GÉRARD SCHNEIDER

Swiss born, Gérard Schneider (1896-1986) enrolled in the École nationale des arts décoratifs and the École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris before settling permanently in France. Throughout the mid-1930s, Gérard Schneider incorporated into his work Kandinsky’s revolutionary abstraction while writing poems and exploring the new horizons opened by Surrealism. In the excitement of the immediate post-war period, Gérard Schneider’s painting plays a key role in the rise of a new and radical form of art: Lyrical Abstraction. His gesture is raw and vibrant, physical and unrestrained. Deeply inspired by music, his brushstrokes reflect his intention to translate pure emotion into painting. Gérard Schneider befriended George Mathieu, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, whose work also took an international dimension. Starting from the mid-1940s, major exhibitions featuring the main figures of lyrical abstraction take place in Paris, in Germany and then in the United States, especially on the occasion of the major travelling exhibition ‘Advancing French Art’ which travelled all over the country—notably to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philipps Collection in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, after which Samuel Kootz Gallery represented him in New York. During the 1950s-1960s, Gérard Schneider exhibited across several continents where he would be invited for major institutional retrospectives and Biennials. Gérard Schneider kept painting until his death in 1986, at the age of 90.