Nouveau Réalisme

About Nouveau Réalisme

On 27 October 1960, in Yves Klein's Paris apartment, the critic Pierre Restany and a handful of artists signed a brief declaration announcing new ways of perceiving the real. Instead of depicting the world, the Nouveaux Réalistes took hold of its fragments: the posters, scrap metal, rubbish and mass-produced goods of postwar Europe. Signatories included Arman, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé; César, Mimmo Rotella and Niki de Saint Phalle soon joined them.

Each had a signature procedure. Hains and Villeglé peeled torn layers of posters from Paris walls; Arman packed boxes with identical objects; César crushed cars into dense blocks; Spoerri glued the remains of meals to their tabletops and hung them upright. Klein pressed paint-covered models against paper in his Anthropometries (1960), while Saint Phalle fired a rifle at plaster reliefs hiding pockets of paint. The group had largely dispersed by 1963.