THE NEW SCHOOL OF PARIS THROUGH ITS PIONEERING WOMEN (1945-1964)
Perrotin announces a historical exhibition on the New School of Paris movement, featuring never-before-seen works from private collections and foundations. Exploring the period from 1945 through 1964, the presentation will bring together for the first time a wealth of archives recounting the stories of female gallerists and critics who contributed to the rise of the post-war movement.
April 13 – May 23, 2024
The term “School of Paris” was coined by André Warnod in 1924 to refer to the generation of avant-garde artists who flocked to France – particularly to Montmartre and Montparnasse – from all over the world, although artists from Eastern Europe, such as Chagall and Soutine, predominated. This “school” did not have a homogenous style. It was more of a network of sociability, but visually it was dominated by a raging, expressionist aesthetic which distorted lines and colors, and readily borrowed its visions from non-Western cultures.
The art that emerged in Paris after 1945 benefited from a flourishing market, but suffered from misunderstandings and numerous scandals. Neither the press nor the bourgeois Parisian audiences of the time unanimously appreciated these new trends and critiqued them, as has often been the case in the history of the Parisian avant-garde since the nineteenth-century quarrels over Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism.
The names of Pierre Soulages, Zao Wou-Ki, and Hans Hartung soon became worldfamous, the latter winning the Grand Prix with Fautrier at the Venice Biennale in 1960. Four years later in Venice, however, everything came to a head. During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States utilized its soft power to compete against the Soviet enemy and “old” Europe. This strategy proved successful at the 1964 Biennale, where the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, backed by art dealer Leo Castelli, emerged victorious. This was a triumph for New York and pop art, from which Paris would never recover.
This exhibition tells three stories that have long been forgotten or overlooked. Firstly, it portrays a moment, rather than a movement: the “New School of Paris” was a cosmopolitan, dynamic group of abstract painters (“lyrical,” “action painting,” “calligraphic,” “gestural,” “warm,” and “cold”) that emerged between 1945 and 1964. Among them, Geneviève Asse, Anna-Eva Bergman, Terry Haass, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Serge Poliakoff, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Wols, and Zao Wou-Ki.
Following in the footsteps of Jeanne Bucher, who died in 1946, these gallerists included Denise René, Lydia Conti, Colette Allendy, Nina Dausset, Florence Bank, Iris Clert, Myriam Prévot, and many others. In the field of criticism, they included Madeleine Rousseau, Odile Degand, Suzanne Tenand, Claude-Hélène Sibert, Dominique Aubier, and Jeanine Warnod.
This exhibition is curated by Thomas Schlesser and has been organized in collaboration with ACA (Archives de la critique d’art), Fondation Hartung-Bergman, and Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva. It features exceptional loans and rare archival material, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of these visionary women in Post-war Paris.