Untitled 

Michel Carrade made this untitled painting with broad, soft bands of acrylic paint. The effect of the colors merging into one another might be read as a reaction against the sharp-edged geometries of high modernism. Carrade was working in France, a country whose art institutions had been dominated for decades by American abstraction. In some respects, this painting is aligned with a modernist tendency towards pure, non-representational form. But the softening of boundaries that we see here could be understood as Carrade's subtle critique of the rigid structures of international abstraction. It suggests a more fluid relationship between individual expression and wider social forces. To know more, one might look to French art journals and exhibition catalogs from the period, paying attention to the ways that French artists were trying to define their own positions in relation to the dominant trends of the international art world. Ultimately, the meaning of art is always contingent on such contexts.