Georges Mathieu

Carlo Van Den Bosch, Antwerp

Private Collection, Belgium

Sotheby's, Paris, 9 December 2015, lot 110

Ravenel, Taipei, 2 June 2018, lot 20

Private Collection

Bonhams, Hong Kong, 3 December 2022, lot 16

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Bruxelles, Société Auxiliaire des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, Georges Mathieu, 1963

Traité de paix du Duc de Bourgogne et la Duchesse de Luxembourg (1958) belongs to the pivotal period in which Georges Mathieu, theorist and principal instigator of European lyrical abstraction, was elaborating his concept of "psychomorphosis": the capacity of painting to externalise interior states with an immediacy that no premeditation could achieve. The title, drawn from the medieval history of Burgundy with which Mathieu was deeply familiar, is not incidental; it constitutes the mental trigger of the pictorial act. For Mathieu, the title always precedes the gesture: it is its condition, the mental space into which the hand commits itself before reason can intervene. The canvas thus becomes the site of a reconstitution that is not narrative but energetic, one in which history translates into speed, tension, and trajectory.

The composition rests on a resolutely asymmetrical distribution. Against a black ground, a single isolated white line crosses the upper portion of the canvas on the diagonal, in a gesture that is both singular and restrained, while the eye is drawn toward a dense cluster of signs in the lower right quadrant — an entanglement of impasto bursts and arabesques in relief. The distance between these two poles, the solitary mark and the proliferating mass, quietly structures the pictorial space without recourse to any conventional formal balance.

Traité de paix du Duc de Bourgogne et la Duchesse de Luxembourg is inseparable from the practice of pictorial performance that Mathieu was developing simultaneously on stage, painting before audiences in period costume with spectacular speed. This theatrical dimension cannot be detached from the work itself: the surface retains the memory of an action carried out at a pace that left no room for hesitation, each mark bearing the irreversibility of a completed gesture. It is precisely this decisiveness, the trace of a decision taken in the moment and fully embraced, that gives the work its singular force and its enduring presence.