Affichists

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The Affichisten (French: affiche = poster ) were a small group of artists who mainly operated on the streets of Paris from the late 1940s to the 1960s . The term affichist is derived from the French word affiche , since posters formed the basis of the work of the affichists. The word Affichist means something like poster artist or poster tear-off . The Affichist movement began as a countercurrent to the Informel styles that emerged in the post-war European years .

The affichists, which include the French Jacques Villeglé , Raymond Hains , Francois Dufrêne and later also the Italian Mimmo Rotella , are nowadays often perceived as a smaller group of the Nouveau Réalisme artistic movement , the establishment of which can be traced back to 1960. The Affichists, who were already active around 1949, were decisive for a new understanding of reality that shaped their work as well as that of the Nouveaux Réalistes, and can thus be seen as pioneers for the new thinking of the Nouveau Réalisme.

Poster artists Hains and Villeglé were grotesquely inspired for street art by the informal artist Camille Bryen . Bryen chose the surface structure of the public streets for his frottage Objet de la rue from 1936, which was very unusual at the time and distinguished itself from the conventional surrealist frottage. Bren's poems initially served as inspiration for Hains and Villeglé's linguistic and photographic experiments, which are influenced by Lettrism , but through the use of a technical aid, namely fluted glasses, with which the texts are visually distorted or alienated by the Affichists differ from each other.

Villeglé and Hains were among the Lettrists, who form a group of Parisian artists who dealt with experimental poetry, sound poems and visual letter deformation. Thus, torn posters, the so-called décollages , were very popular with the two Affichists since 1949. As a post-war artist movement dominated by the presence of the war and its devastating consequences, the Affichists intended to express reality, with all its distortion and devastation, in their art. They found their means of expression in the anonymously torn posters on the streets, which embodied the distorted reality, as well as in experiments with language, photography and film. With these techniques, which are fundamentally different from the craft of the informal artists, they wanted to capture reality themselves instead of depicting it and thus overcome the boundary between art and life.

literature

  • Nouveau Réalisme . Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Publishing House for Modern Art Nuremberg, 2005. ISBN 3-938821-08-6 .
  • Big city poetry. The Affichists . Bernard Blistène, Fritz Emslander, Esther Schlicht, Didier Semin, Dominique Stella. Snoeck Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-9523990-8-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Poetry of the Big City. The Affichists. Exhibition catalog of the Museum Tinguely Basel from October 22, 2014 to January 11, 2015 and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt from February 5 to May 25, 2015. Esther Schlicht, Roland Wetzel, Max Hollein (eds.), Cologne 2014, p. 7 f .
  2. ↑ DIETER SCHWARZ: Short outline of the history of affichistes. In: 1960, les Nouveaux Réalistes Vol. 1, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Buderer, among others. Mannheim 1986, pp. 34-37, here p. 34.
  3. ↑ Ibid., P. 34.
  4. ↑ ROBERT FLECK: Raymond Hains. In: Raymond Hains. Akzente 1949–1995, ed. by Nicolas Bourriad, among others. Klagenfurt 1995, p. 52-62, here p. 56 f.
  5. ↑ PETER SAGER: New forms of realism. Art between illusion and reality. Cologne 1973, p. 38.