Raymond Hains, French Artist, 78

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Raymond Hains, one of the last surviving members of the influential
French Nouveaux Réalistes group of artists, died on October 28, 2005,
at his home in Paris, France, at the age of 78.

His death was confirmed by the French Ministry of Culture.

Mr. Hains was best known for the layered, torn and weathered posters
that he found and removed from public display and exhibited unaltered
in galleries and museums. He produced many of those works from 1949 to
1961 in collaboration with his friend and fellow Nouveau Réaliste
Jacques Villeglé. The "décollages," as they were called, resembled
Cubist collages and, sometimes, Abstract Expressionist paintings, but
they were also seen as provocations in the tradition of the found
objects of Marcel Duchamp.

Two other artists were known for similar works: the Frenchman François
Dufresne and the Italian Mimmo Rotella. The four became known
collectively as Les Affichistes.

Raymond Hains was born in St. Brieuc, Britanny, on Nov. 9, 1926. He
enrolled as a sculpture student at the School of Fine Art in Rennes,
but he soon turned to photography and experimented with mirrors and
distorting transparencies to create abstract works that he called
Hypnagogic Photographs. These made up his first exhibition at the
Colette Allendy Gallery in Paris in 1948.

In 1960, Mr. Hains joined the critic Pierre Restany and the artists
Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and Mr. Villeglé, among others, in founding
the Nouveaux Réalistes, whose emergence came to be seen as the
beginning of French Pop Art and a precursor of American Pop Art.

>From the 60's on, Mr. Hains's work ranged unpredictably from
installations of found objects to greatly enlarged sculptures of
matchbooks and matchboxes. In recent years he had been working on
digital montages that he called Macintoshages. What connected the works
was not a consistent visual style but an irreverent disregard for
conventional ways of categorizing information and an interest in the
play of words and verbal associations, which in any give work could be
at once absurd, scholarly and bewilderingly complicated.

Mr. Hains was featured in many international exhibitions, including
"The Art of Assemblage," the landmark 1961 exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York; the 1964 Venice Biennale; Documenta 4 in 1968;
and Documenta 10 in 1997, at which he presented outdoors a giant
mannequin representing the dealer who exhibited many of the Nouveaux
Réalistes in the 60's, Iris Clert.

The Mr. Hains's death came six days after that of another of the
Nouveaux Réalistes, the sculptor Arman.

NY Times