Who was the artist Gérard Schneider?
Gérard Schneider was one of the pioneers of the Lyrical Abstraction movement alongside the artists Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. Schneider was a leading artist in this new, utterly free and gestural form of abstraction that emerged in post-war Paris.
Gérard Schneider was born in Sainte-Croix in Switzerland in 1896. At the age of 20, he moved to Paris to study at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, before attending the studio of Fernand Cormon École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1918. Cormon also taught Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. In 1922, Schneider settled permanently in Paris. During the 1920s and 1930s, the artist pursued a long period of training, studying different painting techniques and art history. He spent time with the painters Jean-Michel Atlan, André Lanskoy and Georges Mathieu, as well as his friends Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. Schneider’s work very quickly developed an international dimension. Just after the war, the galleries of Lydia Conti and Denise René organised major exhibitions bringing together the main members of the Lyrical Abstraction movement in Paris.
You can visit the painter Gérard Schneider’s dedicated page to discover a complete portrait of the artist.
