Jean Michel Atlan

JEAN-MICHEL ATLAN (Constantine, Algeria, 1913 - 1960).
Composition.
Tempera on paper.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 23 x 19 cm; 57 x 53 cm (frame).

Without dissociating from the abstraction, Jean-Michel Atlan developed a gestural painting of which the work on paper that we show offers a good example: thick lines and forms of biomorphic bias, alive and hallmarks colors, primitivism and spontaneous stroke. Atlan was a leading figure within avant-garde movements such as CoBrA, serving as an important personality in the European art world of the twentieth century. His work awakens deep feelings in those who observe it.

A self-taught painter, Jean Michel Atlan moved to Paris in 1930 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne University. It will be from the year 1940 when he becomes actively interested in aspects until then far from Western culture, such as the religions of the Far East, African magic and eroticism, elements that, as a whole, will become a source of inspiration for his work. A year later, in 1941, Atlán was arrested for being Jewish and for his political activism, being declared a socially disturbed person, even being confined in the Saint Anne Hospital (Paris), one of the reference hospitals of European psychiatry, whose walls enclose a good part of the history of French psychiatry. In 1944 he published his first volume of poetry and held his first pictorial exhibition at the Arc en Ciel Gallery. It will be between the years 1945 and 1960 when he works more actively in Paris, being this the stage that corresponds to the work that we present. Jean Michel Atlan belonged to the School of Paris, this being the name given to a heterodox group of artists - both French and national - who worked in the French capital in the interwar period (1915-1940), a movement characterized by the linking of different artistic styles, such as post-impressionism, expressionism or surrealism. Passionate in the search of new horizons and after meeting the Danish artist Asger Jorn, Atlan is linked with the group CoBrA, a new artistic movement founded in Paris in 1948 and dissolved in 1951 as a result of the rivalries between Jorn himself and Christian Dotremont, which reacted against the rigidity of geometric abstraction, defending the spontaneity and the rejection of the theories until then pre-established, as well as advocated the artistic primitivism. Atlan's work, characterized by enchanting rhythms, by symbolic charges and by the enigmatic aura that surrounds them, has been the subject of exhibitions in France, the United States and Japan.