Maurice André

Maurice André stayed in Aubusson throughout the war. He founded the cooperative group “Tapisserie de France” and was a member of the A.P.C.T. (Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie); he developed a personal aesthetic, far from Lurçat, made of rigorous cubist 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 the French Pavilion for the 1958 Exhibition in Brussels (“La Technique moderne au service de l’Homme”). Naturally (and like Wogensky, Prassinos,…), he later moved toward abstraction: first rather lyrical, then in an increasingly geometric style, in a path very close to Matégot’s.

In André’s ultimate style, geometry and its flat planes were tempered by hachures (hatching), stripes, and other gradations.