Gérard Schneider Swiss-French, 1896-1986

Gérard Schneider pursued his artistic education at the École nationale des arts décoratifs and the École nationale des beaux-arts de Paris before making France his permanent home. In the mid-1930s, Schneider embraced Kandinsky's revolutionary abstraction in his work, alongside writing poetry and delving into the realms of Surrealism. In the post-war period, particularly during the immediate post-war excitement, Schneider played a pivotal role in the emergence of Lyrical Abstraction. Influenced by music, his brushstrokes aimed to translate pure emotion onto the canvas. Establishing connections with artists like George Mathieu, Hans Hartung, and Pierre Soulages, Schneider's work gained international recognition. Following the announcement of Gérard Schneider's representation by Samuel Kootz in New York in 1955, who was already defending Pierre Soulages, the painter multiplied his international exhibitions and was honoured with important institutional retrospectives as well as several participations in the Venice and Sao Paulo Biennials. The calligraphic quality of his work also earned him widespread critical acclaim in Japan, where he was invited to exhibit regularly. After a career spanning almost seven decades, Gérard Schneider died in Paris at the age of 90.