Christiaan Karel Appel (pronounced [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈkaːrəl ˈɑpəl] ; 25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Georges Mathieu (27 January 1921 – 10 June 2012) was a French abstract painter, art theorist, and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He is considered one of the fathers of European lyrical abstraction, a trend of informalism.
Pierre Jean Louis Germain Soulages (French: [sulaʒ]; 24 December 1919 – 25 October 2022) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, President François Hollande of France described him as "the world's greatest living artist." His works are held by leading museums of the world, and there is a museum dedicated to his art in his hometown of Rodez.
Soulages is known as "the painter of black", owing to his interest in the colour "both as a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens a mental field all its own." He saw light as a work material; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to reflect light, allowing the black to come out of darkness and into brightness, thus becoming a luminous colour.Soulages produced 104 stained-glass windows for the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques from 1987 to 1994. He received international awards, and the Louvre in Paris held a retrospective of his works on the occasion of his centenary.
Fernand Berckelaers (10 March 1901, in Borgerhout – 12 February 1999, in Paris), pseudonym Michel Seuphor (anagram of Orpheus), was a Belgian painter.Seuphor established a literary magazine, Het Overzicht, in Antwerp in 1921. He moved in Dutch, Belgian, and French avant-garde circles. He associated at various points with Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, and was influenced by their iconic Neo-plasticist works. Along with Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Pierre Daura, Seuphor founded the abstract artists' group Cercle et Carré which included Wassily Kandinsky and Le Corbusier.In 1934, Seuphor moved to Anduze in the South of France following his marriage.Seuphor wrote and edited three books; A Dictionary of Abstract Painting (Tudor Publishing Co., 1958), Abstract Painting: 50 Years of Accomplishment (Dell Laurel Edition, 1964), and "The Sculpture of this Century" (George Braziller, Inc. NY, 1960). These volumes, now out of print, remain among the most valuable documents of abstract painting & sculpture in the 20th century. The painting books have numerous color illustrations which document the various paths that abstract painting took, especially after World War II. The sculpture book has black & white photos that track both figurative as well as abstract sculpture from early 20th century through 1959. Also contains a short bio in the back of the book on each sculptor mentioned.
Seuphor also assisted with the Tudor companion volume of his Dictionary of Abstract Painting, the Dictionary of Modern Painting, which documents all the various schools of painting in the 20th century, including both abstract and realist painting.
He had also an own contemporary art collection with works of Marcelle Cahn, Adam Jankowski, Jean Piaubert, Jean Gorin, Jean Miotte, Aurélie Nemours and Victor Vasarely.