Post-World War II School of Paris

About

After the Liberation, Paris still drew artists from everywhere, even as New York began to claim leadership. Zao Wou-Ki arrived from China in 1948 and Jean-Paul Riopelle from Canada in the late 1940s, while Maria Helena Vieira da Silva returned from wartime exile in Brazil. The Salon de Mai and the abstract Salon des Réalités Nouvelles gave them regular platforms.

Abstraction dominated, in rival forms. Hans Hartung made taut, calligraphic strokes; Pierre Soulages laid broad black bars against light grounds; Georges Mathieu turned fast painting into public spectacle; Nicolas de Staël laid thick slabs of colour that edged back towards landscape. Critics called these tendencies Tachisme, Art Informel or lyrical abstraction. Vieira da Silva's labyrinthine city spaces and Serge Poliakoff's interlocking colour shapes offered other paths, and geometric and kinetic artists such as Victor Vasarely worked alongside them. The name School of Paris loosely covered this whole scene.