French Summer 2025: Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
Paris Stop 1: Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris
Selected highlights from the modern art collection at MAM Paris
All images: Courtesy of respective artists, artist estates and MAM Paris. Photos taken by City Transit Arts, except otherwise specified.
Hans Hartung (1904–1989) and Jean Degottex ( 1918–1988) are both representatives from the lyrical abstraction movements. Their works are expressive, emphasizing personal expressions and spontaneous brushstrokes.
French expressionalist Bernard Buffet (1928–1999) with his distinct style of strong thick black outlines, angular structure, and a minimalistic palette, seemed to reflect the anxiety of a post-war generation.
Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) and Heri Matisse (1869-1954), both Fauvists shared the same strong taste for colors and decors.
Marcel Gromaire (1892–1971) who were recruited as soldier during WWI, painted many war-themed works. La guerre (1925) with five oversized French soldiers in blue uniforms, with their face, expressions and emotions hidden. Rather, the texture of their uniform and the solemnness of the moment have taken center stage.
In 1931, "Abstraction-Création" was formed by a group of artists who were working in a non-figurative vein, rejecting any explicit reference to the visible world.
Georges Valmier (!885- 1937) isolated his colors in precisely delimited forms which he articulated in complex and harmonious stratifications.
The sculptor Etienne Beothy (1897-1961) created abstract and undulating silhouettes whose biomorphic forms paralleled the organic and curvilinear shapes of Hans Arp's (1886-1966) "Concretions"
The couple, Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885 - 1979) who were the key protagonists of Orphism/ Orphic Cubism, which was a short-lived but influential art movement that emerged in Paris around 1912, also joined the "Abstraction-Création" movement.
Orphism/ Orphic Cubism was characterized by its use of bold, contrasting colors and abstract, often circular, forms to express movements and rhythms. (see their works above, which are around 4 meters high, filling the whole wall of the basement of MAM Paris)
