The New School of Paris : French Post-War Abstraction

The end of the Second World War marks the triumph of Abstraction in France. The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, under the impulssion of veterans of the avant-garde such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Auguste Herbin or Jean Arp, will give a new generation of young artists the opportunity to freely and fully express their art.

But the abstraction these artists will practice is nothing like the carefully ordered geormetric abstraction of their forebearers. Instead, they take the road of an art of heightened subjectivity, where the gesture - expressive, dynamic - is in perfect accord with the artist's own emotivity, and colour and line accord in lyrical rythm. This new, gestural, poetic and expressive form of abstraction will be know as "lyrical abstraction" or "tachism" in France, and find its equivalent in the Abstract Expressionnism of the United Stetes at the time.

At the end of the Occupation, Paris will also find its place again as an Internationale, its aura still capable of attracting artists from all over the world, such as the Swiss Gérard Schneider, who will become one of its premier representatives, together with Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung, the Chinese Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and T'ang Haywen, or the Russian André Lanskoy. We invite you to take a tour through French Lyrical Abstraction, from the 1950s to the 1970s, through the works of Gérard Schneider, Zao Wou-Ki, Pierre Soulages, André Lanskoy and T'ang Haywen.