// BETWEEN THE WARS

The museum’s modern art collections also provide an overview of the abstract art movement, from the 1920s to the Second World War.

The emergence of abstract art is observed through the works of Fernand Léger, Victor Brauner and Willi Baumeister. Still Life in Blue and Red (1938) belongs to Léger’s “mechanical period”, which reflected his infatuation with the machine and modern technology. At this time, his work was nourished by a fascination with the cold beauty of mechanical elements when assembled and an acceptance of the increasing geometrisation of modern life.

In the 1920s, Baumeister shared a predilection for mechanical compositions with several of his contemporaries, notably Léger and Oskar Schlemmer. His Green Figure (1926–27), in which the human body is reduced to a virtually geometric structure, is emblematic of the direction taken by this German painter in the aftermath of the First World War. Subsequently, Baumeister moved away from highly structured compositions and adopted a formless style intimating symbols of the archaic.

Also in the 1920s, the painters of the German New Objectivity movement (Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz), some of whom had experienced first-hand the trauma of the First World War, explored the cultural and social reality of the Weimar Republic. They tended to reject the cubism and expressionism of the pre-war years in favour of different vision of the world, expressed in particular through the pitiless caricature of human relationships.

The works of Alfred Manessier, Jean Bazaine, Gustave Singier, Maurice Estève and Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva evoke the richness of abstract landscape painting, retaining a fully modern focus while laying claim to influences such as cubism, George Braque and Roman art.

During the Second World War, these artists were responsible for creating a new form of abstraction, greatly inspired by the work of Roger Bissière and Charles Lapicque, that was broadly rooted in the observation of reality which they then depicted in stylised fashion, privileging forms and colours without neglecting structure.