Mathieu Matégot

Among the most inventive French designers of the post-war years, Mathieu Matégot gave metal a rare lightness. With Rigitulle, the perforated sheet metal he devised and patented, he turned an industrial material into something airy, almost textile, and created furniture and objects of a grace and wit that still feel strikingly contemporary. Designer, colourist and later one of the leading figures of modern French tapestry, he moved between industry and craft with uncommon freedom, and his work remains a touchstone of French design of the 1950s.

Mathieu Matégot was born on 4 April 1910 in Tápió-Sully, a village some twenty kilometres from Budapest. He spent four years, from 1925 to 1929, at the Budapest School of Fine Arts, and designed sets for the National Theatre, an early apprenticeship in scenography whose traces would remain visible throughout his work. After travelling to Italy and the United States, he settled in Paris in 1931, the city he would make his own.

His first Parisian years were those of a versatile talent. He designed sets for the Folies Bergère and window displays for the Galeries Lafayette, and briefly turned his hand to women's fashion. From 1933 he began to make rattan furniture mounted on metal, significant pieces that nonetheless remained anonymous, and on the eve of the war he discovered tapestry, the art that would ultimately define his later life.

The war changed everything. In 1939 he volunteered for the French army, but was captured and held prisoner in Germany until his escape in 1944. Captivity proved unexpectedly decisive: put to work in a factory producing mechanical components, he came to understand the potential of sheet metal. From this experience was born Rigitulle, a finely perforated metal sheet whose name evokes tulle. Like fabric, it could be bent, folded and shaped, and combined with tubular metal it gave his designs a transparency and a lightness that remain his unmistakable signature. He patented both the material and the technique, and set up his own production to exploit them.

The post-war years were those of his great success. Naturalised French in 1945, he opened a metal workshop in Montrouge, launched a range of perforated metal furniture in 1948 and expanded his factory to some twenty workers the following year, when he also joined the Société des Artistes Décorateurs. His catalogue, which he renewed in collections in the manner of the fashion calendar and produced in limited series, ranged from chairs, tables and lamps to magazine racks and baskets. His renown led him to establish the Société Matégot, with workshops in both Paris and Casablanca. Honours followed: a Grand Prix d'Honneur at the Madrid International Exhibition in 1953, a gold medal from the Société d'Encouragement de l'Art et de l'Industrie in 1955, and a diploma of honour at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.

Yet tapestry had never left him. From 1945 he had been designing cartoons woven in Aubusson by Tabard, and in 1959, the year the State commissioned several tapestries from him, he brought his furniture production to an end. He devoted the rest of his career to the medium, becoming a pioneer of the modern French tapestry movement, and taught from 1961 at the École des Beaux-Arts et d'Architecture in Nancy. He died in 2001, leaving behind an œuvre in which metal and wool, industry and craft, share the same pursuit of lightness.