DESSIN ET PASSION
05.09.2025 - 31.12.2025
Alexander Calder, Serge Poliakoff, Jean Cocteau, Hans Arp, Maurice Estève, Auguste Herbin, Renato Paresce, Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso
Galerie Jörg Schuhmacher
Paris in the 1950-70s: Picasso, Calder and Poliakoff In the post-war period, Paris continued to be a major center for modern art. The city attracted numerous artists, including Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder and Serge Poliakoff, who cultivated very different styles but came together in their quest for artistic renewal.
Pablo Picasso, who had already achieved world fame as the founder of Cubism, lived and worked in the south of France, but was often present in Paris. In the 1950s and 60s, he increasingly turned to political themes again (as in his work Massacre in Korea, 1951) and experimented with ceramics, graphic art and sculpture. He remained a central figure in the Paris art scene. Alexander Calder, the American sculptor, lived regularly in France from the late 1940s, including in Saché near Tours, but often traveled to Paris. He brought movement to sculpture with his "Mobiles" and "Stabiles". His works were exhibited many times in Paris, including at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.
Calder had close contact with the avant-garde and shared Picasso's interest in the reduction of form. Serge Poliakoff, a Russian émigré and part of the School of Paris, developed his unmistakable style of abstract color fields that are rhythmically related to each other in the 1950s. He was in contact with many artists of the time, including Sonia Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, but was also known to Calder. His works were recognized internationally from the mid-50s.
A common denominator of the three artists is their contribution to abstraction and the formal language of modernism - each in their own way. While Picasso tended to oscillate between figuration and abstraction, Calder pursued new ways of spatial design with kinetic sculpture, and Poliakoff explored the effect of pure color and surface. Their paths crossed in the Parisian art world - through joint Exhibitions, galleries such as Denise René or Louis Carré, and in the intellectual milieu of the post-war period.
Jörg Schuhmacher Gallery
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60311 Frankfurt am Main
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E. j.schuhmacher@art-schuhmacher.de