Lyrical abstraction is a movement that arises within abstract painting and is usually taken as a reference when pointing out the origin of abstract painting. It is a descriptive term that characterizes a type of abstract painting related to abstract expressionism; in use since the 1940s. The original common usage refers to the trend attributed to paintings in Europe during the period after 1945 and as a way of describing various artists (mainly in France) with painters such as Gérard Schneider, Wols, Georges Mathieu or Hans Hartung, etc. his works were related to the characteristics of contemporary American abstract expressionism.
At that time (late 1940s), Paul Jenkins, Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, Jules Olitski, Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, and many other American artists were also living and working in Paris and other European cities. With the exception of Kelly, all these artists developed their versions of pictorial abstraction sometimes been characterized as lyrical abstraction, taquismo, field of colored, nuagisme and abstract expressionism.
The art movement "Abstraction lyrique" was born in Paris after the war. At that time, artistic life in Paris, which had been devastated by the Occupation and Collaboration, resumed with numerous artists exhibited again as early as the Liberation of Paris in mid-1944. According to the new forms of abstraction that characterized some artists, the movement was named by the art critic, Jean José Marchand, and the painter, Georges Mathieu, in 1947. Some art critics also saw this movement as an attempt to restore the image of artistic Paris, which had maintained the rankcapital of the arts until the war. Lyrical abstraction also represented a competition between the School of Paris and the new painting of the School of Abstract Expressionism in New York, represented especially since 1946 by Jackson Pollock, then Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko, which were also promoted by the American authorities since the early fifties..
Finally, in the late 1960s (partially in response to minimalist art and the dogmatic interpretations of some, the formalism of Greenberg and Juddian), many painters reintroduced pictorial options in their works and the Whitney Museum and various other museums and institutions over time they formally named and identified movement and the uncompromising return to pictorial abstraction as 'lyrical abstraction'.
