Art Informel

Art informel is the umbrella name for the gestural, material-led abstraction that dominated European art after 1945. Coined by the French critic Michel Tapié in 1950 and grouped abroad under names like tachisme and art autre, it rejected geometric abstraction's rationalism in favor of the direct physical act: paint dripped, smeared, thickened, or mixed with tar, sacking, and ash. Where American Abstract Expressionism worked big and mythic, informel artists - Fautrier, Wols, Dubuffet, Burri, Michaux - built small, encrusted, damaged surfaces that read as traces of the war years and the body. It was less a movement than a shared climate: a conviction that matter and gesture could carry meaning that premeditated form could not.

Defining characteristics

• Thick, tactile impasto built up, scraped, and scarred
• Matter painting: tar, sand, burlap, ash, and other non-art materials fused into the surface
• Spontaneous gesture: drips, smears, and stains left uncorrected
• Small, dense formats with encrusted, wounded-looking surfaces
• No recognizable subject; the material event itself is the image

Key figures

• Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) — His Otages series (1943-44) made matter painting a language for wartime trauma
• Wols (1913-1951) — Delicate etchings and small oil paintings among the earliest informel works
• Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) — Coarse matter paintings of the mid-1940s and champion of raw material
• Alberto Burri (1915-1995) — Sewn burlap sacchi that made damaged material the subject
• Henri Michaux (1899-1984) — Ink and oil abstractions recording the body's involuntary movement

Example works

• Otages (Hostages) — Jean Fautrier (1943-1944)
• Sacchi (Sacks) series — Alberto Burri (from 1950)

Sources

• Art Informel - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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