Paris’s image as the cultural capital of the Western world lingered after its substance had fled. Looking back on the 1950s, Clement Greenberg told Al Held, “Paris was not the place to be at that time, but you young fellows created the Paris you thought was there.”

Americans cannot get enough of that fabricated Paris. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced their way through it to Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” suite in 1951. Underwritten by the relative affluence and confidence of postwar America, it was cultural theater staged in Left Bank settings. Expatriates examined their artistic identities in the Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, Café Mabillon, and points along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. English-language presses, periodicals, and bookstores flourished. Allen Ginsburg’s nostar “Beat Hotel” provided a backdrop to romances of negation and rebellion that lent an American accent to bovarysme.

Drancy, a transit camp to Auschwitz on the outskirts of Paris, had closed. The word collaboration was in disuse, and the myth of the French Resistance was as fashionable as Dior’s New Look.

This is the backlighting for “Americans in Paris: Abstract Painting in the Fifties,” a surprisingly satisfying exhibition that showcases the work of 11 postwar pilgrims to sites abandoned by the Lost Generation well before the fall of France in 1940. Men came on the GI Bill; the women, for love. What they produced had less to do with the Parisian art scene than with freedom from the pressures of the burgeoning New York art world.

Seymour Boardman, Norman Bluhm, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, Al Held, and Shirley Jaffe (accompanying her husband who was on the GI Bill) arrived between 1946 and 1950. Kimber Smith followed his wife, a correspondent for Life magazine, in 1954. Joan Mitchell decided in 1959 to stay in France with Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. Janice Biala, sister of painter Jack Tworkov, settled in France with her French-born husband in 1958. Beauford Delaney, an African American born in 1901, expatriated permanently in 1953.

Delaney’s luminous allover oil, “Untitled” (1958), sets the tone of the exhibition. Here is abstraction without rhetoric. Pure material color speaks for itself. A free, sensual lyricism prevails. Delaney’s surface is built of clotted cream overlaid with a restless golden wash. Light moves across the gentle peaks and interstices of the undercoat in a rhythmical feast. This single lovely work prompts interest in a gifted painter whose achievement has been obscured by having decamped to Paris while the art world’s center of gravity was shifting to New York.

Luminosity is the keynote of everything on view. Even Held’s darkling canvases, their centered gestural motifs woven into the brushwork of a viscous black background, are lit by the luster of the medium.

Most appealing in this exhibition, though, is the vigor of experimentation on display. Drip and pour techniques had not yet hardened into clichés. The cascade of thinned color down Bluhm’s “Green #1” looks as fresh as it did in 1954. Mr. Kelly, more interested in Romanesque art than modern painting, ignored Abstract Expressionist moves altogether. Almost every artist in this show is represented at a fertile, probing moment. Only Smith’s comparatively drab entries fall short of their company.

That sense of feeling one’s way is evident in the contrast between Ms. Jaffe’s two abstractions. The earliest is helter-skelter compared to one painted a few months later. In the second, wisely hung across the room rather than coupled, the rhythmical interplay of colors is more pronounced. They take on measure — cadence — crucial to composition. Brushwork, too, is more complex. A divided brush and optical blacks mixed from the palette create more confident transparencies and finer blendings.

Two horizontal works, an oil by Bluhm and a watercolor by Francis, are a radiant pairing. In Bluhm’s “Northern Light” (1959), unfettered bursts of yellow ignite veils of blue and violet. Skimmed laterally across the colors is an incandescent flare of white. Opaque at its center and receding outward, it is beautifully evocative of a polar sky.

Francis dances a border of orange, yellow, and pale violet, accented by blackened purple, along the top and right side of blank paper. Fine threads of color flutter downward, linking white space to the border without actually filling it. The words drip and spatter are too crude for use here. It is as if pigment had been flecked from a butterfly’s wing.

Both paintings by Mitchell are vigorous examples of her loaded, curvilinear brushwork, broken color, and serendipitous splashes of dense complements. Between 1959 and 1960, the vitality of her signature approach was intact. She had not yet begun to imitate herself.

Mythopoetic ambitions dominated abstract painting in the 1950s. Yet all that is visible today is an ardent effort to sound the expressive depths of painting without external references or traditional devices of order and form. Looking at this work now, half a century past the exalted claims made for abstraction in its infancy, you recognize painting as an eminently earthen thing.

Until September 29 (724 Fifth Ave., between 56th and 57th streets, 212-262-5050). Note: Gallery closed August 18 to September 3.