Jean Miotte, one of the founding fathers of the Informel, was born in Paris in 1926. Childhood and youth were overshadowed by World War II. After the end of the war Jean Miotte began his studies of mathematics and engineering. His free time, however, was reserved for (figurative) painting.
Jean Miotte’s interest in art became increasingly bigger. He visited the studios at Montparnasse as of 1947, where he met his future teachers Othon Friesz and Ossip Zadkine. Works by Georges Rouault or Henri Matisse also had decisive influence on the young artist.
After a journey to Italy (1948) Jean Miotte settled in 1950. He met Hans Arp and Gino Severini and painted his first abstract pictures. In 1953 Miotte, who was a close friend of Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Dimitrienko and André Lanskoy, relocated to Bologna.
In his early abstract works, which were shown in his first solo show at Galerie Durand in Paris in 1957, darker colors dominate. In his later more mature compositions rhythmic painting values show full effect. Next to black and white he also focuses on powerful (primary) colors in highly aesthetic combinations.
Jean Miotte values motion, not only in art but also in his life: On a scholarship he traveled to New York for the first time in 1961, where he met protagonists of the post-war avant-garde, among them Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. Back in France he moved into a studio in Pignans (1963). However, the artist is still far from settling down: After Jean Miotte had moved to Hamburg in 1971, Vitry near Paris (1973) and New York a little later were his places of contemporary residence. In 1994 he relocated to Fribourg in Switzerland, and a year later he went back to Pignans.
Jean Miotte died on March 1, 2016. His works are in possession of famous museums such as the New Yorker Museum of Modern Art, the Cologne Museum Ludwig and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.