Paris Central

Free city, free art in the fifties

24 Oct 2009
17 Jan 2010

Post-war Paris was the uncontested epicentre of European art, reaching its peak in the 1950s. In the Netherlands, this is the first major exhibition to be devoted to this important period.

With a renewed sense of adventure, artists in a devastated continent sought new ideas and insights, new forms of expression and new techniques and materials. Lyrical Abstraction, Tachism, Informal Art, Art Brut - they were a different kind of art, from a different perspective and different ideals.

'Paris Central' pays homage to European art and artists from this period, as well as to the unique city that made it possible. Paris Central includes more than a hundred works by thirty-three masters.

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Bram van Velde, sans titre, 1941 - Source: cobra-mseum.nl

In the 1940s and 1950s, Paris was the centre of European art. Famous artists, such as Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Asger Jorn, Georges Mathieu, Arnulf Rainer, Nicolas de Staël, Antoni Tàpies and Bram van Velde all chose to live in this vivacious and inspiring city. In this exhibition, an ode to lyrical abstraction, action painting, l’art informel and material painting, masterpieces have been brought together from the oeuvres of over 30 European masters. An exhibition of this nature is long overdue, as it investigates a period that generated so much interesting and beautiful art - by artists who intensively and diligently experimented in the age of the reconstruction. They were not only French and Dutch artists, but also German, Italian and Spanish, Danish and Belgian, for they were all working in Paris.