Jean Messagier was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker and poet. He had his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Arc-en-Ciel in 1947. From 1945 to 1949 he worked under the influence of Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Paul Klee and François Desnoyer, his professor at École nationale supérieure des arts decoratifs in Paris. In 1952, his work was exhibited at the Galerie de Babylone, at the exhibition ‘La Nouvelle École de Paris’ (The New School of Paris). The following year, he broke away from his expressionistic form of Post-Cubism. He himself had never accepted any labels and refused the distinction between abstraction and figuration, but is often associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Art Informel. From 1962 until the year of his death in 1999, he exhibited in France and abroad, taking part in major international events as a representative of new trends in French painting.
