However, this stay in Goethe's homeland came to an abrupt end in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. One of their first cultural measures was to order the closure of avant-garde artistic establishments, which were then considered to be centers of "degenerate art". Back in France, it was not until 1943 that he decided to devote himself fully to painting, following a brief experience as a draughtsman in the field of advertising and then a long period of captivity on the other side of the Rhine during the Second World War.
Although the artist's first works are still linked to the aesthetic of the purist realism of the 1930s, the drawings and paintings produced from 1947 onwards testify to a desire to make an early break with the constraints of figuration. This brutal turning point, experienced as an imperative necessity, ushered in a long creative period during which hundreds of canvases with subtle chromaticism followed one another for nearly 50 years, freed from any reference to a real or imaginary object, bearing witness to a particular sensitivity to color and movement.
Close to the young generation embodied by Camille Bryen, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Michel Seuphor and Alfred Wols, Jacques Germain presented his first works in 1948, at the White and Black exhibition organized by the Galerie des Deux-Iles in Paris. This first contribution was followed by regular participation in numerous exhibitions dedicated to non-figurative art (Salon des Surindépendants, Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Salon de Mai, Salon Comparaison) as well as the organization of several solo exhibitions in France and abroad (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland).
Like many young French artists, his works were then linked to the current of lyrical abstraction, a term first used by the art critic Jean José Marchand and the painter Georges Mathieu in December 1947, to designate a current of abstract art that now favors the expression of gesture and personal effusion. Contrary to geometric abstraction and constructivism, whose repertoire of shapes drawn with a compass and ruler encloses color within a strict framework, Jacques Germain frees color to become the organizing and structuring element of the painting. This one is then conceived as a whole, a burst of colors, where the painted surfaces (rectangles, squares, trapezoids, rhombuses), applied by superimposition with the knife, are animated by a general movement which leads the glance in multiple and often opposite directions.
No one other than the art critic Dora Vallier will be able to better summarize the eruptive character of these paintings which, despite their break with the world of geometry, are nonetheless dominated by highly structured compositions, far from the audacity of tachism and informal art: "Projected within thought and supported by it, the gaze is not slow to detect in this painting, agitated from top to bottom, a particular conception of form: a form that is only determined in the general movement, which has its unity only in the tension of the whole, while the elements that compose it all remain indeterminate, engulfed in each other, indivisible. There is no longer this or that color, there is a passage of colors in prism under the knife. There is no longer a line or a stain, but a direction given from afar to the painted mass - many directions that follow one another or break and collide, cross the painting, which thus becomes a brief moment of a very vast reality close to us, almost in secret, as if to reveal its elusive substance" (Jacques Germain. Paris, s.n, 1961. Exhibition December 1961 Galerie Kriegel).

Source : Cnap

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