Maurice André

Maurice André stayed in Aubusson throughout the war. He founded the cooperative group "Tapisserie de France" and he was a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie); he developed a personal aesthetic, far from Lurçat, made up of rigorous cubizing flat planes, in a chromatic range that was often pared down, and he received ambitious public commissions for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg ("L'Europe unie dans le Travail et la Paix"), or for the French Pavilion for the 1958 Exhibition in Brussels ("La Technique moderne au service de l'Homme"). Naturally (as did Wogensky, Prassinos,…), he then moved toward abstraction, first rather lyrical and then in an increasingly geometric style, following a trajectory very close to Matégot's.

In the mid-1960s, André's style grew closer to Matégot's, where hammering, prickings, and stippling were the norm. A range of greens and triangular forms served here as plastic equivalents to the mass of the Vercors.