Curated by: Christian Briend, curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, assisted by Nathalie Ernoult, conservation attaché.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the Centre Pompidou held an exhibition at the Fondation Clément on abstract non-geometric painting, as it developed in Paris after the Second World War.

Known, since that era, by turns as "informal", "lyrical", "tachist", "gestural" or "matterist", this abstraction, which cannot be defined by one homogenous movement, translates the artists' desire to "start from scratch" after the dark years of the war. Beyond the diversity of artistic propositions, this form of painting, which puts both realism and rationalism on trial, is characterised by an instinctive practice and a direct connection with the material. In the 1950s, this "other art" had a wide audience in France and abroad, mainly due to the work of enlightened critics and enterprising gallerists who emerged from the ferment of Liberation-era Paris.

It is an opportunity to discover less celebrated artists who have also contributed to the abstract art movement, focusing on artists like Olivier Debré, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Gérard Schneider and Pierre Soulages.

The presentation, which abandons chronology, brings together some fifty paintings from the National Museum of Modern Art collection and is organised in nine sequences. By turns, they highlight key artistic characteristics, such as formlessness, worldly imagination, constructive gestuality – or, conversely, gestuality inspired by calligraphy –, a certain persistence of landscape, the desire to create a language of signs or a recourse to the grid motif inherited from Cubism, finishing with the temptation of monochrome experienced by some artists.

This original exhibition, which is an opportunity to rediscover many of the Centre Pompidou’s little-shown works, is a real first in Martinique.