Atlan

Jean-Michel Atlan (1913—1960), a self-taught painter, his work is characterized by a rare articulation between gesture, color and form, where painting becomes a symbolic and tense space. Trained in philosophy before devoting himself entirely to painting, he developed a work of great conceptual rigor, influenced by his reflections on meaning and structure.

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From the end of the 1940s, Atlan established himself as a major figure in Parisian abstraction. Her work draws on the spontaneity and energy of the CoBrA movement, while pursuing a personal and more structured approach to color and form. At the end of the 1950s, he forged a radical abstraction where each canvas became a dynamic field of forces in tension. Color, dense and saturated, becomes a vector of energy that organizes pictorial space, while forms, often biomorphic or archetypal, are placed with a great economy of means, creating an almost closed composition.

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His painting, based on an internal necessity, is neither gestural abstraction nor systematic geometry. Atlan moves away from decorative or expressive effects, preferring an approach where each element seems to flow from the structure of the canvas itself. His work is characterized by a precise balance between the expansion of forms and the restraint in their organization, creating a fluid but controlled dynamic. This abstraction, which does not rank among gestural or geometric expressions, introduces a symbolic, almost telluric dimension, where matter, history and memory interact.

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His paintings are preserved in several museums in France, such as in Paris, at the Pompidou Center and at the Museum of Modern Art in the City of Paris, and internationally, such as at the Tate Gallery in London, the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In 1963, the MAM devoted a retrospective to him, which was also exhibited in 1964 at the Tel Aviv Museum. Jean-Michel Atlan now occupies an essential place in the history of European abstraction, as one of the artists who most deeply questioned the relationship between form, color and symbolism in the 20th century.

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