PARIS

Following the liberation of Paris from German occupation in August 1944, the city’s population swelled from wartime lows of approximately 800,000 to its prewar population of 2.7 million. Despite an optimistic postwar atmosphere, French cultural figures struggled with the question of how to reassert Paris’s role as the cultural center of the Western world. All agreed that the visual arts were vital to France’s reconstruction, but artists and art critics held differing opinions about the form France’s postwar art should take. These ranged from Social Realism to an aesthetic grounded in France’s medieval past, and from lyrical and tactile abstraction to a more aggressive geometry.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Paris once again became a destination for artists from other parts of the world, including South America. A number of South American artists gravitated toward geometric abstraction and later Kinetic art, in which physical movement was incorporated into the artwork. Kinetic art provided distance from contemporary political debates and offered war-weary viewers a participatory artistic experience that was both novel and entertaining.