Post-war, Nouveau Réalisme and May 68
After the war French artists sought new forms of expression in matter, gesture and everyday objects, while New York challenged Paris.
After the Liberation in 1944 Paris was still the capital of art, but the war had left deep scars. Jean Fautrier showed his Hostages, thick masses of paint that resembled battered faces. Jean Dubuffet collected art by the mentally ill and the self-taught and called it art brut, raw art. Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu painted abstractly with sweeping gestures. The tendency was called Art Informel or Tachisme and became Europe’s answer to American Abstract Expressionism.
Around 1960 a new generation turned against abstract painting. Yves Klein painted monochrome pictures in an intense blue of his own and used naked women as living brushes. The critic Pierre Restany brought him together with Arman, Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse and others in the group of the Nouveaux Réalistes. They worked with scrap metal, rubbish, posters and machines, often with a mixture of humour and social criticism. Niki de Saint Phalle fired a rifle at reliefs filled with paint.
At the same time Paris lost its role as the undisputed centre of art. New York increasingly took over, and in 1964 the American Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. In France art became political again during the student revolt of May 1968, when posters were printed at the art school. The culture minister André Malraux and later President Georges Pompidou invested in state cultural institutions. When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977 Paris gained a new kind of museum, with Pontus Hultén, the former director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as one of its leaders.