Charles Estienne

Charles Estienne (1908–1966) was a French art critic and writer active in the postwar Paris art scene. He was considered one of the most influential critics of the period, alongside Michel Tapié. While both championed new aesthetic directions, Estienne drew more strongly on the traditions of painting and on modern movements such as Surrealism, which he understood as a means of reclaiming a fundamental and neglected form of human revolt.

Estienne viewed poetry and art as part of a single mode of expression operating prior to explanation or narration. Through his criticism and exhibition texts, he supported new developments in abstract painting and participated in debates surrounding the direction of modern art in France during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

He met Ellsworth Kelly around 1950 and soon became familiar with, and supportive of, his work. Estienne reviewed the exhibition at Galerie Arnaud in which Kelly participated and also wrote for Derrière le miroir, the art magazine founded by Aimé Maeght in 1946. In his essay accompanying the Tendance exhibition at Galerie Maeght in 1951—where Kelly also exhibited—Estienne described him as a “new philistine,” using the term to characterise a tendency among several artists to set aside expressive lyricism in favour of object and form.