Natalia Dumitresco was a French-Rumanian abstract painter. She is linked with the Réalités Nouvelles art movement that evolved in the School of Paris circle after the end of World War II. Dumitresco's style of painting followed closely this movement which was influenced by the art of Wassily Kandinsky and Alberto Magnelli. Other artists who were associated with this group of painters were Serge Poliakoff and Alexandre Ishrati. Dumitresco later married Ishrati.
Beginning in 1952 Dumitresco won many prestigious awards, including one from the group Espace in 1952. She was also the recipient of the 1955 Kandinsky Award and in 1957 Le Prix des Amateurs et Collectionneurs d'Art, as well as the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh in 1959.
Yellow and Green Composition is a striking and lyrical example of Natalia Dumitresco’s mature abstract style, rendered here on an intimate scale. The work pulses with movement, built from an interlocking rhythm of vertical and diagonal elements in bold yellow and green, anchored by darker tones and softened by airy whites. The surface is animated by broken brushstrokes and layered color, characteristic of her dynamic approach to structure and space.
Though Dumitresco began her career in black and white, she gradually embraced color, often in measured tones of red, blue, gray, and white. This composition, with its confident palette and balanced construction, demonstrates her shift toward a more expressive visual language. The sense of vitality and motion in the painting reflects her enduring interest in the rhythms of nature, translated through an abstract lens.
Works from the early 1950s are considered the pinnacle of Dumitresco’s career, a period when she developed her most sophisticated and resonant compositions. Paintings from this time are the most sought after by collectors and institutions, particularly as the broader school of postwar European abstraction gains renewed scholarly and market attention. This movement, long undervalued, is now being reconsidered as a rich parallel to American Abstract Expressionism, offering a quieter, more measured yet equally powerful vision of abstraction.