Post war art, defines a time period in art history and simultaneously introduces contemporary art. Though necessarily broad, in general this group of artists attempted to re-establish identity and cope with the trauma of the war, the onset of the Cold War, and the shift in the art world center from New York to Paris.
Post war Europe found its artists, both established and those making their first appearances in the art world, changed and challenged. They questioned beauty and aesthetics, but also the very role of the artist and the impact of artistic creation. With a world divided in two and the artistic center wavering between Paris and New York, this era could not fail to give rise to artists of unimaginable creativity.  
The art of this period seems to be more self-referential than ever, with artists challenging even the traditional materials of creation. The need for self-expression overflows from the incoherence of artists who are not afraid to push their bodies to extremes in order to be understood. As many painters turned their backs on their formal artistic training, their work demonstrated both an urge to rebel against convention and a desire to tap into what was seen as the unfettered. The art of the period reflects the anguish of the artist’s mind and soul against the backdrop of a world going through hardship and change.
DUBUFFET
A pioneer, a painter, a writer, an inventor. Jean Dubuffet is himself the author of an unclassifiable work, made of assemblies and bricolages, full of wandering and accidents, of mixtures of genres, between real and imaginary. After the Second World War, this artist seems unwilling and unable to fit into any box. An artist naturally curious, he constantly tries to experiment with materials that no one had thought of before while never stopping to evolve his techniques. This is the case with this particular work. Dubuffet began to work on a canvas unrolled on the ground, on which he would come to brush, scratch, erode the oils, using all types of tools - rags, newspapers - in a direct and unambiguous relationship to the material. He then cut out the fragments he liked best in order to compose the final work on a new canvas. Le devetu is a striking example of this technique and it is therefore not surprising that this work was chosen to be part of the artist’s first major retrospective in the United States, at MoMa in New York in 1962.
HANS HARTUNG
Associated with the Art Informel and Taschist movements, Hartung was one of most significant post-war artists, renowned for his dramatic and innovative approach to abstraction. During six decades of production, the artist never ceased to use technical innovations and to intensify his gesture, scratching, incising or covering the surface of his paintings with graphic signs. Concerned with the translation of the inexpressible onto canvas, Hartung’s emotional abstractions eliminated all figurative elements, pursuing such freedom of gesture and spatial dynamism with a litany of non-traditional tools, including spray guns, brooms and branches from the olive trees that grew in the grounds of his home and studio in the South of France. Our work, P1973-A53, is a perfect example of his signature spontaneous gesture and instant emotion and his sensitivity between aesthetics and mathematics, as evidenced by the title, composed of numbers and letters.
DIEGO GIACOMETTI
In the Giacometti family, he was considered as the little brother, in the post-war art scene of Paris he is considered one of the most important artists in decorative arts. The word is for Diego Giacometti, who became particularly well-known for his fantastical sculptures of animals. While his brother’s fame explodes, Diego creates his first animal sculptures. Under his fingers, he creates a naïve, poetic and funny bestiary which is characterized by pureness and delicacy. His furniture have adorned the salons of the avant garde of Paris for decades but one of his more whimsical creations incorporated a real ostrich egg shell into the bronze sculpture of an ostrich. Diego Giacometti’s sculptural depiction of an ostrich is representative of his Primitive-inspired work portraying wild animals with bronze. Featuring a real ostrich egg, the sculpture is braced with wings that support the egg even while the bird balances on only a few toes. This work is the epitome of elegance, the graceful refined form of the exotic bird literally standing on its tiptoes, while at the same time the real egg, a symbolism perhaps of life and birth, gives vitality and originality to the work.
GEORGES MATHIEU
Georges Mathieu is often considered the father of the movement that characterized the post-war period in France. Across Europe and the United States, Georges Mathieu played a decisive role within abstraction during the movement’s burgeoning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He departed from the geometrical abstractions that had dominated the previous era and aimed for uninhibited creative expression. He termed this newfound aesthetic “lyrical abstraction”. He published several manifestos outlining the beliefs of lyrical abstraction important in the creation of paintings: priority to the primacy of speed, refusal of references and ecstatic state of mind. Mathieu’s works are characterized by a calligraphic quality of line, which he achieved by using long brushes and applying paint directly from tubes onto the canvas. In our work, Mouvements ivres, the immediacy and rapid execution of these certainly ivres (drunk) lines and forms testify the freedom with which he defined his work.
CHU TEH-CHUN
Situated at the confluence of two cultures often considered antagonistic, Chu Teh Chun’s work is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful testimonies of lyrical abstraction. His asiatic origins and education and his choice to live in the west, will make him an inclassable artist. Inspired by Chinese calligraphy, classical music and opera, he painted works that permit the viewer to dream, through an explosion of colors. In his works, red, the color of luck in Asia, evolves with the broad brushstrokes clearly visible on the canvas, inherited from the lyrical abstraction that was introduced in France in the 1950s. In A bon port the artist, with a gesture that is both precise and fluid, creates a work dominated by flamboyant tones of reds, oranges and ochres contrasted by shades of blue and deep greens marking an opening in the background. The pigment-laden black frames the composition with an explosive burst of color.  
These artists expressed the chaos that existed in their minds after the terror of war, overflowing with energy, creativity, and the vision of a world free of convetion and criticism. This was a generation of artists who were fermented by the giants of early-century art, and at the same time led and inspired the artists who marked and changed the course of art in the second half of the century, and Helene Bailly Gallery pays a tribute to those pioneers of art with its new exhibition (title)