Oscar Gauthier was a prominent member of the Abstraction Lyrique group which was the European equivalent to the American Abstract Expressionists, and the present work is a major early example of this revolutionary movement. After the second world war there was a powerful Western urge to celebrate the superiority of liberal society through it’s openness to free thought.

 

This sentiment lead to the passionate expression of unconventional creativity and this manifested itself in visual art in the enthusiastic embracement of abstraction. This took a variety of forms of which the most famous is the approach of the Abstract Expressionist and Abstraction Lyrique artists whose highly gestural approach was acclaimed as the ultimate expression of the individual, the uninhibited self. At once dynamic and spontaneous whilst also poetic and meditative.