Abstract Expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the epicenter of this movement, included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning and Theodoros Stamos among others.
Abstract Impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s. It involves the painting of a subject such as real-life scenes, objects, or people (portraits) in an Impressionist-style, but with an emphasis on varying measures of abstraction. The paintings are often painted en plein air, an artistic style involving painting outside with the landscape directly in front of the artist. The movement works delicately between the lines of pure abstraction and the allowance of an impression of reality in the painting.
COBRA or Cobra, often stylized as CoBrA, was a European avant-garde art group active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home countries' capital cities: Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A).
Pierre Alechinsky is a Belgian artist. He has lived and worked in France since 1951. His work is related to tachisme, abstract expressionism, and lyrical abstraction.
Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
This is a chronological list of periods in Western art history. An art period is a phase in the development of the work of an artist, groups of artists or art movement.
20th-century French art developed out of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism that dominated French art at the end of the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century in France saw the even more revolutionary experiments of Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, artistic movements that would have a major impact on western, and eventually world, art. After World War II, while French artists explored such tendencies as Tachism, Fluxus and New realism, France's preeminence in the visual arts progressively became eclipsed by developments elsewhere.
Georges Mathieu was a French abstract painter, art theorist, and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is considered one of the fathers of European lyrical abstraction, a trend of informalism.
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
Michel Tapié was a French art critic, curator, and collector. He was an early and influential theorist and practitioner of "tachisme", a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s which is regarded as a European version of abstract expressionism. Tapié was a founder member of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut with Dubuffet and Breton In 1948, as well he managed the Foyer De l'Art Brut at the Galerie René Drouin.Tapié was from an aristocratic French family and was a second cousin once removed of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painter's mother Adèle Tapié de Celeyran was Tapié's great-aunt.
The Gutai Art Association was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954.
André Lanskoy was a Russian painter and printmaker who worked in France. He is associated with the School of Paris and Tachisme, an abstract painting movement that began during the 1940s.
Luciano Pistoi was an Italian art critic, dealer, journalist, publisher, promoter and organizer of cultural events. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in the postwar Italian art world.
20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
Arte Informale is a term coined in 1950 by the French critic Michel Tapié to refer to the art movement that began during the mid-1940s in post-World War II Europe. This movement also paralleled the Abstract Expressionism movement that was taking place at the same time in the United States, and had ties to the Arte Povera movement. Sometimes referred to as Tachism, Art Autre or Lyrical Abstraction, it was a type of abstraction in which form became less important than that of the expressive impulses of the artist, and was opposed to the rationalism of traditional abstraction. The qualities of informal art explore the possibilities of gesture, materials, and signage as the basis of communication. Oftentimes art characterized as informal is executed spontaneously and the approach to painting and sculpture are generally gestural, performative, expressionistic and experimental. Certain artists such as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and Emilio Vedova were crucial figures of this movement.
Informalism or Art Informel is a pictorial movement from the 1943–1950s, that includes all the abstract and gestural tendencies that developed in France and the rest of Europe during the World War II, similar to American abstract expressionism started 1946. Several distinguishing trends are identified within the movement such as lyrical abstraction, matter painting, New Paris School, tachisme and art brut. The French art critic Michel Tapié coined the term "art autre" in the homonymous book published in 1952 in relation to non-geometric abstract art. It was instrumental in improving the concept of abstract art in France during the Early 1950s. Its use in the expression of political ideologies in South America during the Early 1950s was quite common, as it was seen as the main way to show support for the changing political climate.
Franck Prazan is a French art collector and the owner of Applicat-Prazan gallery in Paris. He specialises in School of Paris, a Post-War abstract painting movement, whose main artists include Jean-Michel Atlan, Pierre Soulages, Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël.
Applicat-Prazan gallery was established in 1993 on the Left Bank in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris at 16 rue de Seine under the initiative of Bernard Prazan, a keen art collector.
