Hailed by Malraux: “At last the West has produced a calligrapher!”, Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) moved to Paris in 1947. The self-proclaimed creator of “Lyrical Abstraction”, he invented a wild, fantastic system of signs that he sees as the expression of his own inner primordial violence.

“Painting”, he wrote, “has to be an act” – a battle with the canvas in which Mathieu, with a strong streak of exhibitionism, creates works of swirling, tormented and violently-coloured movement, often in front of an audience. He has also experimented in poster design, furniture and jewelry.

The explosive dynamism of his work for the 1961 Mouton Rothschild label is in typical Mathieu style.