To mark the centenary of their births, the gallery brings together two friends—hence the title *That’s All for Now, Dear Friends*—and two artists with whom it has maintained close ties, François
Morellet and Jack Youngerman, both born in 1926.
Two influential artists, two painters, even though both also produced, through different means, sculptures—and, in Morellet’s case, installations—that have left a very significant mark on the history of
contemporary art, in a sort of back-and-forth between European and American art, serving as both eminent figures and witnesses to the shifts that
saw New York join Paris as epicenters of Western art.
Jack Youngerman, who had been living in Paris since 1949, met François Morellet in January 1952, just before a group exhibition in Nantes, which also featured the work of Ellsworth Kelly. It was the
Brazilian Almir Mavignier who facilitated the meeting with Morellet.
We are fortunate to be able to present a 1951 work titled *Machines d’hiver*, created in Paris by Youngerman at the age of 25, the very year the artist held his first exhibition in Paris
at the Galerie Arnaud; Jack Youngerman had just married Delphine Seyrig, whose father Henri, an archaeologist, would influence the early development of his work.
Morellet and Youngerman were then drawing on the precepts of Concrete Art, which it is worth recalling