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The killing fields of the war (nearly one-tenth of the French adult male population had been killed or wounded) had made many see the absurdity of existence. This was also the period when the " Lost Generation" took hold: rich Americans enjoying the liberties of Prohibition-free France in the 1920s and poor G.I.'s going abroad for the first time. Paris was also, for African-Americans, amazingly free of the racial restrictions found in America ( James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker).
When Dada reached Paris, it was avidly embraced by a group of young artists and writers who were fascinated with the writings of Sigmund Freud, and particularly by the notion of the unconscious mind. The provocative spirit of dada became linked to the exploration of the unconscious mind through the use of automatic writing, chance operations and, in some cases, altered states. The surrealists quickly turned to painting and sculpture. The shock of unexpected elements, the use of frottage, collage and decalcomania, the rendering of mysterious landscapes and dreamscapes were to become the key techniques through the rest of the 1930s.
World War II ended the feast. Many surrealists (like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Breton and André Masson fled occupied France for New York and the States (Duchamp had already been in the U.S. since 1936), but the cohesion and vibrancy were lost in the American geometric city.Meanwhile a new generation of Americans were making art that finally owed nothing (or nearly so) to the old world.
The French art scene immediately after the war went roughly in two directions. There were those who continued in the artistic experiments, especially surrealism, from before the war, and there were those who took on the new Abstract Expressionism and action painting from New York and tried them in a French manner ( Tachism or L'Art informel ). Parallel to both of these tendencies, Jean Dubuffet dominated the early post-war years while exploring child-like drawings, graffiti and cartoons in a variety of media.
The late 1950s and early 1960s in France saw what might be considered " Pop Art" : Yves Klein had attractive nude women roll around in blue paint and throw themselves at canvases ; Victor Vasarely invented Op-Art by designing sophisticated optical patterns ; artists of the Fluxus movement like Ben Vautier incorporated graffiti and found objects into their work ; Niki de Saint-Phalle created bloated and vibrant plastic figures ; Arman gathered together found objects in boxed or resin-coated assemblages and César Baldaccini produced a series of large compressed object-scuptures (similar to Chamberlain's crushed automobiles).
In May 1968, the radical youth movement, through their attelier populaire, produced a great deal of poster-art protesting the moribund policies of president Charles de Gaulle.
Many contemporary artists continue to be haunted by the horrors of the war and the specter of the holocaust. Christian Boltanski's harrowing installations of the lost and the anonymous are particularly powerful.
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