In 1955 a polychrome and affordable collection of writers' biographies was created, allowing a large and young audience to easily access contemporary art, especially abstract art. This is hardly a given in the context of post-war, where the return to classical French aesthetics clashes with Socialist Realism. This study of ‘The Pocket Museum’ (1955–1965), shows how the collection fits into art writing, between art criticism and poetic writing, and how it enables the reader to discover abstract works. An ideal place for mediation and transmission, the collection, as an editorial strategy, helps to transform these new aesthetic creations into a national cultural heritage. Through a discursive analysis of ten books from the collection, three processes that have contributed to the promotion of abstract art are highlighted: the legitimacy of the author's discourse, whether he is an art critic, a poet, writer or journalist; the representation of the artist in question, whose difficult path is both stereotyped and singular, but always valorized; and finally, a series of analogies between abstract art and nature or comparisons with music, or else metaphorical expressions manifesting the ‘collapse of time’ where the universality of abstract art is part of the past, the present and the future.