Pierre Restany, artist-critic, champion of Nouveau Realisme
Hyfler/Rosner
Oracular artist-critic and champion of Nouveau Réalisme
04 June 2003
Pierre Restany, art critic: born Amélie-les-Bains, France 24 June
1930; four times married; died Paris 29 May 2003.
Pierre Restany's illustrious career as one of the most prolific art critics
in France spanned more than 50 years. He stayed au courant up to the end, as
fresh and vigorous in his defence of artists as he had been in his heyday of
the Parisian Sixties. Restany is best known for his role as the champion of
Nouveau Réalisme, which existed most cohesively during 1960-63 and is
widely, if misleadingly, considered the French equivalent of Pop Art.
Born in the Pyrenees, raised in Morocco, and educated in France, Ireland,
and Italy, Restany was a man of diverse tastes and international interests.
His centre became Paris, where as a young bureaucrat he involved himself
increasingly in the art world, meeting the artist Arman and fostering
relationships with the eminent Milanese art dealers Guido le Noci and Arturo
Schwarz. As France stumbled with the onset of the Algerian war in the mid
1950s, Restany prospered intellectually, eventually becoming, in the words
of the New York art dealer Leo Castelli, "one of the most influential
persons in French cultural life".
In 1960, Restany hit his critical stride, fashioning himself into an
artist-critic in the style of André Breton and the Surrealists. The year
marked the publication of the first and second manifestos of Nouveau
Réalisme. The homogeneous style of the declarations written by Restany
joined the works of artists with heterogeneous styles under a single banner.
The artists Yves Klein, Arman, César, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle,
Daniel Spoerri, Martial Raysse, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé,
François Dufrêne, Christo, Mimmo Rotella, and Gerard Deschamps united,
temporarily, under Restany's deceptively simple philosophy:
The New Realists are conscious of their collective singularity. New realism
= new perceptive approaches to the real.
Yves Klein, with his blue monochromes and immaterial art, was perhaps the
most famous of the artists in Restany's stable. Klein's spiritual influence
had helped push Restany into an open declaration of the necessity of a more
socially conscious abstraction to respond to the wounds of war, past and
current. Restany's 1961 essay "A quarante degrés au-dessus de Dada" ("At
Forty Degrees above Dada"), written for the first exhibition of the Nouveaux
Réalistes, spoke of an art that combined the random appropriation of Marcel
Duchamp-type ready-mades with a power and feeling that connected in a real
way to the world.
From 1961 to 1967, the Galerie J, run by his second wife, Jeannine de
Goldschmidt-Rothschild, served as an important workshop for Restany's
philosophies, showcasing international artists such as Cy Twombly and
hosting influential shows that influenced American artists such as Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
With the victory coup of Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale, which
marked the first win by an American in such an important European venue, New
York had usurped a shocked Paris as the centre of the art world.
Independently of the Biennale, Restany pitted Mec Art, unsuccessfully,
against the hugely successful American Pop artists. Not accepting defeat, he
scoured the world for new talent. He fostered the career of Jean-Pierre
Raynaud and wrote attacks on what he saw as the mediocrity of figuration.
His works during these years adopted a more revolutionary tone, consistent
with general feeling of discontent in France around the 1968 revolution and
nodding to Maoism.
For Restany, the turn of the decade was marked by his support of Michel
Journiac and Gina Pane, the Body Art artist who cut herself with razor
blades in religious ceremonies. While his interests broadened, Restany
remained faithful to the core of his life's work, with a 10th anniversary
festival of Nouveau Réalisme in Milan in 1970 and later writing a 30th
anniversary book, 60/90: trente ans de Nouveau Réalisme (1990). Restany
continued his critical work with tireless pace. He continued to write
columns for art journals such as Cimaise and Domus, and to participate in
museum exhibitions and catalogues, as well as write many independent books
and articles. He was married, for the fourth time, to Josianne de Koch,
herself an artist.
In the spring of 2002, Restany was an active participant at the Royal
Academy's exhibition "Paris: capital of the arts 1900-1968", curated by
Sarah Wilson. The effects of age were obvious, and his full white beard
threatened to engulf his short body. His hands were strangely small and
delicate as he waved them to illustrate his thoughts. He closed his eyes
when he spoke, like an oracle channelling an important message. He was kind
and full of humour. That spring, Restany wrote the obituary of the great
artist Niki de Saint Phalle for The Independent with the same graciousness.
He revealed himself through the medium of the pen. "I am exposed in exposing
others," he once wrote in a poem.
He was in many ways as much of an artist as those about whom he wrote.
Villeglé acknowledged that "the great lesson of [Nouveau Réalisme], is that
art critics are like artists". As Arman wrote many years ago, Pierre Restany
was not a critic of art. He was a part of the history of art.
Elienne M. W. Lawson
Pierre Restany was delighted and amused by the presentation of his Nouveaux
Réalistes in "Paris: capital of the arts 1900-1968", writes Sarah Wilson. He
came to London to see the exhibition with the artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud.
Always expansive, the bon viveur, with an extraordinary turn of phrase and a
venerable long white beard, he was his inimitable self. He appeared recently
on screen at the Cannes Film Festival, as an almost spectral visage, full
screen in black and white, in Stéphan Oriach's documentary Orlan, Carnal Art
(2001), announcing the body-modifying artist Orlan as herald of the new
century.
Today at the Mayor Gallery, on Cork Street in London, opens an exhibition of
the Belgian Pop artist Evelyne Axell. Restany was her great friend and
supporter: a constant visitor to Brussels in the 1960s. He was prince of her
female harem in the special exhibition "Pierre et les Opalines" at the
Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, in 1969, and her token man with the
sphinx-like female '68ers in her Joli moi de mai plexiglass tryptych of
1970.