Artists & Works

STYLE: NOUVEAU RÉALISME

Born Armand Pierre Arman, Arman studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Nice during the forties. With Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and others, Arman issued a manifesto declaring the Nouveau Realisme movement in 1960. The manifesto called for “new approaches” to the depiction of the real, including the use of found objects, etc. Later, Arman explored ways of critiquing ABSTRACT-EXPRESSIONISM through devising mechanical, automatic ways of simulating spontaneous expression. These strategies included throwing inked stamp pads at a canvas to create an abstract painting. Arman is also known for his found object sculptures, in which familiar objects are taken apart and reassembled in a different form, suggesting new references and meanings. In 1990, he created a grotto out of twelve tons of discarded telephones for his French Riviera home. The grotto is titled “Reach Out.”

This untitled print from the HOMAGE TO PICASSO portfolio represents in graphic form Arman’s use of mechanical, arbitrary means to create an abstract artwork, thus deconstructing the idea of personal expression as it is defined by the Abstract-Expressionist movement.

Source for biographical information: Grove Dictionary of Art, MacMillan, 2000.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century (Prentice-Hall, 1991)
"An intimate of Yves Klein since the two met as teenagers studying at a judo academy in Nice, Arman (né Armand Fernandez) had been a conservative modernist until around 1955, when he appropriated from its environment a common rubber stamp and ink-printed it in an evenly distributed manner all over the flat support to create abstract...compositions called cachets...in 1959...Arman packed the contents of discarded baskets...into transparent containers, a clever stratagem for citing the complex interrelationship between objects and their consumers...Such poetics of waste, echoing those of Schwitters and Rauschenberg, assumed dramatic proportions in 1960 when Arman filled Iris Clert’s Paris gallery with thirty tons of random rubbish. ...Arman would seem to have been even more anti-art than his spiritual ancestor, Duchamp. Still, he professed 'no desire to renounce aestheticism.' On the contrary, the sheer technical brilliance with which Arman preserved waste and destruction generates a sense of haunting nostalgia for the bountiful goodness of human creativity and a vexing uncertainty about the prospects of its survival."