Arman - Vicky David Gallery

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