Jean Degottex was born on 1918 in Sathonay, France, and began painting inhis twenties. He first exhibited his works in 1949, encouraged by Denise André, who defended the abstract avant-garde and the new Paris school in the 1950’s. He participates then to an exhibition at the Maeght gallery in 1952 and at the Salomon Guggenheim Museum in New York the year after. He appears during the fifties with Simon Hantaï as the pioneer of the Lyrical Abstraction movement, especially in New York. He died in Paris in 1988.