César Baldaccini

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

César Baldaccini , called César , (born January 1, 1921 in Marseille , † December 6, 1998 in Paris ) was an internationally important French sculptor of the Nouveau Réalisme . While he is hardly known by his surname or only to the initiated, he is world famous as "César". He also created the César , the trophy for the French film awards.

“Le Pouce” (The Thumb) in the Ludwig Museum Koblenz

Life

César Baldaccini, the son of simple immigrants from Tuscany, born on January 1, 1921 in Marseille, attended the École des Beaux-Arts there and came to Paris in 1942. As a penniless student at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris , he worked in a traditional sculpture class, lived under Alberto Giacometti's studio , won prizes, and visited Constantin Brâncuși and Pablo Picasso . His career started out from solid craftsmanship and through academic teaching. On the way to becoming a star in the art scene, there were patriarchs of classical modernism .

Baldaccini died at the age of 77. His grave is on the Parisian Cimetière du Montparnasse .

Nouveaux Réalistes

In 1961, César joined the loose artists' association Nouveau Réalisme , which had been founded in Paris the year before. The art critic Pierre Restany saw the "New Realists" as a programmatic group under his intellectual direction. The 39-year-old César had already made a name for himself with his sculptures made of welded scrap iron at international exhibitions: 1956 at the Biennale di Venezia , 1957 at the Biennale of São Paulo and the Biennale in Carrara as well as in the Hanover Gallery in London, 1958 in Carnegie Institute Pittsburgh and at the world exhibition in Brussels, 1959 at the documenta II in Kassel (he was also represented at the documenta III 1964 and at the 4th documenta 1968) and at the Claude Bernard gallery in Paris, where the vernissage audience attended the Rue des Beaux Arts was congested. His reputation as a sophisticated clown grows in a geometric progression in relation to his artistic reputation. His southern temperament spurts out of every pore , wrote Pierre Restany about his role in the Parisian cultural ghetto of the late 1950s.

It was by pure coincidence that he came across the younger Nouveaux Réalistes with his compressions and signed their manifesto afterwards, as there was a common idea about the direct appropriation of reality. While the critics questioned the artistic status of the industrially pressed car wrecks, it was only through Restany that he became aware that the compressions fulfilled all the conditions of the "object" and that a progressive line from Duchamp's bicycle wheel of 1913 led to the hydraulically crushed cars of 1960, from ready-made to objet-plus as the ›most modern sculpture of the century‹ (Restany).

Self-assessment

I really didn't do it that way. Rather, I belonged to the family of the past, going back to Egypt and even further to the primitives, to everything that shows itself with the religious, where there is a transference, a fear, a presence. In every interview, César emphasized, albeit not without eloquence, that he was not an intellectual, but a craftsman, guided by his emotions and the “logic of the material”. I still can't say today whether compression, like the ready-made, is a limit gesture. - I am a sculptor in tradition. I am - as my mother said - Michelangelo or Rodin. I'm Duchamp or Man Ray at the same time.

Works

L'Homme de Figanieres (1964)

Assemblages ( assemblages ):

  • 1954: "Chauve-Souris"
  • 1954: "Vénus de Villetaneuse"
  • 1955: "La Grande Duchesse"
  • 1956: "Nu de Saint-Denis"
  • 1957: “Nu de la Belle-de-Mai”, in the exhibition A forest of sculptures - Simon Spierer Collection , Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt
  • 1983: “Hommage à Picasso”, Paris, Carrefour de la Croix Rouge

Compressions :

  • 1986: “Coque Vallelunga n ° 1”, Paris, Center Georges Pompidou , Musée national d'art moderne
  • 1995: "Compression bicyclette", Val de Marne, Fonds départemental d'art contemporain (FDAC)

Expansions

Empreintes (prints):

Others

  • 1967: “Dessin Inedit” (unpublished drawing), composition of nuts and nails for the Mouton Rothschild label from 1967

literature

  • César , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 12/1999 from March 15, 1999, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • César . Retrospective of the sculptures. / Overzichtstentoonstelling van Sculpturen. Redaction: RM Mason, M.-C. Beaud, E. Langui, et al. Exhibition catalog. Geneva, Musée d'art et d'histoire / Musée Rath 1976.
  • Ina Busch, Simon Spierer , Ina Boike, Lutz Fichtner, Valentina Anker, Ernst Wegener, Wolfgang Fuhrmannek: “A forest of sculptures. Simon Spierer Collection ”, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2005. Catalog for the exhibition in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt ISBN 3-7757-1609-2

Web links

Commons : César Baldaccini  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of César Baldaccini
  2. ↑ Harald Olbrich (Hg): Lexicon of Art. Volume I: A - Cim , EA Seemann: Leipzig 1987 (study edition 2004) ISBN 3-86502-084-4
  3. ^ Thomas Zacharias on César, in: Artists . Artist - Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art , ed. by Detlef Bluemler and Lothar Romain , issue 42, Munich 1998.
  4. ↑ Internet site A forest of sculptures - Simon Spierer Collection
  5. ↑ From the things of life in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , page 55
  6. ^ César Baldaccini: Conserve expansion - Martial Raysse
personal data
SURNAME Baldaccini, César
ALTERNATIVE NAMES César (stage name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French sculptor and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1998
Place of death Paris