François Morellet, French Abstract Artist, Dies at 90
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Version 0 of 1. François Morellet, a French painter and sculptor whose use of unorthodox materials like neon lights, sticky tape and metal rods left a distinctive mark on postwar abstract art, died on Tuesday at his home in Cholet, France. He was 90. His family confirmed the death. Although his early work was representational, Mr. Morellet moved decisively toward abstraction. He concluded that his work should “make it possible for the observer to find what he wants to find,” he told The New York Times in 1985, the same year that a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum essentially introduced him to an American audience. He had his first solo exhibition as an abstract painter in 1950 at the Galerie Creuze in Paris. From then on, he applied himself to eliminating the artist’s sensibility from his art, assembling lines into hypnotic shapes, incorporating kinetics in his sculptures and installations, and using chance to determine aesthetic choices. In the early 1960s Mr. Morellet helped found the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, which emphasized public participation in art and played down the role of the individual creator. In the 1960s he began a series of works called “Sphère-Trame,” balls made from grids of metal rods. In 1965 his work was included in “The Responsive Eye,” the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition of Op Art. His work was featured this month in the Frieze New York art fair on Randalls Island in New York, where he covered walls with randomly distributed red and blue squares, drawing on the mathematical concept pi but resembling a giant QR code. The Modern is showing a painting of his that uses the same color arrangement in “From the Collection: 1960-1969.” Circles and lines were recurring themes in Mr. Morellet’s work. In 2010, at the Louvre in Paris, he was commissioned to design the windows for a staircase. The work was called “L’Esprit d’Escalier” (“The Spirit of Stairs”), which is also a French idiom referring to the predicament of belatedly coming up with the perfect reply in a conversation. Mr. Morellet played with mathematics and geometric figures as much as he played with words. “The idea is to enjoy it,” he told a French newspaper in 2011, describing his process of creation. “Sometimes I feel I make jokes that people laugh at without understanding.” The Brooklyn Museum was one of many institutions that highlighted Mr. Morellet’s work. After the 1985 show there, his son Florent held a party, which then helped start Florent Morellet’s career in the restaurant industry in New York. (Florent Morellet went on to run a diner in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, Florent, which closed in 2008.) In 1992 the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, showed Mr. Morellet’s work “Steel Lifes,” which combined white painted square canvases with steel metal rails. More recently, in 2011, the Pompidou Center in Paris held a retrospective of his work, including installations begun in the 1970s for which Mr. Morellet stuck adhesive tape along white walls, covering doors and radiators. Exhibitions marking his 90th birthday opened last month at the Mayor Gallery and Annely Juda Fine Art in London and at the Dan Galeria in São Paulo, Brazil. The Pompidou Center recently bought “Pier and Ocean,” an installation composed of two walls of flashing blue neon lights, from Mr. Morellet, along with a wooden pier by a collaborator, the Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata. The piece was a tribute to a drawing by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who, like Mr. Morellet, used horizontal and vertical lines to represent the calm sea. Born on April 30, 1926, in Cholet, in western France, near the city of Nantes, François Charles Alexis Albert Morellet was the son of a prefect, the local representative of the national government. He started his career working for a family business that made model cars for children. He ran the company until 1975, while pursuing his artistic career on the side. Besides his son Florent, Mr. Morellet’s survivors include his wife, the former Danielle Marchand; two other sons, Frédéric and Christophe; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Though his work has traveled around the globe, Cholet was the center of Mr. Morellet’s world. “He didn’t do emails or telephone calls,” said Kamel Mennour, a Paris gallerist who worked extensively with Mr. Morellet. “You have to get to Cholet to see him. It’s a three-hour trip. It would take an entire day to go have lunch with him.” On his last trip to Cholet, Mr. Mennour said, Mr. Morellet discussed his plans. “He was so prolific, he worked every single day, producing pieces,” he said. “And more than anything he wanted people to see his work.” |