Nouveau réalisme

also: New Realism

movement 1960-1970 France Italy

Nouveau réalisme ("new realism") was founded in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein, when nine artists signed Restany's "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism" in Klein's Paris studio. Their rallying cry - new ways of perceiving the real - meant abandoning both lyrical abstraction and traditional figuration in favor of directly appropriating reality itself: torn advertising posters, crushed cars, collections of discarded objects, a paint-covered body pressed against canvas. Often read as France's answer to Pop art, the movement kept closer ties to Dada and its readymades. Based on the Riviera around Nice, the nouveaux réalistes exhibited widely, including at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962, and formally dissolved in 1970, leaving behind assemblage and décollage as lasting techniques.

Armand Pierre Fernandez photographed by Lothar Wolleh
Armand Pierre Fernandez photographed by Lothar WollehCC BY-SA 3.0 (credit: Lothar Wolleh) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Direct appropriation of real objects - accumulations, assemblages, and urban detritus lifted from everyday life
  • Décollage: lacerated, layered advertising posters torn from city walls and presented as found images
  • Industrial materials and mass-produced goods used instead of traditional bronze or stone
  • Rejects both lyrical abstraction and illusionistic figuration in favor of the thing itself
  • Works made in public or as "actions-spectacles" that merge art with lived events
  • Bold, saturated monochrome color experienced as pure sensation (Klein's blue)

Key figures

  • Pierre Restany (1930-2003) — Critic who wrote the founding manifestos and theorized the group's "poetic recycling of reality"
  • Yves Klein (1928-1962) — Co-founder whose monochrome and body-trace works defined the movement's early years
  • Arman (1928-2005) — Sculptor of accumulations - identical mass-produced objects massed together in transparent cases
  • Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) — Builder of self-destroying junk machines, beginning with Homage to New York (1960)
  • Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) — Joined in 1961 with her shooting paintings (Tirs), firing paint at plaster reliefs

Example works

  • Homage to New York — Jean Tinguely (1960)
  • Anthropometry of the Blue Period — Yves Klein (1960)
  • Tirs (Shooting Paintings) — Niki de Saint Phalle (1961)

Sources

← Back to the catalog