visual appeal
United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France.
Ralph Coburn, Orange and White Abstraction, 1950, © Will Howcroft Photography
The Musée d’arts de Nantes and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier are organizing an exhibition entitled United States of Abstraction. American Artists in France, 1946-1964. The role of Paris as the world capital of Western art since the 19th century is well recognized and it is also considered an established fact that the City of Light lost this pre-eminence after World War II to New York. The history of Abstract
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Expressionism, the New York School and its heroes, Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning among others, thus became the prevailing narrative of art after 1945. Nevertheless, 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 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
