 25-ft.-by-7-ft. canvas stretched on the garage glower-glower ing as his assistants laid out boxes of paint tubes, a big sake bottle filled with tur pentine, bundles of brushes, and a dozen brass mixing bowls. Of a sudden, in a burst of movement, Mathieu was at work. Tearing paper cartons with his teeth to gain time, he began squeezing blobs and curlicues of violet paint straight from the tubes, and then squirted whole tubes of black pigment.

He gripped four tubes in either hand, emp tied them in one mighty salvo, next grabbed the sake bottle of turpentine and upended it over the canvas, then dropped to his knees, began fiercely swabbing the surface with a towel, finally swarmed directly onto the canvas itself.

Buccaneer’s Rush. With the canvas well primed. Mathieu paused to swig down a frothing glass of Japanese beer while assistants propped the work up against the wall. Then, glaring like a buc caneer about to board ship, he kicked at the debris of brushes, tubes and bottles, plunged one brush into a bowl of white paint, grasped a second brush in his teeth, and rushed at the canvas. A white cross with red outline appeared on one side, a yellow squiggle on the other.

He returned to the beer and charged again. Aiming a 5-ft. brush like a lance, he carved broad, pink lines running the length of the 25-ft. canvas. From then on, the battle raged with such fury that Mathieu was soaked in paint, turpentine and sweat. Soon the Japanese, usually polite before foreigners, were roar ing with laughter, shouting delightedly after each stroke.

“It’s the new Ford!” cracked one. “It’s not a whodunit, but a hedunit,” cried another, in good doughboy English.

Mathieu was too engrossed to hear. He banged the can vas with a towel soaked in yellow paint, kneaded flake-white pigment into snowballs, and pitched them at the dripping oil, slapped on more paint with rapier-quick strokes, seized handfuls of paint tubes and leaped up and down the length of the battlefield. At the peak of his fury, he was ejecting tubes over his shoulder with the cyclic action of a machine gun, until he finally slowed down, devoted the last 20 minutes to adding only a touch of paint here and there. Total elapsed time: no minutes. Title: The Battle of Hakata (A.D. 1281, when the Japanese defeated Kublai Khan).

Price of Victory. To round out his show, Mathieu did 19 paintings at the home of a Japanese painter friend’s house (this time garbed in a white kimono), finished off two more simultaneously in a public painting session in the front window of the department store, drawing crowds so dense that at one point they threatened to break in the plate-glass window. Even before the show opened, Japanese Flower Arranger Sofu Teshigahara (TIME, July 11, 1955) had bought The Battle of Hakata for 3.000.000 yen ($8,333), marveled at Mathieu’s “instantaneous outburst of artistic feeling.” Exclaimed Flower Arranger Sofu: “In many respects, his work resembles that of old Japanese art. where emphasis was placed on spirit rather than detail.”

His show was a success, but Mathieu was exhausted. “My work comes out of me.” he explained. “In each new work I am actively destroying all I have done before.” Only hitch with this procedure, he finds, is that it forces the artist to blaze fresh trails faster and faster. And so, Mathieu says gloomily, “in the end, we shall end up with nothing.”