Le Choix De La Peinture Une Autre Histoire De L'abstraction En France, 1962-1989

Exhibition at the Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, from 10 February to 9 June 2024

How to go on painting, when easel painting has been declared dead and Pop Art, non-art, conceptual art and minimalism are all the rage?

After the triumph of lyrical and gestural abstraction that characterised the post-war period, the 1960s saw a profound revival of abstract painting. Artists simplified their practice, invented new tools and gave colour unprecedented space on the canvas. Abstraction was no longer a place for lyricism and expressionism, but a questioning of the means of painting.

This exhibition catalogue, which looks back over three decades of abstract painting in France, from the early 1960s to the 1980s, brings together artists whose pictorial approach was based on a different conception of gesture, the role of colour and the notion of the painting. Through some sixty works by 46 different artists, including Poliakoff, Schneider, Hantaï, Viallat, Soulages, Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe and Monique Frydman, it bears witness to the profound renewal of abstract practices in the 1960s, the project to deconstruct the elements of painting initiated around May 1968, and the return of the painting begun at the turn of the 1980s.