Since impressionism had, at its extremities, given rise to the expressionists Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the postwar painter Jean-Michel Atlan said great art could only be made in the margins.

In early postwar Europe, abstraction and figuration were the embattled avant-gardes. Working at their intersection, Belgian Pierre Alechinsky acquired notoriety in the short-lived Paris-based avant-garde group of artists Cobra — an acronym of the home countries of its participants, Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. This eponymous exhibition is the artist's first Japan retrospective.

Cobra, which only lasted from 1948 to 1951, included Karel Appel, Christian Dotrement and Corneille Guillaume Beverloo, who all loathed communism's maligned social realism and opposed banal imitations of reality. They also rejected the abstract orthodoxy of geometrical forms reduced to formulaic decoration and held suspicions about American abstract expressionism.