Born in 1955 in England then relayed in the USA by Robert Rauschenberg, Pop Art is famous by its artistic language coming from the popular culture and by the spectacular of the consumer society in urban environment : publicity, cars, music, cinematography became the Andy Warhol's, Tom Wesselmann's, Claes Oldenburg's, James Rosenquist's, Roy Lichtenstein's, Jim Dine's, Robert Indiana's, George Segal's, John Chamberlain's favorite themes.
The French replica of the American Pop Art, the New Realism, is open between 1960 and 1963 by a heterogeneous group of artists, together with the art critic Pierre Restany, having the same spirit as Duchamp and sharing a new vision of the reality through the adventure of the object.
Beyond Yves Klein's metaphysical preoccupation we can notice Cesar's "Compressions", Arman's "Accumulations", Niki de Saint Phalle's "Shootings", Christo's "Packings", the “affichists” François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and the "Traps" of Daniel Spoerri, Martial Raysse's advertising displays and Jean Tiguely's technological resources.
Denying the Pop imagery (color, print) as well as the gesture of the abstract expressionism, the American artists will renew the pictorial and sculptural approach of the abstraction starting with 1962. From Morris Louis's and Ellsworth Kelly's minimalism (with a hard-edge painting) up to Frank Stella creating like Kenneth Noland a color-field painting on a shaped canvas, from Pollock's inheritance in Larry Poon's works or Jules Olitski's to Richard Serra's and Sol LeWitt's, Minimal Art seems to be addressed more to the spirit than to the senses.
In the same time with the American situation and close to B.M.P.T., the Meridional Collective of Support-Surfaces is created between 1969 and 1972 around the magazine "Peinture", the theoretical notebooks directed by Philippe Sollers and Marcelin Peynet. The marxist artists with their ideological and semiological dissensions, they all open a work on the "repression" in painting : the print in Claude Viallat's work ; soaking in Noël Dolla's. From the same category are : Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Vincent Bioulès and even Bernard Pagès, Jacques Martinez and Bernar Venet. Close to them, Nice's artists from the 70's group Raphael Monticelli, Marcel Alocco, Serge Maccaferri, Martin Miguel than Max Charvolen, Louis Chacallis and Vivien Isnard, they all have the same direction.
The magazine "Fluxus" is published in the United States in 1961 and in Europe in 1963. More than a group, Fluxus represents a nihilist humor close to a non art. Fluxus artists around dadaist music of John Cage, La Monte Young or Pierre Schaeffer are practicing the art of performance: Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik, Robert Filliou, Brecht and Beuys and also Pierre Pinoncelli and Serge III.
In the 80's there is an important return to figuration in the European painting : the Italian trans-avant-garde, the German new-fauvists and the French free-figuration in 1981. For the artists closed to Keith Haring is important to get back to the spontaneity of creation and the popular ideas coming from publicity, comics and punk & rock music. We can find Jean-Michel Alberola, Jean-Charles Blais, Robert Combas, Hervé di Rosa, François Boisrond and Rémi Blanchard.