Abstracting from Nature

As the dust settled across Europe after the Second World War a generation of artists faced the dilemma of how to represent contemporary life.

Caught between the chaos of conflict and the harmonious order of nature, Paris became the centre for a group of trailblazing artists to forge a new visual language based on organic abstraction. Adopting a poetic sensitivity to colour and form, these artists responded to the existential crisis of post-war Europe by recreating the subjective experience of the natural world.

As the inheritors of Jean Arp’s free-flowing forms and Wassily Kandinsky’s spiritual colour palette, these burgeoning movements of Art Informel, Lyrical Abstraction and Tachisme were counterpointed by the contemporary machismo of American Abstract Expressionism. 

Artists: Afro; Jean Arp; Roger Bissière; Bram Bogart; Alexander Calder; Anthony Caro; Maurice Estève; Barbara Hepworth; Roger Hilton; Wassily Kandinsky; André Lanskoy; Peter Lanyon; Henry Moore; Antoine Poncet; Serge Poliakoff; Gérard Ernest Schneider; Maria Vieira da Silva; Mark Tobey.