Musée du Niel’s summer exhibition 'L'Abstraction est une couleur' is currently presenting a focused group of American painters whose work the museum frames as part of the major American contribution to postwar Parisian art. In its August 2026 newsletter, the museum says the exhibition welcomes four American painters this year: Mark Tobey, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe and James Bishop.
The newsletter presents the display as a historical and artistic exploration rather than a single-artist survey. It links the four painters through abstraction while also underlining the different ways they arrived at it. Tobey, born in 1890 and died in 1976, is described as an innovator whose work marked the landscape of abstract art. Sam Francis, born in 1923 and died in 1994, is identified as a representative of abstract expressionism.
Francis receives the most detailed treatment in the museum’s text. The newsletter notes that he moved to Paris in 1949 and attended the Académie Fernand Léger, where he met Henri Matisse, Al Held, Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. It also says that after returning to the United States, his interest in light led him to explore dripping, a technique the newsletter explains as letting paint flow vertically after placing the work horizontally. The text connects that approach to action painting and adds that Francis’s meeting with Mark Rothko pushed him to explore color and the dissolution of figures further. The museum says two works on paper by Sam Francis are currently on view.
Shirley Jaffe, born in 1923 and died in 2016, is presented as a reference point for abstract painting at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The museum says her encounter with the cut-paper works of Matisse, shown at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 1961, had a profound influence on her. After beginning in abstract expressionism, she moved away from gestural painting toward structured compositions built from geometric forms in vivid, contrasting colors.
James Bishop, born in 1927 and died in 2021, is described as having been recognized early in France, where part of his career unfolded. The newsletter draws a distinction between Bishop and many American artists in Paris after the war, noting that many had been demobilized soldiers supported by the U.S. government’s G.I. Bill, whereas Bishop was too young to have taken part in the conflict and did not arrive in Europe until 1957, when many older compatriots were returning to the United States.
The museum uses the presentation to point to what it calls the important contribution of Americans to postwar Parisian art. It also cites Annie Cohen-Solal’s 'Un jour, ils auront des peintres', which the museum recommends in its bookshop. The newsletter says the book recounts a history running from 1867 to the Venice Biennale in 1948, where eight paintings by Jackson Pollock were shown in Europe for the first time. Alongside the exhibition, the museum also announces upcoming evening events in jazz on Sunday, 2 August, and in dance on Friday, 28 August, while 'L'Abstraction est une couleur' runs from 1 May to 1 November 2026.
