French painter, born in Constantine. He left his native Algeria and moved to Paris in 1930, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1938, he was professor of philosophy at the Lycée de Laval, then, at the start of the 1939, at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He began to paint in 1941, before being arrested on June 9, 1942, for his involvement in the resistance and because he was Jewish. He is locked up in the prison of La Santé, where he escapes the extermination camps by simulating madness. Interned at Sainte-Anne Hospital, he came out at the Liberation. Among his relatives are: Jean Duvignaud (husband of Clara Malraux), Alain Robbe-Grillet and René de Obaldia. In 1944, he devoted himself entirely to painting and exhibited at the Salon des surindépendants in an expressionist style. That same year, in November, he published a collection of poems, The Deep Blood, which he illustrated, and in December 1944 presented an exhibition at the Arc-en-Ciel gallery in Paris. Atlan met Asger Jorn in 1946, then joined the CoBrA movement and approached abstraction. Maeght publishes the book Description d’un Combat by Franz Kafka, the black lithographs of which were produced by Atlan. In 1955, he exhibited at the Charpentier gallery in Paris. He suffered a haemorrhage in 1959 during an exhibition in London and died on February 12, 1960 of a devastating cancer, shortly before presenting his paintings in New York. Jean-Michel Atlan found his way in abstract painting after taking the path of expressionism. His compositions are often very close to African art in his choice of colors and shapes. The artist mainly uses oil paint. In 1980, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.