Faces of hostages
Paris, 1945. At the Galerie René Drouin, the painter Jean Fautrier showed a series of small pictures titled Otages, hostages. On pale, thickly troweled layers of paint one senses heads and faces, little more than outlines and wounds. During the German occupation Fautrier had lived in hiding on the edge of Paris and heard from a distance the shots with which prisoners were executed.
The pictures show no scene, no perpetrator, no victim. They make horror palpable as matter. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, this seemed to many artists the only possible response.
An art without form
The French critic Michel Tapié popularised the term “Informel” in the early 1950s, among other things with the exhibition Signifiants de l’informel in 1951 and the book Un art autre. It meant a painting that frees itself from every preconceived form, neither geometric nor figurative. The picture arises in the painting itself, from traces, stains, trickles and gestures.
In Paris, Hans Hartung worked with sweeping bundles of lines, Pierre Soulages with broad black bars, and Georges Mathieu with lightning-fast gestures in front of an audience. The Berlin-born Wols, real name Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, created delicate, nervous pictures full of lines and stains. He died in 1951 at only 38.
Germany: a new beginning after the war
In Germany, after twelve years of Nazi art policy, abstraction also meant a new beginning in freedom. In 1952 K. O. Götz, Otto Greis, Heinz Kreutz and Bernard Schultze exhibited as Quadriga at the Zimmergalerie Franck in Frankfurt. In Hagen, Emil Schumacher developed pictures with deep furrows and thick crusts of paint.
Düsseldorf became an important centre. Here the Gruppe 53 was founded in 1953, including Gerhard Hoehme and Peter Brüning. K. O. Götz, who drew fast, swinging forms through wet paint with a squeegee, taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1959 to 1979. His students included Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.
Europe between sacking and tar
In Italy, Alberto Burri, a former army doctor, stitched tattered jute sacks into pictures. In Spain, Antoni Tàpies made pictures of sand, marble dust and scratches that recall old walls. In Paris, the Hungarian-French painter Judit Reigl developed large pictures born from the movement of her whole body.
In 1959 documenta II in Kassel presented Art Informel as a central current of contemporary art, side by side with American Abstract Expressionism.
Why it still matters
Art Informel questioned painting from the ground up after the catastrophe of the war. It put material, trace and process at the centre, opening paths that lead from Zero to the painting of Gerhard Richter. This line is especially clear in Düsseldorf: some of the most important German artists of the following decades came out of K. O. Götz’s class.
Further reading
- Michel Tapié: Un art autre (1952, in French).
- Christoph Zuschlag et al. (eds.): Brennpunkt Informel: Quellen, Strömungen, Reaktionen (1998, in German).