ABSTRACT
The historical conditions pertaining after World War II allowed social and literary contexts for art practice in France radically different from increasingly dominant American paradigms. Memories of the Occupation, collaborationist guilt and, later, difficulties with decolonization in Algeria and then Vietnam all acted as contexts for a specific kind of cultural production. The parallel paths traced by Sartre, Genet and Giacometti typify the association of art practice with the literary and the philosophical which has characterized the French cultural scene since the war.
