Nouveau Réalisme
Started: 1960
Ended: 1970
KEY ARTISTS
 | Arman Quick View  Artist Page |
| Arman |  |
| Born Armand Pierre Fernandez, Arman is a French painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes, to using them as the painting itself. He is best known for his "accumulations" and destruction/recomposition of objects. Art Story: Arman Artist Page | ||
 | Cesar Baldaccini Quick View Further External Info  |
| Cesar Baldaccini | |
| Cesar Baldaccini, usually called César, was a noted French sculptor. Cesar was at the forefront of the Nouveau Realisme movement with his radical compressions (compacted automobiles, discarded metal, or rubbish), expansions (polyurethane foam sculptures), and representations of animals and insects. Further External Info | ||
 | Christo Quick View Artist Page |
| Christo | |
| Christo is a Bulgarian land and environmental artist, best known as one half of the married artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude (his wife who died in 2009). Together, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created temporary land art installations, so grand in scale and ambition that controversy often followed. The best known examples of their work include Wrapped Coast (1969) in Little Bay, Australian, Wrapped Reichstag (1995) in Berlin, and The Gates (2004) in New York City. Art Story: Christo Artist Page | ||
 | François Dufrêne Quick View Further External Info |
| François Dufrêne | |
| François Dufrene was a French artist and poet, closely associated with the development of the Nouveau Réalist and Letterist International movements of the post-war period. A herald of decollage, sound poetry, and hypergraphy, Dufrene aimed to transgress the boundaries of both visual and linguistic representation in his work, exploring alternative modes of expression through interdisciplinary approaches to art-making. Further External Info | ||
 | Raymond Hains Quick View Further External Info |
| Raymond Hains | |
| Raymond Hains was a French artist and photographer. In 1946-47 he did his first abstract photographs, inspired by Surrealism, using mirrors or capturing objects through distorting glass. In 1950 he invented the concept of the "Ultra-lettre" and devoted himself to his lettres éclatées (shattered letters). Further External Info | ||
 | Yves Klein Quick View Artist Page |
| Yves Klein | |
| Yves Klein attacked many of the ideas of the art world that underpinned abstract painting, audience participation, and other approaches to making and viewing art. Also, he famously used a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own, "International Klein Blue." Art Story: Yves Klein Artist Page | ||
"A new world calls for a new man."
Summary of Nouveau Réalisme
A group of French artists in the early 1960s set out to prove the death of art's preciousness by considering reality their primary medium. Through a phenomenological reflection about the world around them, they would create works and happenings under the banner of Nouveau Réalisme, or New Realism. Although it was not the first "realism" movement, it was coined "new" as the third component to the Nouveau Roman (fiction) and New Wave (film) genres that were also progressive arrivals of culture in France at the time. With Nouveau Réalisme, artists questioned the idea that art had to elevate, politicize, or idealize any subject. This questioning led to an intersection between art and life, narrowing the gap between artists and the public, allowing everyone to participate in and easily relate to a rich multiplicity of media, forms, and styles. Although it was relatively short-lived, the movement's influence is still widely seen today, perhaps because it offered such myriad possibilities within the ever-existing fodder of the present environment for any given artist.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
In 1955, French art critic Pierre Restany met Yves Klein at his first solo show in Paris. At the time Klein had been making a name for himself as an artist whose work challenged the illusions of art. In this exhibition he was showing the first series of what would later become his famous monochrome works - paintings made of simple squares of one uniform color. There was no relation of color to anything but itself, a blasphemous notion at the time. Klein introduced Restany to a large group of artists including Jean Tinguely and Arman whose work, like much of his own, meant to show ordinary reality without idealization. Unlike the European Realists or the Social Realists before them, who were known to present reality through a darker lens, Klein and his peers were simply acting as mirrors to explore their everyday urban, consumer society.
Important Art and Artists of Nouveau Réalisme | |
 Artwork Images | Monochrome Blue (1960)Artist: Yves Klein Artwork description & Analysis: Between 1955 and his death in 1962, Yves Klein produced 194 "monochromes," or canvases painted with a single color. The technique of painting the entire canvas with a block of color challenged expectations of what the content of a painting should be. His literal depiction of colors as their real selves with unadorned simplicity, lacking of line, image or intention, was his way of opening art to extended possibilities. It also acted as an antidote to the dominant style of Abstract Expressionism, which championed the lyrical expression of paint as being conjured through an artist's pure emotion. Instead, paint could be used as a tool to invest a space with sensibility, rather than meaning. Dry pigment in synthetic polymer medium on cotton over plywood - Museum of Modern Art, New York |
 Artwork Images | Shooting Picture (1961)Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle Artwork description & Analysis: In 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle (one of the few female artists associated with Nouveau Réalisme) held an exhibition at Galerie J entitled Fire at Will. On show were several of her "Shooting Pictures" from her series Tirs, which means gunshot or fire in French. In these pieces, polythene bags of paint were fixed to a board and covered with thick plaster. Viewers were then invited to shoot a rifle at the surface, popping the bags and causing the paint to run down the textured white surface. This particular work was shot at by a number of people, including American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Plaster, paint, string, polythene and wire on wood - Tate, London |
 Artwork Images | Baluba (1961-2)Artist: Jean Tinguely Artwork description & Analysis: Tinguely's Baluba series, executed from 1961-1963, were wildly provocative odes to the detritus of consumer culture. The sculptures were created from a variety of found objects in compositions that radiate disharmony while also promoting the beauty of fragility. Most of the objects are scruffy and old, and are used as a pointed comment on society's promotion of brand new objects. Tinguely considered each piece a living entity and was pleased at his ability to present dark commentary on mass production and the industrialization of society through such humorous means. Metal, wire, plastic objects, feather duster, barrel, motor - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris |
More Nouveau Réalisme Artwork and Analysis:
Content compiled and written by Anna Souter
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Kimberly Nichols
" Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Anna Souter
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Kimberly Nichols
Available from:
First published on 17 Feb 2017. Updated and modified regularly. 
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