Nouveau réalisme (French: new realism) refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic

Pierre Restany Pierre Restany (24 June 1930 – 29 May 2003), was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher. Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On retur ...

and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city ...

. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," in April 1960, proclaiming, "Nouveau Réalisme—new ways of perceiving the real."Kerstin Stremmel, ''Realism'', Taschen, 2004, p. 13. 'Nouveau Réalisme nouvelles approches perceptives du réel''/ref> This joint declaration was signed on 27 October 1960, in Yves Klein's workshop, by nine people: Yves Klein,

Arman Arman (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005) was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman was a painter who moved from using objects for the ink or paint traces they leave (''cachets'', ''allures d'objet'') to ...

, Martial Raysse,

Daniel Spoerri Daniel Spoerri (born 27 March 1930) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures a group of objects, such as the remains of meals eaten by in ...

Jean Tinguely Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as Métamatics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art ...

and the Ultra-Lettrists, Francois Dufrêne,

Raymond Hains Raymond Hains (9 November 1926 – 28 October 2005) was a prominent French visual artist and a founder of the Nouveau réalisme movement. In 1960, he signed, along with Arman, François Dufrêne, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Ville ...

, Jacques de la Villeglé; in 1961 these were joined by César,

Mimmo Rotella Domenico "Mimmo" Rotella (Catanzaro, 7 October 1918 – Milan, 8 January 2006) was an Italian artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. Best known for his works of décollage and psychogeographics, made from torn adver ...

, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gérard Deschamps. The artist

Christo Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landmarks and ...

showed with the group. It was dissolved in 1970. Contemporary of American pop art, and often conceived as its transposition in France, new realism was, along with

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...

and other groups, one of the numerous tendencies of the

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...

in the 1960s. The group initially chose

Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative ...

, on the

French Riviera The French Riviera (known in French as the ; oc, Còsta d'Azur ; literal translation " Azure Coast") is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France. There is no official boundary, but it is usually considered to extend from ...

, as its home base since Klein and

both originated there; new realism is thus often retrospectively considered by historians to be an early representative of the École de Nice movement.

History

The term ''new realism'' was first used in May 1960 by Pierre Restany, to describe the works of Omiros, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé as they exhibited their work in Milan. He had discussed this term before with Yves Klein (who died prematurely in 1962), who preferred the expression "today's realism" (''réalisme d'aujourd'hui'') and criticized the term "New". After the first "Manifesto of New Realism", a second manifesto, titled "40° above Dada" (''40° au-dessus de Dada'') was written between 17 May and 10 June 1961. César,

, Niki de Saint-Phalle (then practicing "shooting paintings") Omiros with his "free space" and Gérard Deschamps then joined the movement, followed by

in 1963. Klein, however, started to distance himself from the group around 1961, disliking Restany's insistence on a Dadaist heritage. The first exposition of the ''nouveaux réalistes'' took place in November 1960 at the Paris "''Festival d'avant-garde''". This exposition was followed by others: in May 1961 at the Gallery J. in Paris; ''Premier Festival du Nouveau Réalisme'' in

from July til September 1961 at the Muratore Gallery and the Abbaye de Roseland; ''International Exhibition of the New Realists'', a survey of contemporary American pop art and the Nouveau Réalisme movement at the

Sidney Janis Gallery Sidney may refer to: People * Sidney (surname), English surname * Sidney (given name), including a list of people with the given name * Sidney (footballer, born 1972), full name Sidney da Silva Souza, Brazilian football defensive midfielder * S ...

in New York at the end of 1962; and at the Biennale of San Marino in 1963 (which would be the last collective show by the group). The movement had difficulty maintaining a cohesive program after the death of Yves Klein in June, 1962 and when Omiros abandoned it and decided to go in his own path experimenting with perspective and space.

Ideas and techniques

The members of the nouveaux réalistes group tended to see the world as an image from which they could take parts and incorporate them into their works—as they sought to bring life and art closer together. They declared that they had come together on the basis of a new and real awareness of their "collective singularity", meaning that they were together in spite of, or perhaps because of, their differences. But for all the diversity of their plastic language, they perceived a common basis for their work; this being a method of direct appropriation of reality, equivalent, in the terms used by Pierre Restany, to a "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality". Artists of Nouveau Réalisme sought out to strip art of previously thought standards that art had to mean something, they could take any object beyond its preconceived notions and present it as itself, and thought it could still be considered art. Many of them also sought to break down the glamorization of artists producing their craft in private, and due to this, often art pieces were produced in public. Thus the nouveaux réalistes advocated a return to "reality" in opposition to the lyricism of

abstract painting Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th ...

. They also wanted to avoid what they saw as the traps of figurative art, which was seen as either

petty-bourgeois ''Petite bourgeoisie'' (, literally 'small bourgeoisie'; also anglicised as petty bourgeoisie) is a French term that refers to a social class composed of semi-autonomous peasants and small-scale merchants whose politico-economic ideological sta ...

or as Stalinist

socialist realism Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is ch ...

. Hence the Nouveau Réalistes used exterior objects to give an account of the reality of their time. They were the inventor of the ''

décollage ''Décollage'', in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images, it is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image.

'' technique (the opposite of collages), in particular through the use of lacerated posters—a technique mastered by François Dufrene, Jacques Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains. Often these artists worked collaboratively and it was their intention to present their artworks in the city of Paris anonymously. Nouveau réalistes made extensive use of

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an Assemblage (art), assemblage of different forms, thus creat ...

and assemblage, using real objects incorporated directly into the work and acknowledging a debt to the

readymades of Marcel Duchamp The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art".Tomkins: ''Duchamp: A Biography'', page 158. By simply choosing the object (or objects) and r ...

. But the New Realism movement has often been compared to the pop art movement in New York for their use and critique of mass-produced commercial objects ( Villeglé's ripped cinema posters,

's collections of detritus and trash), although Nouveau Réalisme maintained closer ties with Dada than with pop art.

The new realists in architecture

"The new realists" is also a term applied to a group of Australian architects determined to create a "New Realism" in architecture, based on the understanding of past developments in the discipline of architecture and modern day explorations of new technologies in the fields of design and building technology.

The new realists

Arman by Lothar Wolleh.jpg, ''Arman'', Foto:

Lothar Wolleh Lothar Wolleh (January 20, 1930 – September 28, 1979) was a well-known German photographer. Until the end of the sixties, Lothar Wolleh worked as a commercial photographer. He made portraits of international contemporary painters, sculptors ...

Villiglé by Lothar Wolleh.jpg, ''Villeglé'', Foto:

Niki_de_Saint_Phalle_by_Lothar_Wolleh.jpg, ''Niki de Saint Phalle'', Foto:

Tinguely by Wolleh.jpg, ''Jean Tinguely'', Foto

Bibliography

* Jürgen Becker, Wolf Vostell, ''Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme''. Eine Dokumentation. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1965. *

Catherine Francblin Catherine Francblin is a French art critic, art historian, and independent curator. Career Francblin joined Art Press magazine in 1975 and was the editor-in-chief until 1992. She then joined the Paris Modern Art Museum where she headed the Ed ...

, ''Les Nouveaux Réalistes'', éditions du Regard, Paris, 1997 * ''Nouveau Réalisme''. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2005. . * Ulrich Krempel, ''Nouveau Réalisme. Revolution des Alltäglichen''.

Hatje Cantz Hatje Cantz Verlag (English: Hatje Cantz Publishing) is a German book publisher specialising in photography, art, architecture and design. It was established in 1945 by Gerd Hatje
*''New Realisms, 1957–1962: Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle,'' Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010. *Pierre Restany, ''Manifeste des Nouveaux Réalistes''
Editions Dilecta
Paris, 2007. * ''Poesie der Großstadt. Die Affichisten''. Bernard Blistène, Fritz Emslander, Esther Schlicht, Didier Semin, Dominique Stella. Snoeck, Köln 2014, *Nitas Natalie

References

External links

article from the

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

New Realism website, listing each of the artists
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nouveau realisme Contemporary art movements Realism (art movement) French art movements