Jean-Michel Atlan, born in Constantine, Algeria in 1913.

He continued his philosophy studies in France, at the Sorbonne, and was preparing for a career in teaching before the Second World War disrupted his life. A Jew and a member of the Resistance, he was arrested in 1942 and interned at Sainte-Anne Hospital, where he truly began to paint and write poetry. This episode marked the birth of a body of work imbued with the tension between the violence of the world and the power of symbolism.

After the Liberation, Atlan quickly established himself on the Parisian art scene.

Although close to the lyrical abstraction movement, he nevertheless rejects any strict affiliation and forges a personal language, made up of signs, totems and organic rhythms.

His heavily impastoed canvases, traversed by ardent colours and primitive forms, convey a spiritual quest and an intense vital energy. Exhibited from 1944 at the Librairie de l'Arc-en-ciel and then in 1946 at the Galerie Denise René, he participated in numerous international exhibitions, becoming a singular and respected figure of the post-war avant-garde.

Jean-Michel Atlan died prematurely in Paris in 1960.

His work, at the crossroads of instinct and thought, remains that of a painter-poet seeking, through gesture and matter, to restore the lost unity of the world.