Jacques Germain is an internationally acclaimed abstract painter of the post-war School of Paris. As a young art student he had the privilege to work with Léger at the Académie Moderne (1931) and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus (from 1932 onwards). It wasn't until after WWII though that Germain first exhibited his work, at the Salon des Surindépendants of 1947. After a short initial figurative period, he soon began to explore abstraction, which seemed natural to him, geometric at first, before decamping to the Abstraction Lyrique group with Mathieu, Bryen, Riopelle, and Lanskoy, which formed the European equivalent to the American Abstract Expressionists. Here he enjoyed the freedom to paint with heightened gestural expression and developed the powerful resonant style magnificently with which he achieved international success. Germain's contribution to the continuing re-interpretation of painting established him amongst the leading post-war painters:

Perhaps the most lucid account of what motivated Germain's conception of art was published by the famous writer and critic Roger van Gindertaël:

"The poetry of Germain is dominated even in its smallest details, and above all through the steadfastness of his personal expression, by an interior movement in tune with the great rhythm of nature, not visually remarked and translated in a picturesque way, but intuitively perceived and manifested by a participating pictorial act. Germain's œuvre is among those, very rare still, in which the conceptualism of abstract art as well as the conventions of figurative art are overrun to find once more, in an uncontrived way, the profound meaning of nature" (R. van Gindertaël in Les Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1959).