Le Geste et la Matière

In the 1940s and 1950s, the French capital served as a platform for artistic exchange, with a dense network of galleries and a generation of art critics who worked to promote groups of artists. Paris, which once again became the centre of the art world, attracted European artists, often driven from their countries by authoritarian regimes, as well as Americans, encouraged to settle in the capital thanks to the G.I. Bill, and many artists from Asia.

Cutting across various important movements in 20th-century art history, such as Informalism, American Action Painting and Japanese Gutai, the forty or so paintings (often large-format) in Movement and Matter are divided into five sections:
•    “Art of Another Kind” reflects the notion of the “informal” art that critic Michel Tapié championed from 1950 onwards.
•    “Transatlantic Exchanges” looks at the relationship between the art scenes in Paris and New York.
•    “Black Is a Colour” brings together artists who limit themselves to black, highlighting in particular the more or less controlled brush movements.
•    “Asia/The West” highlights the work of Asian painters inspired by this new aesthetic. For their part, Western artists showed themselves to be just as sensitive to calligraphy and Far Eastern spirituality.
•    Finally, “European Dissemination” shows that gestural abstraction is rapidly becoming a common language that is widely shared.