Art autre [Fr.: ‘other art’].

Term coined in a book published in 1952 by French writer and critic Michel Tapié to describe the kind of art many intellectuals and artists deemed appropriate to the turbulent mood of France immediately after World War II. He organized an exhibition entitled Un Art autre for the Studio Facchetti, in Paris, also in 1952. Inspired in part by the ideas of Kandinsky Vasily, by Existentialist philosophy and by the widespread admiration for alternative art forms (notably child art, psychotic art and ‘primitive’ non-Western art), Tapié advocated an art that worked through ‘paroxysm, magic, total ecstasy’, in which ‘form, transcended, is heavy with the possibilities of becoming’. He wrote of the need for ‘temperaments ready to break up everything, whose works were disturbing, stupefying, full of magic and violence to re-route the public. To re-route into a real future that mass of so-called advanced public, hardened like a sclerosis around a cubism finished long ago (but much prolonged), misplaced geometric abstraction, and a limited puritanism which above anything else blocks the way to any possible, authentically fertile future’. Although the term has been used more or less interchangeably with ART INFORMEL and TACHISM as embodied in the expressive and non-geometric abstract work of artists such as Mathieu Georges, Henri Michaux and Wols, it also embraced the more figurative concerns of artists such as Fautrier Jean, Brauner Victor  and Dubuffet Jean.