United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France. 1946–1964.
Snoeck| N° d'inventaire | 23461 |
| Format | 23 x 29 |
| Détails | 288 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Gent, 2021 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9789461616678 |
The exhibition "United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France, 1946-1964" is organized by the Musée d'arts de Nantes, where it will be presented to the public from February 11 to May 23, 2021, and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, where it will be presented from July 3 to October 17.
Paris's role as the world capital of Western art since the 19th century is well known, and it is also considered a fact that the City of Light lost this preeminence after World War II to New York. Yet it is also known that many American artists, painters, musicians, and writers, both men and women, continued to study and create in France. Several hundred young American artists, musicians, and writers, both men and women, stayed in Paris after World War II and into the 1960s. Some, like Joan Mitchell in 1955, settled in France permanently. More than 400 artists, in particular, used the GI Bill scholarship, which allowed any veteran to finance their studies, by enrolling in Parisian art schools and academies between 1946 and 1953. Some artists, such as Ellsworth Kelly, who arrived in France in 1948, studied at the École de Beaux-Arts, while others attended the Grande Chaumière studios with Fernand Léger or Ossip Zadkine with varying degrees of assiduity. They came for various reasons: the cultural appeal of Paris, its museums and its masters; the lure of Europe; the adventure of living well and without real constraints thanks to the scholarship; the search for greater freedom; the desire to be elsewhere, to be in Paris as if on an island. The exhibition explores this intense presence and the way in which it contributed to the redefinition of abstract art in France at a time when the global geography of art was being disrupted. It is organized into three chapters, which will also be found in the catalog.
The first section, "The Others of Other Art: Americans Around Michel Tapié," will examine the 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, or Un art autre at 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 expressiveness, gestural painting, or abstract automatic painting. Several American painters, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Tobey, Claire Falkenstein, Alfonso Ossorio are associated with it and put in relation with Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The second chapter, "Paris, an island for American artists?", will bring together several abstract colorists, such as Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, but also Kimber Smith, Norman Bluhm or Beauford Delaney, who found in France a place of freedom and creativity, without however establishing strong links with the French artists of the lyrical abstraction group, 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 nevertheless strangely stateless. Their works have in common floating forms, large scale, with intense colors.
The final chapter, "New Paths of Geometric Abstraction: Shadow, Chance, Movement," will examine how the artists Ellsworth Kelly, John Youngerman, Robert Breer, and Ralph Coburn, in conjunction with some of their elders such as Jean Arp and Alexander Calder, and with some of their contemporaries (François Morellet), profoundly renewed geometric abstraction in post-war Paris.
The exhibition "United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France, 1946-1964" is organized by the Musée d'arts de Nantes, where it will be presented to the public from February 11 to May 23, 2021, and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, where it will be presented from July 3 to October 17.
Paris's role as the world capital of Western art since the 19th century is well known, and it is also considered a fact that the City of Light lost this preeminence after World War II to New York. Yet it is also known that many American artists, painters, musicians, and writers, both men and women, continued to study and create in France. Several hundred young American artists, musicians, and writers, both men and women, stayed in Paris after World War II and into the 1960s. Some, like Joan Mitchell in 1955, settled in France permanently. More than 400 artists, in particular, used the GI Bill scholarship, which allowed any veteran to finance their studies, by enrolling in Parisian art schools and academies between 1946 and 1953. Some artists, such as Ellsworth Kelly, who arrived in France in 1948, studied at the École de Beaux-Arts, while others attended the Grande Chaumière studios with Fernand Léger or Ossip Zadkine with varying degrees of assiduity. They came for various reasons: the cultural appeal of Paris, its museums and its masters; the lure of Europe; the adventure of living well and without real constraints thanks to the scholarship; the search for greater freedom; the desire to be elsewhere, to be in Paris as if on an island. The exhibition explores this intense presence and the way in which it contributed to the redefinition of abstract art in France at a time when the global geography of art was being disrupted. It is organized into three chapters, which will also be found in the catalog.
The first section, "The Others of Other Art: Americans Around Michel Tapié," will examine the 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, or Un art autre at 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 expressiveness, gestural painting, or abstract automatic painting. Several American painters, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Tobey, Claire Falkenstein, Alfonso Ossorio are associated with it and put in relation with Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle.
The second chapter, "Paris, an island for American artists?", will bring together several abstract colorists, such as Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, but also Kimber Smith, Norman Bluhm or Beauford Delaney, who found in France a place of freedom and creativity, without however establishing strong links with the French artists of the lyrical abstraction group, 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 nevertheless strangely stateless. Their works have in common floating forms, large scale, with intense colors.
The final chapter, "New Paths of Geometric Abstraction: Shadow, Chance, Movement," will examine how the artists Ellsworth Kelly, John Youngerman, Robert Breer, and Ralph Coburn, in conjunction with some of their elders such as Jean Arp and Alexander Calder, and with some of their contemporaries (François Morellet), profoundly renewed geometric abstraction in post-war Paris.