Current Issue
After World War II, Paris continued to attract artists from the MENA region. The form of abstraction that was developing then in Paris, particularly in the artistic networks gravitating around the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, created in 1946, could, for certain aspects, echo living traditions that were familiar to them. The general historiography of gestural or lyrical abstraction and Art informel is rather silent about these artists and traditions. When analyzing the works of Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung or Jean Degottex, it rather refers to East Asian arts. The works of these artists from the MENA region—some of whom were trained in calligraphy—are most often studied in terms of the “cultural area” they originated from, be it Hurufiyya (“letterism” in Arabic), the production of the Turkish school in Paris, or the work of the Iranian Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. The contributions in this issue study the artistic context and the abstract art scene in Paris in the post-WWII period with new or revisited sources that allow to trace the presence of artists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the rediscovery of these artists who were essential contributors to global abstract art.
