Born in 1904, Georges Breuil attended the Ecole régionale des Beaux-Arts in Rouen. After five years of captivity in Germany during the Second World War, he turned to abstraction, encouraged by his friends Georges Braque and Jacques Villon, and exhibited for the first time at the Colette Allendy gallery in Paris in 1953. He also wrote an essay, Sublimation de l'art abstrait, published in 1965.

"What path should the abstract artist follow today? He must express human communion with the cosmos; his symbolic language must enable man to break through the envelope of the known and access this deeper knowledge of nature or reality. By means of forms, harmonies, and rhythms—in other words, what in science we call the discontinuous, the only...