Lyrical Abstraction arose in Paris after the Second World War as a reaction against the excessive coldness of Geometric Abstraction. A painter, Georges Mathieu, and an Art critic, Pierre Restany, were able to sweep along an entire generation of artists who recovered warmth through automatism and the exaltation of emotional values.

Kandinsky and Paul Klee’s experiments, together with the influence of surrealist painters, became the basis of this recovery and the simplification of forms with a natural origin to again strengthen the subjectivity of the plastic creator. Action Painting that was so successful in the United States also inspired this new European movement.

The artists who embraced Lyric Abstraction expressed their emotions with an enormous diversity of styles. Among the most representative, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Otto Wols, Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung, as well as Mathieu, the master. The technique most widely used by most of them was watercolor, which provided immediacy, although they also worked with oils in some of their most committed works. In all cases, color always predominates over form.