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Arman (1969)

Arman , actually Armand Pierre Fernandez (born November 17, 1928 in Nice , † October 22, 2005 in New York ) was a French-American object artist and co-founder of the Nouveau Réalisme . Encouraged by a misprint on the invitation cards for an exhibition in the Iris Clert gallery , in 1958 he adopted the artist name Arman (without the final "d"). Arman had been an American citizen since 1972 and lived in France and the United States .

life and work

Arman was the only child of his father Antonio, an antique dealer and son of a wealthy Spanish family from Algeria. He attended the "Lycée du Parc impérial" in Nice , where he graduated from school in 1946 with a Baccalauréat (focus on philosophy and mathematics). In the same year he studied at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Nice until 1949 .

In 1947 he met Yves Klein in a judo club . Like him, he dealt with Buddhism and the secret society of the Rosicrucians in 1947/53 , as well as with astrology and the teachings of Georges I. Gurdjieff . During a trip to Europe with Klein and Claude Pascal in 1947, he decided to become famous under his first name Armand. In 1949, with the aim of becoming an auctioneer , he began a two-year study of archeology and oriental art at the École du Louvre in Paris . At the same time he devoted himself to painting and created paintings influenced by Surrealism , but the meeting with the art critic Pierre Restany in 1951 would have a decisive influence on his further artistic career in the following years.

In 1952 Arman completed his military service in the Indochina War , married Eliane Radigue in 1953 , whom he had met two years earlier, and returned with her to Nice. With many interests, he dealt with both African art and the works of Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël , while the style of his paintings changed to abstraction . In 1954, the artist saw works by Jackson Pollock that influenced the composition of the picture, such as the application of the "all-over" principle. Finally, a visit to an exhibition with works by Kurt Schwitters in Heinz Berggruen's Parisian gallery inspired him to create his first cachets (1955) or stamp images . He showed these together with paintings in his first exhibition, which took place in 1956 in the Parisian Galerie du Haut-Pavé . This was followed by trips to Turkey and Afghanistan in 1957 and Iran in 1958 . In the same year he took the name Arman.

In 1959 Arman gave up painting - to which he was only to return to in 1988 - and experimented with his first allures d'objets (prints of colored objects on canvas and paper) and with the contents of garbage cans and paper baskets, from which the first Poubelles from 1959 mentioned works emerged. He called the accumulations of identical objects accumulations .

On October 23, 1960, the artist suddenly rose to fame with the scandal caused on the occasion of his exhibition "Le Plein" in the Iris Clert gallery. This event was preceded in 1958 by a no less sensational exhibition by Yves Klein entitled "Le Vide". He had cleared out the gallery, painted the walls white and illuminated the empty room with a bluish light. Arman responded to this in his 1960 exhibition by filling the gallery to the brim with rubbish.

A few days later, on October 27, 1960, in Yves Klein's Paris apartment, one of the most important events in Arman's career was the founding of the Les Nouveaux Réalistes movement by Pierre Restany . In addition to Arman and Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri , Jacques Villeglé , Raymond Hains , François Dufrêne , Martial Raysse and Jean Tinguely were involved in the founding . He made the acquaintance of the American artists Jasper Johns , Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers in Paris . In addition, through Klein's brother-in-law Günther Uecker , there were contacts to the Düsseldorf artist group ZERO .

In 1961 Arman realized the first colères (fits of anger), actions in which objects like violins or double basses were smashed. He made the acquaintance of Marcel Duchamp . In 1963 he expanded the concept of colères , starting with cutting up objects ( coupes ) and blowing them up with dynamite ( combustions ) and exhibiting the remains. Since 1964, the inclusions , cast in polyester accumulations, from 1970 "invisible", because objects cast in concrete. In 1966 the first accumulations of paint tubes in Plexiglas were made. Participation in the world exhibition in Montréal in 1967 with accumulations of auto parts.

In his Slicing campaign at the Reese Palley Gallery in New York in 1970, objects brought by visitors were cut up or sawed up by Arman and sold for the benefit of the Black Panther Defense Fund . In 1971 a series of organic poubelles in polyester was created. By casting in polyester, a pre-selection with regard to durability is no longer necessary, which was still necessary in the early Poubelles in Plexiglas. During the Happening Conscious Vandalism in New York's John Gibbson Gallery in 1975 , Arman smashed an American middle-class apartment that he and Corice had set up especially for this purpose. In the same year he made a trip to Egypt . In 1978 he realized large-scale sculptures in Dijon and Dearborn . The following year he went on a trip a. a. to archaeological sites in the People's Republic of China and stayed in Moscow .

Avalanch (1990), Tel Aviv University , Campus.

In 1982 the work Long Term Parking was inaugurated, an 18 meter high installation made of 1,600 tons of concrete with 59 enclosed cars in the park of Montcel in Jouy-en-Josas . In 1985 a set was created for Maurice Ravel's musical comedy L'heure espagnole , which was performed at the Comical Opera in Paris. In addition to other large-format projects in public space, Ascent of the Blues , a 12-meter-high double spiral made of pianos, guitars and banjos in Memphis , was created in 1987 .

Arman turned back to painting in 1988. A series of 13 paintings exhibited by the Beaubourg Gallery in Paris in the Center Georges Pompidou were used to illustrate Arthur Rimbaud's “Lettre du Voyant”. By attaching the brushes, the traces of which he traced across the canvases in broad, gestural swings, to the image carriers at the end of their paths, Arman combined principles of abstract expressionism with those of the Nouveaux Réalistes . In the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, Arman covered four walls of an 80 m² hall with paint and a total of 2,400 brushes in four days.

In 1991 Arman presented portraits of great composers from Johann Sebastian Bach to Béla Bartók , combining them from those musical instruments that were characteristic of the respective music of the composer being portrayed.

In 1995, the 32-meter-high Hope for Peace monument was built in Beirut from 83 tanks and military vehicles cast in concrete.

Armand Pierre Fernandez died in New York in 2005 at the age of 76. He is buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery . On his grave is a plaque with the laconic remark "Enfin Seul!" ( Finally alone! ) And his signature.

From 1953 to 1971 he was married to the French composer Eliane Radigue (* 1932), who gave him three children. The couple lived separately since 1970. After the divorce, Arman married Corice Canton in Nice in 1971. From this marriage two more children were born.

Awards

plant

Arman became known for his accumulation , in which he amassed groups of left unchanged or destroyed objects with the same function . Arman packed these collections in object boxes made of wood or Plexiglas, encased them with cast resin, mounted them on wooden panels, welded them together or even used concrete when he made large outdoor sculptures. He wanted to make it clear that objects with the same function are by no means identical from the outside, but rather have individual properties that only become visible when they are accumulated. One of his accumulations, “Inclusion Kart d'art” (2000) can be seen in the FLUXUS + museum (Potsdam) in the Fluxus permanent exhibition. In addition to various accumulations - u. a. "Les encrier" (1961), "Le bon caviar" (1962) - the Abteiberg Museum also contains other works by the artist using other techniques.

Arman deliberately used different terms for clusters of various objects. Arman collected personal items of a famous person in robot portraits , and he calls the contents of a waste paper basket filled in glass boxes around 1959/60 Poubelle . With them he ironically questioned the one-sided consumer character of mass products.

Selection of works

  • 1962: Chopin's Waterloo (186 × 300 × 48 cm), Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne , Center Georges Pompidou ; smashed parts of a piano attached to a wooden panel.
  • 1967: Torso with gloves (85 × 35 cm), Cologne, Museum Ludwig , glass sculpture of the upper body of a woman with cast-in gloves.
  • 1969: Portrait of Mike (Michael Sonnabend) , Ileana Sonnabend collection ; Plexiglass box with various objects as attributes of the art patron.
  • 1971/1974: Le cor de l'un, le cor de l'autre (90 × 60 × 12 cm), Paris, MNAM, Center Pompidou; cut hunting horns pressed into a frame filled with concrete.
  • 1980: Proud in Despite Of (48 × 140 × 25 cm), sawn cello on a bronze base.
  • 1981: Art label for the 1981 Mouton-Rothschild ; Template-like violin in its fragments multilayered on a gray background with a golden color.
  • 1982: Long Term Parking (19.50 × 6 × 6 m), Jouy en Josas, Cartier Foundation, Jean Hamon Collection; Accumulation: 59 cars parked in 1600 tons of concrete .
  • 1991: Traction avant, traction après . Bronze sculpture 157 × 553 × 386 cm, exhibited in 2013 in Bad Homburg, Blickachsen 9.
  • 1992: Les Gourmandes (height: 4.50 m), Roanne , in front of the Les Frères Troisgros restaurant run by the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros , 100 forks made of patina-coated bronze.
  • 1996: Design of a postage stamp for the French Post.

Exhibitions

Literature and film

  • Nouveau Réalisme. Revolution of the Everyday , Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2007; ISBN 978-3-7757-2058-8
  • Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Hrsg.): Insights. The 20th Century in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf , Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit 2000; ISBN 3-7757-0853-7
  • Dominique Rimbault (Director): Arman, Portrait d'un sculpteur. Film, 52 minutes, 1997, with the participation of Arman and Pierre Restany
  • Jean-Louis Ferrier and Yann le Pichon (eds.): L'Aventure de l'art au XXe siècle. Editions du Chêne, Paris 1990; ISBN 2-85108-677-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Arman
  2. ↑ Curriculum vitae on the Arman Foundation website ( memento of February 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on January 13, 2011

Web links

Commons : Arman  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Arman  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
personal data
SURNAME Poor in
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Armand Pierre Fernandez
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-American contract artist and co-founder of the Nouveau Réalisme
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 2005
Place of death new York