After the ravages of World War II, Paris once again became the place where young artists gathered and picked up conversations about what art should be. Through contact with an older generation of avant-garde practitioners, they were exposed to the use of chance composition, primary color palettes, and geometric abstraction, which they applied in increasingly radical experiments. As artist Ellsworth Kelly remembered: “At the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, I noticed the large windows between the paintings interested me more than the art exhibited. . . . From then on, painting as I had known it was finished
for me.” By the end of the 1940s, these vocabularies had opened up new spaces for abstract painting. The contacts made in Paris between artists from places as far afield as the United States, Latin America, and Eastern Europe became an ongoing network of exchange, crossing ideological divides and the boundaries created by Cold War politics.
Collection 1940s–1970s
406A
In and Out of Paris
406A
In and Out of Paris
Floor 4
MoMA
- MoMA, Floor 4, 406 The David Geffen Galleries
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Jean (Hans) Arp Constellation with Five White and Two Black Forms: Variation 2 Meudon 1932 -
Sérgio Camargo Edge 1962 -
Saloua Raouda Choucair Poem 1963-65 -
Lucio Fontana Spatial Concept (Concetto spaziale) 1957 -
Carmen Herrera Untitled 1952 -
Ellsworth Kelly Relief with Blue 1950 -
Ellsworth Kelly Colors for a Large Wall 1951 -
Yves Klein Blue Monochrome 1961 -
François Morellet Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 50% Blue, 50% Red 1960 -
Lygia Pape Orange 1955
Installation images
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