The American art collector Larry Aldrich first used the term Lyrical Abstraction in 1969 to define the nature of various works he had recently collected that he felt signalled a return to personal expression and experimentation following Minimalism.
However the French art critic Jean José Marchand used a variation of the term, Abstraction Lyrique, decades earlier, in 1947, to reference an emerging European trend in painting similar to Abstract Expressionism in the US. Both uses of the term referred to art that was characterised by free, emotive, personal compositions unrelated to objective reality.
