Sam Francis, Blue Balls, vers 1961-1962, Stockholm, Moderna Museet © 2020 Sam Francis Foundation, California / ADAGP, Paris, 2020
The exhibition examines their intense
presence and the way in which they
contributed to redefining abstract art
in France at a time when the world
geography of art went through
profound changes.
They came for a range of reasons:
the cultural appeal of Paris, its
museums and its masters, the draw
of Europe, the possibility of creating
without any real constraints through
grants, the search for greater freedom,
the desire to be elsewhere, to be in
Paris as if on an island.
The exhibition is arranged into three
sections. The first section examines
works brought together by the critic
Michel Tapié, whether in group exhibitions
(such as Véhémences Confrontées
at the Nina Dausset gallery in
1951, Les Signifiants de l'Informel in
1952 and Un Art Autre at the Studio
Facchetti the same year) or in
publications from the first half of the
1950s. These events constitute an
exciting attempt to bring together a
series of abstract works outside of
national considerations, but around
the ideas of expressivity, gestural and
automatic abstract painting.
Several
American painters, Jackson Pollock,
Willem De Kooning, Mark Tobey, Claire
Falkenstein, Alfonso Ossorio were
associated with works by Wols, Jean
Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul
Riopelle. Their works have in common their large scale, floating forms with intense colours.
The second section brings together several abstract colourists, such as Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, but also Kimber Smith, Norman Bluhm and Beauford Delaney, who found in France a place of freedom and creativity, without establishing strong links with the artists of the School of Paris, with the exception of the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. They claim a form of solitude and use the French capital as a stimulating place for creation but remain nevertheless strangely stateless. Nevertheless, we also know that many American artists, musicians and writers, both men and women, continued to travel to France to study and create. More than 400 artists in particular made use of the G.I. Bill scholarship between 1944 and 1953, which allowed any veteran to finance their studies, by enrolling at Parisian art schools and academies.
The last section looks at how the
artists Ellsworth Kelly, Ralph Coburn,
John Youngerman and Robert Breer,
in relation to some of their elders such
as Jean Arp and Alexander Calder
and to some of their contemporaries
(François Morellet), profoundly
renewed geometric abstraction in
post-war Paris.
Comprising around one hundred
works, paintings and sculptures from
European and American public and
private collections, the exhibition is enhanced
by a wealth of documentation
that provides an insight into the period
and a catalogue in which French and
American specialists retrace a fascinating
chapter in the history of artistic
exchanges in a new light.
