Arman; painter & pioneer of 'New Realism'
Hyfler/Rosner
October 24, 2005, Monday
Obituary of Arman Pioneer of 'New Realism' who assembled
smashed up rubbish in huge piles to great acclaim
ARMAN, the French-born American painter and sculptor who
died in New York on Saturday aged 76, was closely associated
with the New Realist and Pop Art movements, and made a
career out of turning the contents of dustbins into
"assemblages"; numerous museums and collectors paid large
sums for his burned rubbish, broken violins, combs, taps,
smashed typewriters, spoons and door handles, and last year
an auction of 400 of his works fetched some 2.8 million
euros.
Armand Pierre Fernandez was born on November 17 1928 in
Nice, where his father Antonio was an antique dealer. At the
age of six he was sent to the Cours Poisat School for Girls,
because his father was reluctant to part young Armand from
his best friend, a girl called Micheline. By 1936, he had
taken up chess (he was to remain fascinated by games), and
two years later his father taught him the basics of oil
painting - not a medium with which he troubled the art world
much.
In 1940 he went to the Lyce Parc Imprial in Nice, from which
he was expelled. Thereafter he went to boarding schools at
Grasse and Vence, before being readmitted to the lyce to
take his baccalaureat. In 1946 he proceeded to the cole
Nationale d'Art Dcoratif in his home city, but left - by his
own account, in protest against the "social conservatism" of
the authorities - three years later without taking his
degree.
He had, however, begun to bid for local dealers and
developed a knowledge of Chinese porcelain which tied in
with a growing interest in matters Oriental. He took up
judo, and met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal, with whom he
embarked on a hiking holiday. The three shared an adolescent
absorption with Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, astrology and Van
Gogh, in whose honour they vowed to be known by their first
names. (Armand became Arman after a misprint at the Galerie
Iris Clert in 1958; after initial fury, he decided he
preferred it.) After a spell at the cole du Louvre in 1949,
where he was training as an auctioneer, Arman set off for
Madrid with Klein to teach judo.
Arman served with the medical corps of the French Marines in
Indochina, and returned to Nice in 1953, where he married
Eliane Radigue, with whom he had two daughters and a son
(they were divorced in 1971). He began working in abstracts
and collaborated with Klein on "happenings", but an
exhibition by Kurt Schwitters caused him to reappraise, and
then to repudiate, all his work to date, and in 1955 he
began his series Cachets, sheets of paper covered with
rubber stamps. He had his first solo show in Paris and
travelled widely.
In the 1960s, this series was followed by Allures; much the
same, except that the marks were made by the objects
themselves. It was a technique he never entirely abandoned:
works such as Open Mouths featured crude prints of
adjustable spanners.
Arman began destroying the objects themselves and exhibiting
the bits in 1959; his Poubelles (dustbins) were rubbish in a
glass box. In a radical departure in 1964 at the Stedelijk,
Amsterdam, he showed his Accumulations, assemblages of the
same stuff in a plexiglass box, or in polyester. Colres were
smashed furniture. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago in 1969 he brilliantly combined these techniques by
accumulating broken rubbish, in the exhibition Art by
Telephone.
By then, Arman was regarded as a founding father of the
Nouveaux Ralistes, and had been living in America
(inevitably, in the Chelsea Hotel) since 1963. Robert
Rauschenburg taught him English and he became a citizen in
1973, changing his name to Armand Pierre Arman.
From the 1970s, he lived in a loft in SoHo, New York,
studied Kung Fu with his second wife Corice Canton (by whom
he had two sons and a daughter), played Go, and exported
broken and burnt items wrapped in plastic or concrete to
major mueums everywhere. Sculptures included a pile of
clocks (Paris), a pile of tyres (South Korea) and a sliced
cello in bronze (New York).
In 1998 Arman sliced up books for Amnesty International. He
was a Grand Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and designed a
plate for the Franklin Mint.