tachism

tachism

English

Alternative forms

• tachisme

Etymology

From French tachisme, from tache (“stain”).

Noun

tachism (uncountable)

1. A French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s.
   • 1992, Katia Sainson-Frank, Lisa Maguire (translators), Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-century France, University of California Press, page 146,

     This was particularly notable in early stages of impressionism—the 1866 Manet Affair for example—and later postimpressionism when tachism, pointillism, and cloisonism—as well as the term referring to the Italian impressionists, macchaioli—begin to create paintings where the surface overshadows the content (the sacrosanct subject of the work).

   • 1992, Rupert Riedl, Schrödinger’s Negentropy Concept and Biology, Johann Götschl (editor), Erwin Schrödinger’s World View: The Dynamics of Knowledge and Reality, Springer, page 63,

     This breakdown is virtually complete in Art Informel, in the turmoil of tachism, and in similar tendencies in modern painting. And, as in tachism, where composition is left to chance, it is no longer possible to decide, in parallel cases, what is involved: a redundancy-free, qualitatively highest level of order or the lowest level of order (chaos).

   • 2017, Alexander Alberro, Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art, University of Chicago Press, page 22,

     By 1950, however, Tachism’s lyrical abstraction and the tragic pathos of l'art informel had taken precedence in Europe, prompting Bill to pursue the propagation of Concrete art overseas.

Anagrams

• Machist, mastich