The Shape of Freedom

The exhibition brings together 97 works by over 50 artists, including many icons of postwar abstraction. The show takes its point of departure from a number of important paintings in the Hasso Plattner Collection, whose holdings also include key works of French Impressionism. Artists like Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Norman Bluhm were inspired by Impressionist landscape painting. The nearly abstract water lily paintings of Claude Monet, in particular, were viewed by many as anticipating twentieth-century artistic developments.

The exhibition presents iconic painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, and Ernst Wilhelm Nay alongside lesser-known artists whose contributions to the development of abstract painting after 1945 have been largely ignored: the many discoveries to be made in the show include works by Jean Degottex, Perle Fine, Simon Hantaï, Manolo Millares, Judit Reigl, Janet Sobel, Hedda Sterne, and Theodoros Stamos.

Paris, the international center of modern painting from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s, increasingly yielded its preeminence to New York. Many European avant-garde artists fled to the United States to escape war and persecution. There, in galleries like Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of this Century,” they exchanged ideas with young American painters. For artists like Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, the Europeans were important role models.

The impulsive application of color is also characteristic of Hans Hofmann’s First Sprouting. Born in Bavaria in 1880, Hofmann emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s and became one of the most important forerunners of Abstract Expressionism.

The most famous examples of the “all-over” effect are the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. The artist laid his canvas on the studio floor and covered it with densely tangled strands of color, dripping, spattering, and pouring the paint onto the surface in rhythmic, dance-like movements.

Beginning in the early 1950s, this revolutionary new technique also influenced the development of European abstraction. Without resorting to geometric structure, the works are often marked by a decorative character.

Color Field Painting often involved monumental formats and the negation of spatial depth. Many of the works are intended to be viewed at close range, inviting viewers to contemplatively immerse themselves in the pictorial field.

One of the pioneers of Color Field Painting was Clyfford Still. While artists like Mark Rothko applied the paint in thin layers, Still produced impasto, relief-like surfaces, using the palette knife to create textures.

By lifting and moving the support, Frankenthaler allowed the paint to flow freely across the surface. She often gave representational, associative titles to her nonobjective works. Motifs of landscape and nature served as key reference points for Frankenthaler’s monumental abstractions.

Sam Francis, who had encountered Abstract Expressionism through the work of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still during his time as a student in the late 1940s, also studied the nature scenes of Claude Monet. From 1950 on, Francis spent a number of years in Paris, where he also contributed to the exchange between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. With his American origin and close connection to the French art scene, he was seen early on as a link between Paris and New York on both sides of the Atlantic.

From the mid-1950s on, Mitchell regularly spent extended periods of time in France and settled there permanently at the end of the decade. Through Sam Francis, she made the acquaintance of numerous artists and critics from the milieu of Art Informel, including Georges Mathieu, Judit Reigl, and Michel Tapié as well as Simon Hantaï, with whom she became close friends.

In Paris and other Western European cities, the painting of Art Informel developed parallel to Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Its open, “formless” pictorial structure was based on an improvisational approach to brushwork, surface texture, and material.
In many works, scratches, holes, or gouges evoke the feeling of bodily wounds. In a postwar world traumatized by violence and fascist terror, gestural painting was also an expression of the existential search for meaning.

In America, Art Informel was soon perceived as a European pendant to Abstract Expressionism and was greeted with intense interest. In October 1950, the group exhibition Young Painters in the US and France opened at the Sidney Janis Gallery, with seven painters from each country paired in visual dialogues — Rothko with Nicolas de Staël, for example, or Hedda Sterne with Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Georges Mathieu had developed his dripping and pouring technique even before Jackson Pollock. Many of his calligraphic Action Paintings were completed in the space of only a few hours, in a burst of creative energy. 

In the early 1950s, Judit Reigl emigrated from Hungary to Paris, where she was initially associated with the Surrealists. Later, under the influence of the New York School, she experimented with impulsive, gestural painting.

By the early 1950s, West Germany had emerged as a center of Art Informel. For many artists, nonobjective painting seemed the only possible response to the horrors of war and the Holocaust. West German artists, too, embraced spontaneous, dynamic processes as the expression of a new sense of artistic freedom.

Germany’s unique role in the Cold War, as well as the Federal Republic’s close connection to its Western allies, further encouraged the turn toward abstraction. As the perceived antithesis of the Socialist Realism of Communist East Germany, abstraction was politicized as the only valid form of expression for free democracies.

One of the most important proponents of Art Informel in Germany was K. O. Götz. While visiting Paris, he met pioneers of Informel such as Georges Mathieu and Jean-Paul Riopelle and encountered works of Abstract Expressionism. In 1952, Götz began experimenting with a new painting technique that showed parallels to American Action Painting.

Another important artist of German postwar abstraction was Ernst Wilhelm Nay. In the 1930s, Nay had worked in a figural style influenced by German Expressionism. Under the Nazis, he was banned from painting and exhibiting. 

Nay himself rejected the categorization of his pictures as Art Informel or Abstract Expressionism. Instead, he described his approach as “chromatic constructivism,” focused on the painterly exploration of nonperspectival space.

In his influential 1983 book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, art historian Serge Guilbaut outlined the thesis that after World War II, New York established itself as the global epicenter of avant-garde painting, thereby superseding Paris. Moreover, it has often been observed that the United States, in particular, exploited free abstraction for purposes of propaganda during the Cold War. The political overtones of postwar abstraction, however, were of little importance to the artists themselves, who engaged in a mutually fruitful dialogue between equals.