Raymond Hains; French artist -- "king of the metaphysical pun."
Hyfler/Rosner
November 14, 2005 Monday 5:58 AM Eastern Time
HEADLINE: French artist Raymond Hains, member of New
Realists, dies at 78
DATELINE: PARIS
AP
http://www.ac-creteil.fr/arp/Pages/evenement/pages/17-Raymond-Hains.htm
http://www.tobeart.com/Expo/H/Hains-Philadelphia02.htm
http://www.zannettacci.com/artistes/Hains/Hains_Intro_FR.html
French artist Raymond Hains, a member of the New Realism
movement who was famous for his shredded posters, has died
at age 78, French officials said.
Hains banded together with leading artists including Yves
Klein, Jean Tinguely and Arman to found New Realism in 1960.
The movement, based on the "poetic recycling" of everyday
objects, provided a European counterpoint to Pop Art.
Born on Nov. 9, 1926, in Saint-Brieuc in the Brittany
region, Hains died in Paris on Oct. 28, 2005, French media
said.
"We have lost one of the key artists of the last 50 years,
the creator of a personal mythology who knew how to mine
with great daring, and also great humor, the depths of
images and language, of form and verb," Culture Minister
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said in a statement.
Hains, who shared his time between Paris and the Riviera
resort town of Nice, was fond of elaborate visual and verbal
games that earned him the nickname of "king of the
metaphysical pun."
Hyfler/Rosner
>
> http://www.ac-creteil.fr/arp/Pages/evenement/pages/17-Raymond-Hains.htm
>
> http://www.tobeart.com/Expo/H/Hains-Philadelphia02.htm
>
> http://www.zannettacci.com/artistes/Hains/Hains_Intro_FR.html
>
The New York Times
November 14, 2005 Monday
HEADLINE: Raymond Hains, 78, French Artist
BYLINE: By KEN JOHNSON
Raymond Hains, one of the last surviving members of the
influential French Nouveaux Realistes group of artists, died
on Oct. 28 at his home in Paris. He was 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 Realiste Jacques Villegle. The
''decollages,'' 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 Francois 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. Villegle, among
others, in founding the Nouveaux Realistes, 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
Realistes in the 60's, Iris Clert.
The Mr. Hains's death came six days after that of another of
the Nouveaux Realistes, the sculptor Arman.