With the public acceptance of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and then the rise of minimalism, Pop Art and the other innovative developments of the 1960s, it became obvious that the center of the contemporary art world had shifted from Paris to New York. American art had triumphed. As many commentators observed, this was a new, entirely unexpected development. Pablo Picasso continued to paint, and there were still a number of ambitious artists working in France—Simon Hantaï and Pierre Soulages, to name two. But it was simply no longer the case that the center of the art world was in Paris, as had been true in the early twentieth century.