Arman - Vicky David Gallery

More documents

Recommendations

Info

12 EXTRACT FROM THE CATALOGUE ARMAN BEFORE THE NEW REALISM Jean-Michel Bouhours Having studied at both the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice and the École du Louvre in Paris, Arman never tired of praising maieutic - the Socratic elicitation of the truth. In 1947 he met Claude Pascal and Yves Klein at the judo school in Nice; he was at the time the only one of the three to have in mind a career as a painter. A few years later came two major discoveries: the work of Jackson Pollock, at the only exhibition to be held in Paris during Pollock’s lifetime, at Studio Paul Facchetti in 1952; and the rubberstamp work of Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, a Dutch artist close to the De Stijl group, through an article by Willem Sandberg published in the journal Art d’aujourd’hui. At the time, doing his military service at Antibes, Arman had let things slide; he was indeed planning a career as an artist, but his progress was erratic, if he had made any at all. He had been married for two years to Éliane Radigue, who herself had vague inclinations towards a career in music, and the couple were having difficulty in making ends meet. The year 1954 would prove a turning point. While holidaying with friends in Nice after returning from Japan, Yves Klein talked with Arman about his abstract painting and advised him to look for a more personal path. Arman grasped straight away the importance of finding an original language. And his visit to the Kurt Schwitters show at the Berggruen gallery in 1954 freed him from his attachment to oil painting. 1 These key moments, as identified by Arman himself, set him on the road from an abstraction influenced by Serge Poliakov and Nicolas de Stael and on the way to the New Realism. 2 This essay adopts a heuristic approach that will better enable us to understand how Arman’s most radical languages – those of the Accumulations and of the Poubelles or Garbage Cans – came to emerge. For this, we have to return to the period immediately preceding the inaugural declaration of New Realism. At the La Roue gallery in 1957, Arman showed his early abstracts and a few, small Cachets (rubber-stamp works). These new pieces marked the personal turn he had been advised to take by Klein, expressed in a gestural abstraction that took acting rather than making as its principle, privileging the act over the made. Pierre Restany saw in this a cathartic settling of accounts with the boring work that Arman had had to do in his father’s shop in Nice in order to survive. For Arman, the artistic gesture, if it were to be cathartic, had to be vigorous and repetitive; it derived from a repertoire that borrowed its rapidity of execution from the machine. In this, the artist affirmed the primacy of accident, disorder and subjectivity. The gesture is of the order of the spontaneous and obsessive action that for Harold Rosenberg defined action painting. When Arman writes to Eliane that he has a desire to rubber stamp every one of the many freckles she has on her body, he makes clear the sexual element in the gesture. There can be no doubt that Werkman’s work gave him ideas for his first Cachets: one again finds the same material, of course, the semantic/ plastic construction, the repetition of an identical motif, the refusal of the decorative. There is one point, though, that needs to be made. Arman’s very first Cachets, dated in late 1954, which he showed at the La Roue gallery, were done not on paper like those that followed, but directly onto printed fabric. These first works, made entirely from waste materials – in terms of support as well as technique – declare, like Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings, that all materials are pictorial. One might obviously argue that in Arman’s case economic necessity was the mother of artistic invention. His approach might also be seen as answering to the injunctions of Kurt Schwitters’ 1928 manifesto-essay, to make use of everything to be found in lumber rooms, on rubbish tips; the essay was reprinted in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Berggruen gallery that Arman had in his possession. 3 The artist brings into a situation of coexistence and tension two very different visual realities, a decorative floral motif printed by machine on a perfectly regular grid, very present in the composition in terms of colour and connotation, and the “overprinting” of a rubber stamp characterised by finesse of line, applied repeatedly, erratically and irregularly through human gesture. With the Cachets, the artist introduces a semiotic “overprinting” but also variation in repetition, accident and chance. In his 1948 essay on the new American painting, Clement Greenberg defined the new pictorial space at issue, highlighting the internal economy of all-over painting and the absence of variation in the repetition, by comparing Abstract Expressionist painting with wallpaper. 4 It needed the critic Pierre Restany, writing in the journal Cimaise, to tell Arman to abandon the “limited format of boudoir frescoes” 5 for this “viscerally painterly Niçois” to make his own Cachets in much larger formats, filling the surface delimited by the frame. His first Cachets were done on samples of what Greenberg identified as the paradigm of the Abstract Expressionism that was in the process of dethroning easel painting. Arman in addition introduced a strong element of kitsch, distinguishing himself from the Modernism of Werkman or Schwitters by his refusal of the aesthetic. Arman repeats an identical administrative message, devoid of any typographic quality or second-order literary content. An astonishing
13 cocktail of materials and kitsch motifs associated with an intervention intended as non-art, these first Cachets of 1954 testify to an absolutely fundamental advance, anticipating the debate that some years later would see Clement Greenberg – with his theory of high culture and low culture, conceiving kitsch as a degraded form of expression, expelled to the margins of culture – opposed by younger critics such as Lawrence Alloway or Barbara Rose, who defended the rising generation of Neo-Dada and Pop artists. For Arman, these first Cachets served as the first foundations of an approach that, in the late 1950s, after the Gait of Objects phase, would define itself as resolutely postmodern. 6 Between 1955 and 1960, Arman was simultaneously seeking his own personal artistic path and a strategy that would win him a name and respite from financial difficulties. Should he settle in Nice or in Paris? Before New York proved to be the answer, which would be the better gallerist: Iris Clert, Jean Fournier, D’Arquian or Jean Larcade? Before George Marci and Sidney Janis turned up, before Larry Rubin opened up the American market to Arman, what networks, what schools of thought should he attach himself to? Art critic Pierre Restany, or Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of concrete music? And if the picture is to be complete, one shouldn’t leave out Claude Rivière, a journalist with Combat who would support Arman in his endeavours, or Yves Klein, to whom Arman was so close that their artistic procedures can sometimes seem to have emerged from the same conceptual mould. For tactical reasons, Pierre Restany would always tend to analytically disentangle – and so in my opinion over-clarify – these two inextricably entangled approaches. Pierre Restany came to art criticism through the “informal” abstraction that emerged in 1947 with Dubuffet and Fautrier, challenging the geometric abstraction of the post-war period, held to be cold and analytical, and championing in its stead an art based on pure spontaneity. The almost undisputed intellectual leaders in the field were Michel Tapié, famous for having introduced the American abstract expressionists to France, who would end up working with the René Drouin gallery, and Charles Estienne, who would convince André Breton of the existence of an abstract surrealism, thus prompting the opening of the gallery À l’Étoile scellée. In the narrow world of the informal, it wasn’t easy for Restany to find a place of his own, but he quickly developed a powerful, international network of connections, among them Jean-Pierre Wilhem in Dusseldorf and Guido Le Noci in Milan. In 1956, Restany joined the editorial committee of the journal Cimaise, alongside Michel Ragon. Restany never sought to deny the fascination that Yves Klein exerted over him from their very first meeting. From then on, he invested all his energy into promoting the latter’s work, and through his friendship with Klein, Arman too benefited by association, exhibiting in most of the galleries that showed his friend. Restany at first classified Hains, Tinguely and even Villeglé under the label of the Informal, notably on the occasion of the first Paris Biennale in 1959. 7 In his Lyrisme et abstraction (1958), an argument for what he himself had baptized lyrical abstraction, 8 he evoked in connection with the pictorial spatiality created by gesture a new and different spatiality generated by the deployment of new materials by those whom two years later he would marshal under the banner of the New Realism, one of whom was Arman. Among the reasons for his own shift of interest from the Informal to the New Realism, Restany would identify his disillusion in the face of lyrical abstraction’s inadequacy to a new social context, when after the post-War reconstruction French society was hurtling into the three-decade long industrial expansion that would be known as the Trente glorieuses. Lyrical abstraction had been an art of escape: the New Realism – the phrase itself a verbal riposte to Socialist Realism – would metaphorically reflect the power of consumer society. A signatory to the October 1960 manifesto, Arman would take Restany’s side against Yves Klein’s challenge to his authority at the time of the exhibition “À 40° au-dessus de dada” in 1961. By the autumn of 1963, however, he had passed over to the critics, seeking “de-restanyfication,” admitting as if to an adultery his invitation to the critic Alain Jouffroy to write the catalogue essay for his exhibition at the Schwarz gallery. “The experience has been positive on the whole,” he wrote to Restany, “the New Realism is no longer discussed or disputed, it is and will continue to be an influence. There’s only one thing I still hanker for: to see what is next and if possible to play a part in it. In the classification of painterly tribes, I believe I belong more among the nomadic than the sedentary”. 9 Arman clearly felt that he had his own, personal future before him. New Realism may indeed have been an integral element of his strategy at the beginning of the decade, but the artist now settled in the United States had a more expansive vision of territorial conquest under his own steam. In one of his letters to Eliane, written in 1959, Arman comments as follows on a large Cachet: “it is a bit less rubber-stamp than the others and a bit more […] concrete pictorial proposition”. 10 Around now, following from his commitment to the Socratic maieutic, Arman produced very large format compositions that began to gain a favourable critical reception and also his very first artistic earnings. The terminology of “concrete pictorial propositions” that Arman employs is directly borrowed from the discussion of concrete music around Pierre Schaeffer, founder of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). Arman and Éliane Radigue had been in contact with Schaeffer since 1957. If Arman was already referring to this
Page 1 and 2: COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT PRESS PAC
Page 3 and 4: 21 July 2010 Direction de la commun
Page 5 and 6: � 5 2. PLAN & INTRODUCTION TO THE
Page 7 and 8: 7 3. BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS Armand
Page 9 and 10: 9 1971-1978 On 25 January 1971 Arma
Page 11: 11 4. PUBLICATIONS EXHIBITION CATAL
Page 15 and 16: 15 Allure, to go beyond the simple
Page 17 and 18: 17 NOTES 1 Arman, Mémoires accumul
Page 19 and 20: 19 GALERIE 2, LEVEL 6 GUIDED TOURS
Page 21 and 22: 21 La Grande Bouffe, 1973 Accumulat
Page 23 and 24: 23 Colère de télévision, 1976 Ra
Page 25 and 26: 25 FILMS PRESENTED WITHIN THE EXHIB
Page 27 and 28: 7. PARTNER INA PARTNERS THE «ARMAN
Page 29 and 30: 29 Chopin’s Waterloo, 1962 © ADA
Page 31: 31 PRACTICALITIES AT THE SAME TIME

Arman - Vicky David Gallery

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?