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Saran, Sophia, Andres, Chloe, Hanna

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaSGVAO-Ki8&ab_channel=StedelijkMuseumAmsterdam

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JEAN TINGUELY - MACHINE SPECTACLE (Mini Documentary)

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Aidan, Antonio

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Jessica, Gabriel

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Nina and Soho
Viri and Abbey

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Javier, Andy, and Keegan

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Delaney, Sarah, and Ella

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/spoerri-daniel/

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Summary of Daniel Spoerri

When Daniel Spoerri first collected the remnant cups, plates, utensils, and even nicotine-stained ashtray that had contributed to his most recent meal and glued them onto a board hung sideways on the wall, he was not only snubbing the early 1960s art world's new obsession with abstraction, he was also planting himself firmly at the center of an exciting new art movement centered on real life experience. As a founder of Nouveau Réalisme, with an existentialist compulsion to directly appropriate reality, that of his self and others, he pioneered the concept of memorializing singular moments of time and its literal documentation into humorous works of art. Later, as founder of the Eat Art movement, he would challenge the public to reconsider staid attitudes and freshen their perspectives surrounding food. His performance-based events and passion for audience participation celebrated the everyday action of eating by elevating it to an art form, decades before famous chefs and food networks started infiltrating our current food-obsessed collective consciousness.

Accomplishments

Spoerri's signature method of appropriating reality was through his "snare-pictures," in which he would take the immediate objects in the surrounding environment of any given moment in time (most famously meal contents) and "freeze" them in place into assemblage works. This presentation of objects from real life as medium modified prior boundaries of traditional representation in art.

An early education in dance and theater provided Spoerri a flair for the dramatic that has spread itself across his entire oeuvre, from his love of "autotheater" in which spectators are turned into active participants, to his appreciation for Kinetic Art which evokes viewer engagement, to his large banquet happenings in which he reveled in cooking and communing with guests.

The artist was a huge contributor to the idea of multiples, or making numerous, cheaply reproduced works of art that could animate, shift, change, move, or morph in visual or physical dialogue with the viewer's participation over time.

In similar ways that Spoerri enjoyed toppling a viewer's traditional perspectives of reality through object assemblages, he thoroughly enjoyed tweaking a person's notions of food. He felt food, the cooking and eating of it, was the purest form of art with endless potentials. He said, "If all art forms were to disappear, the noble art of cooking would remain."

Spoerri's childhood, in which he lost his father to execution by the Nazis, left him feeling rootless. He has said, "Everyone has something that drives them through life. Being without a native land is the engine of my own." Truly, in the course of his career, his artwork has become deeply rooted in showcasing his own particular life, formulating a map of its own, and turning his moments concrete.

Important Art by Daniel Spoerri

Biography of Daniel Spoerri

Childhood

Daniel Spoerri was born Daniel Isaac Feinstein on March 27, 1930 in Galati, Romania on the banks of the Danube. His mother was Lydia Spoerri, a Swiss citizen living in Romania. His father, Isaac Feinstein was a Romanian Jew who converted to Christianity. He was a respected leader at the Norwegian Mission for Israel in Galati, and preached actively for the conversion of Jews to Christianity. As a result, young Spoerri was raised as a German-speaking Lutheran. He grew up in a country that witnessed the gradual rise to power of the Nazi party and its alliance with Nazi Germany.

Starting in 1940, Romanian Jewish people suffered persecution. Despite his conversion, Isaac was not spared and in June 1941, during the Lasi pogroms, he got arrested and taken away. Over the course of summer, his family did not hear anything from him. Persecutions against Jews were part of daily life then in Romania and the Spoerri children had to wear the yellow star on their clothing. The terrible news of Isaac's death arrived at the end of 1941 when Daniel was just 11. His mother struggled to obtain a death certificate, and as a foreigner, she needed to prove her widowhood to be able to apply for passports for herself and her children. In 1942, she finally managed to get her six kids out of Romania. She declared to them years later: "the death of your beloved father made possible your salvation, my dear children." The family travelled to Lydia's home country of Switzerland where her brother Theophile Spoerri welcomed them all in his house. Theophile adopted Daniel and his five siblings, and the Feinstein family decided to go by their mother's maiden name, Spoerri. This early episode shaped the artist's vision of life and death, and his sense of belonging and identity as well. He would later state, "Everyone has something that drives them through life. Being without a native land is the engine of my own."

Growing up in Zurich, Daniel found his way to art through dance and theater. His uncle was a Professor of Literature and Rector at the University of Zurich and had a strong influence on his early love of poetry and literature. Between 1943 and 1948, as the young boy studied at the School of Business in Basel, he met the Swiss avant-garde artist Eva Aeppli while working in a bookstore. In 1949, he decided to study classical dance, and went back to Zurich to attend the Zurich Theater Dance School. There, he began to socialize with the Swiss artistic circle, meeting sculptor Jean Tinguely, Meret Oppenheim, and Dieter Roth who would all remain long-time friends. In a café one day, he happened to meet Max Turpis, a top Swiss dancer and professor who recognized Spoerri's talent and encouraged him to pursue his career in the performing arts. With the recommendation of his friend, Spoerri went to Paris in 1952 to study classical dance.

Early Training and Work

In 1954, after two years in the Parisian art community, Spoerri came back to Switzerland. He worked as a professional dancer for the State Company of Opera in Bern through 1957. Again, he developed friendships with Swiss avant-garde artists such as Bernhard Luginbühl and André Thomkins. In 1955, as his interest in theater grew, he decided to produce and direct the first production in German of The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, in which Ionesco famously used recycled verbal elements to convey the emptiness of life. This idea of reusing existing materials would prove to be important in the Spoerri's own artistic practice. As Art Historian John G. Hatch writes, theater has always provided "meaningful parallels for understanding Spoerri's work, as well as supplying possible influences."

After The Bald Soprano, Spoerri worked on other plays, participating in productions of Pablo Picasso's farcical play Desire Caught by the Tail, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Ionesco's The Lesson, all staged in Bern. In 1957, he obtained a two-year contract as assistant of the director of the Landestheater Theater in Darmstadt, Germany. After moving there, he met Vera Mertz, daughter of well-known theater set designer Franz Merz. The two fell in love and promptly married.

While in Germany, Spoerri discovered another interest: concrete poetry. The burgeoning movement, which had started simultaneously in Brazil and Europe, consisted of turning poems into visual and physical entities. Spoerri met writer and director Claus Bremer who was one of its German promoters, and American expatriate Emmett Williams; the three would collaborate under the name of the "Darmstadt Circle" to publish MATERIAL, a journal of concrete poetry and figurative art. The first issue was also the first international anthology of the form. Spoerri served as a leader in the publication and made contributions himself. They published a total of four issues between 1957 and 1959. In the context of the magazine, Spoerri gave space to many important artists and writers of the time. With Bremer, he also created a form of experimental theater, sometimes described as "dynamic theater" or "autotheater," which aimed to turn spectators into active participants, an idea he would link later to visual art. During these active years, Spoerri turned gradually away from dance.

Mature Period

At the end of 1959, Spoerri and Vera moved to Paris where the artist reconnected with the city he had loved while studying dance. The couple lived in a tiny room at the hotel Carcassonne, the famous room 13 that the artist, years later, would recreate in a life-size bronze sculpture. Paris was (re-)becoming an important international artistic center at the time, its population eager to move forward from the post war years. The ideas of evolution and progress were very much in the air and in fact, earlier in 1955, an important exhibition at the Galerie Denise Rene had introduced Kinetic Art to the city hungry for fresh movement.

For Spoerri, this signified being in the right place at the perfect moment. He had been inspired by his earlier work for MATERIAL to create his first art project, the MAT Editions, "Multiplication d'Art Transformable" (Multiplication of Transformable Art). He had exposed this idea to Marcel Duchamp whom he met during a visit to Max Ernst's studio. Duchamp immediately supported Spoerri's concepts, which were to extend the reproducibility of sculptural objects and to place movement and changeability at the heart of an artwork. The results would be the production of objects, made inexpensively in a series that would change "optically, electrically, or through the physical intervention of the spectator, and presenting an infinite number of variations or aspects." Many significant artists agreed to participate in the project including Duchamp, Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Pol Bury, Heinz Mack, Roth, J.R. Soto, Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely. Spoerri's role was primary; he supervised all the operations from start to finish.

The first exhibition of the MAT Editions was held at the Galerie Edouard Loeb from November 1959 to January 1960 where Op and Kinetic artists prevailed. Spoerri explained his idea in the catalogue: "The static objective work permits only quantitative multiplication of the fixed idea present within the model [...] For the animated work, either by itself or through the intervention of the viewer-collaborator, multiplication renders justice to the infinite possibilities of transformation."

1960 would become a pivotal year for Spoerri's career. During it, he created his first tableau-piege or "snare picture," for which he would glue the remnants of an actual meal to a board to hang upon a wall. Among the earliest pieces is Kichka's breakfast (now at MoMA in New York). Although he was still married to Vera, she traveled often for work as a photographer and the couple lived a bohemian and open life. Kichka was the artist's girlfriend for a number of years and one day while waiting for visitors in his room of the Hotel Carcassonne, Spoerri became inspired by the lingering remains of a meal she had enjoyed earlier. "I pasted together the morning's breakfast, which was still there by chance," Spoerri explained. He included dishes, utensils, food, and cigarettes, mounted everything on a wood panel and affixed it to a small chair. The chair was affixed to the wall by its feet, seemingly defying gravity, along with all its contents. The snare pictures, also described as assemblage, were revolutionary in that they depicted literal fragments of reality trapped in space and time. They quickly encountered worldwide success and are considered Spoerri's trademark today.

The work also gained Spoerri inclusion into a bustling new group that had formed as an alternative to the Abstract wave that was quickly becoming a major Avant- Grade trend throughout Europe. In October 1960, in the studio of Yves Klein, he was among the first signatories of the Manifesto of the Nouveau Réalisme, coined and authored by art critic Pierre Restany. Restany stated that Nouveau Réalisme was based on a fresh perceptual approach to reality and a form of its "appropriation." Restany also declared, "The New Realists recognize their collective singularity. Nouveau Réalisme = new perceptual approaches of the real." Spoerri signed the Manifesto with his two names, "Daniel Spoerri-Feinstein." Other close friends of his were involved such as Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques Villeglé, all close friends. The first exhibition as a collective group was the Festival d'art d'avant-garde where Spoerri exhibited his snare-pictures. He would go on to show with this group for several years as a very active member.

During these years, Spoerri began to use performance and audience participation in his practice of making snare-pictures. As John G. Hatch explained, "the selection of the moment of when to adhere the objects tends to be arbitrary, where Spoerri will, over the course of a meal with friends, for example, "simply decide to stop and take the table away."

In 1962, he participated with Tinguely, Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Martial Raysse, in Dylaby, a special exhibition organized at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Museum was transformed into an immersive labyrinth that spanned seven rooms. The artists filled the galleries with physical obstacles, and visitors had to move over raised platforms, climb structures, and false stairways. Visitors were also provided with BB guns that they could fire anytime. In one of the rooms, Spoerri contributed, chairs, mannequins, and pedestals that were affixed to the wall to create an illusion that the gallery was flipped ninety degrees. In another room that was totally dark, he scattered objects that coated in different materials to create different textures for the visitors.

In 1962, he published the famous book Topographie Anecdotée du Hasard (Anecdoted Topography of Chance). Extending his snare-picture practice, the book contained detailed descriptions of 80 objects, which were lying on a table in Hotel Carcassone room on October 17, 1961 at 3:47PM. The artist carefully inventoried each object and recorded the memories and associations related to each. Spoerri wanted to make fun of the art market fluctuations with the book but the publication aroused interest in his friends who wanted to contribute too. Hence, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, and Dieter Roth's associations, memories, and anecdotes were added alongside Roland Topor's sketches of each object. It became a documentation of an intellectual generation, sprinkled with their personal anecdotes. Art critic Peter Frank has called the book, a "quasi-autobiographical tour de force".

Food became increasingly important to Spoerri. As early as 1961, he declared items of food to be works of art with the rubber stamp "Attention. Oeuvre d'art" at the Galerie Koepcke in Copenhagen. In 1963, he organized the famous Repas Hongrois during an exhibition at the gallery J in Paris. He cooked and served meals to critics each night of the show and they were invited to glue their own table assemblages and put them on the walls. He held joyful banquets for friends, asking them to cook or cooking himself, requesting they bring their own utensils, boards, or dishes to the table. During this time, Spoerri was ambitiously productive, participating in many shows, projects, installations, and performances. He travelled all over Europe and the US. In 1964, he lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York for several weeks and held exhibitions at the Allan Stone gallery.

However, Spoerri's frustration with the art market and institutions in general would continue to grow beyond his art works' tongue in cheek snub toward their traditions. He also feared that he was becoming trapped in his own paintings, which were falling into a consistently expected formula.

In 1967, he left Paris with Kischka for the remote Greek island of Symi where he remained 13 months. During their time there, the couple worked on several publications and Spoerri narrowed his interests more and more toward food.

Late works

After his retreat, Spoerri settled in Düsseldorf in 1967 where his friends Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys among others encouraged him to stay. He decided to open a restaurant and introduced the term Eat Art, a new movement focused around food. The artist believed that the act of eating and drinking were not only integral to the cycles of life, but also worthy of celebration and elevation. Restaurant Spoerri opened in January 1968 and became an immediate success due to its surprising and eclectic range of dishes such as grilled ant omelets or python cutlets. But creativity extended beyond the fare; the menu also featured performances and even activities for kids. In September 1970, he opened the Eat Art gallery above the restaurant featuring exhibits made out of food and oftentimes, entirely edible. Many of the artist's friends were invited to contribute artworks. At the opening of the gallery, Spoerri declared, "The theme that we somewhat tackily call Eat Art is broad enough to encompass both decadence and also the creative act of rebirth. And making an artwork out of life itself appears to me to be the most delicious way to employ one's time." By turning culinary considerations into art, he also presented interesting ways for people to consider their own eating habits and consistently challenged and disorganizes long standing sensory perceptions and traditions surrounding food and its consumption. The gallery was a success but only lasted four years, closing for good in 1971.

In 1978, he started a new project: a sculpture garden in Tuscany called simply "Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri." He filled the 35-acre space with re-creations of his snare-pictures and assemblages as life-size bronze sculptures, including his room 13 of the Hotel Carcassone. Longtime friends like Arman, Tinguely, and Roland Topor contributed as well as contemporary artists like Nam June Paik and Erwin Wurm.

One of Spoerri's last major happenings was the Dejeuner sous l'Herbe (or, Lunch Under the Grass) in 1983. The artist organized a banquet for 120 contemporary art world personalities at the Jouy-en-Josas where a year later the Cartier Foundation would be installed. In the middle of the meal, he invited guests to bury their tables, still covered with the remnants of the dishes. In 2010 and then again in 2016, Spoerri revisited the site to orchestrate the "first excavations of Modern art," in true archeological fashion, digging up and analyzing the remains of his banquet.

Throughout his career, Spoerri also took on teaching positions. Between 1977 and 1982, he taught at the Art and Design School in Cologne where he organized exhibition projects and banquets with students. From 1983 to 1989 he was professor at The Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He also lectured all over Europe.

In 2008, Spoerri formed a non-profit foundation in Vienna, Austria where he continues to live and work today. Through the organization, he donated two spaces to the city to be used as exhibition venues and eateries. In 2015, he participated in a film by Olga Stefan where he discussed his 2010 trip to Romania searching for traces of his father. Olga Stefan stated: "This was the first recording of the artist speaking of his years in Romania and the impact of the pogrom on his biography."

Spoerri continues to exhibit all throughout Europe.

The Legacy of Daniel Spoerri

Spoerri is mostly known today for his snare-pictures and the idea that art can truly capture a literal moment of life. He's created a perpetual time stamp of his own existence, his travels, and his lust for food and companionship through objects affixed to a wall. He has elevated simple items of everyday consumption and one's immediate environment, and minutes of existence, into forever memories. This contribution to Nouveau Réalisme has reverberated throughout the years, inspiring many other artists such as Tracey Emin who famously made an artwork out of the contents of her bedroom consisting of her actual bed surrounded by the trash and clutter of her personal life.

But aside from the snare work, Spoerri's theatrical flair for the dramatic and his love of social engagement led him to also actively involve audiences in his artwork. Spurring an intimate connection between artwork and viewer through hosted happenings, he asks us to conscientiously consider, revel in, and respect the activities of our lives, imparting a message that life is the greatest form of art.

Finally, as instigator of the Eat Art movement, he created a unique perspective between food and art decades ahead of our contemporary obsession with food culture, famous chefs, and our universal consumption considerations and relationships to food. Today, what and how we eat is as trendy a subject as the figurative nude or the eternal abstract painting. This has paved the way for many contemporary artists to add to the dialogue, extending from the personal to political realms. For example, the film Resurrection by Tony Morgan traces graphically a pile of human excrement back through the intestines, to the eating of a steak, and back to its source, a cow.

Spoerri has never stopped working and renewing himself. Through his practice, he questions, humorously, all forms of conformism and invites his viewers to rethink the meaning of objects and moments, especially those that have become so ordinary as to develop an aura of complacency. In spite of his many collaborations with American artists, as notably with the Fluxus group, he is much better known in Europe than in the US. His first retrospective was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1990, and the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna is now preparing another large retrospective to open in Spring 2021.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Daniel Spoerri

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Daniel Spoerri founded Nouveau Réalisme movement, and practiced an existentialist compulsion to directly appropriate reality.

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What do these pictures all have in common?

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What do these pictures all have in common?

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1) Create a digital portfolio about your artist.
(PowerPoint, GoodNotes, Prezi, Video)

DONT FORGET TO UPDATE YOUR SKETCHBOOK

2) Let yourself be inspired by your artist. Create a work using a technique of your choice. Within the group, you can decide whether to create a collective piece or individual creations. Make sure to explain what your artwork has to do with the artist.

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"You have 10 periods for your work ( you can work at home)

Each group has around 20 minutes for presenting your results

After the presentations: Discussion

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZnQijyAsgU&ab_channel=BestDocumentary

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Niki De Saint Phalle - The story of a free woman

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zYKa6xmbjQ&ab_channel=Tate

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude Wrap Up the Reichstag | Lost Art

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https://www.theartstory.org/artist/arman/

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Summary of Arman

Arman is most associated with the Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) movement that emerged in 1960, and which represented France's response to the trend of Pop art that was sweeping Europe and the United States. Arman had first emerged as a lyrical abstract painter, but he soon rejected the style and began making sculpture inspired by the concept of the readymade. Arman's most notable work was preoccupied with the consequences of mass production: his Accumulations often reflected on the identical character of modern objects; his Poubelles, or "trash cans," considered the waste that results when these objects are discarded; and his Coleres, or "rages," expressed an almost irrational rage at objects that, in modern times, threatened to dominate everyday life. At his best, Arman delivered a powerful and chilling rejection of modernization and the culture of mass consumption. Later, he developed an aesthetic based on the act of destruction, his pieces commemorating the obliteration objects in various ways.

Accomplishments

Many of Arman's early sculptures point to the strangeness inherent in the idea of identical, mass produced objects. Gathering these identical objects together, he distracts us from their functional purpose and presents them instead as endlessly repeated forms - forms which seem to have a deeper meaning that, bia the processes of modernization, has been lost to us. In his focus on repetition, Arman's work echoes that of many American Minimalists and Pop artists of the same period.

Arman was important in pioneering the European return to Marcel Duchamp's idea of the readymade (and to Assemblage). Arman's fascination with it points to his belief that contemporary sculpture had to confront the commodity. That is, sculpture could no longer be crafted by hand, or displayed as a testimony to craft skills and imagination; instead it had to respond to the characteristics of mass-produced consumer goods.

Arman's persistent use of trash was a deliberate nod to the waste that mass production generates when time passes and goods are discarded. It also points to the wreckage of human history and the threat that humanity's production of waste might eventually literally bury us. In this respect, Arman's work might be read as an important early response to environmental issues.

Important Art by Arman

Biography of Arman

Childhood

Arman was born Armand Pierre Fernandez to Marie Jacquet and Antonio Fernandez in 1928. In his early years, Arman lived alone with Marie, who did not marry Antonio until Arman was five, and during those years he often relied on his own imagination and invention to occupy himself. Learning to play chess at the age of eight, Arman retained an interest in games of strategy throughout his life.

Although Arman admired his mother's strength of character, it was his father's cultural interests that shaped his career. Antonio enjoyed painting, poetry and music, and taught his son to paint at an early age. An antiques and furniture dealer, Antonio's interest in collecting provided fundamental inspiration for Arman's sculpture, particularly the accumulation pieces.

His father's side of the family, who were also well-versed in painting, encouraged Arman's artistic leanings, although his style diverged from the family's preference for traditional forms. After graduating with degrees in philosophy and mathematics, Arman enrolled in the École Nationale d'Art Decoratif in Nice, but soon dropped-out due to the conservative views of the school.

Early Training

While studying judo, in 1947, Arman met Yves Klein, who became his life-long friend and also his collaborator in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. In addition to painting, Arman and Klein were deeply involved in the study and practice of Hinduism, Rosicrucianism, and Zen Buddhism for the next several years. And out of admiration of Vincent Van Gogh, who signed his name only with "Vincent," they decided to use only their first names.

Following pressure from his father to take a "real" job, Arman enrolled in the École de Louvre in 1949 and studied to be an auctioneer. During this time, he continued to paint, adopting a Surrealist style. By 1951, Arman had dropped out of the École de Louvre and started to teach judo at a school in Madrid with Klein.

By 1953, Arman had returned to Nice, and had focused once again on art after an injury prevented his martial arts training. He worked part-time as a salesman for his father's business, developing a serious interest in antiques and collectibles. In the same year, he married Eliane Radigue, a composer and pianist. By this time, Arman's painting had evolved into a more abstract style that was heavily influenced by the painters Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël.

Mature Period

After seeing works by Kurt Schwitters in Paris in 1954, Arman began to experiment with rubber stamps, producing works called cachets that were included in his first solo exhibition in 1956. The stamp-and-ink technique marked a rejection of the lyricism of his earlier painting since it relied on the repetition of identical, readymade motifs; and the occasional use of date stamps pointed to a new preoccupation with time. The cachets then led to the allures d'objets, which utilized solid objects such as chains, pins and nails that were dipped in ink and imprinted on paper. Some of the allures were created by crushing fragile objects, which inspired a series of coleres (rages). These pieces mostly consisted of musical instruments smashed and then mounted onto a flat surface. Chosen perhaps in tribute to his father's cultured tastes, the coleres were simultaneously a homage to Cubism, and a provocative attack on a well-loved aspect of popular culture.

Armand Pierre Fernandez adopted the name Arman following a printer's error in an exhibition catalogfor his 1958 group show at Galerie Iris Clert, in which the 'd' was dropped from his name.

Perhaps Arman's greatest notoriety came in the wake of his 1960 exhibition, Le Plein (Full-up). In response to Yves Klein's earlier exhibition at the same gallery, Le Vide (Empty), Arman filled the gallery completely with trash to the extent that it could only be viewed through the window from the street. Originally, in accordance with his love of chance, Arman had wanted to have sanitation workers dump art in any manner they pleased into the gallery, but the city refused to allow it.

Le Plein caught the attention of art critic Pierre Restany, who declared that Arman's work exhibited the "properly architectonic dimension" of a new realism. And in the same year Arman signed a manifesto that aligned him with Restany, Klein and the other artists formed a new movement named Nouveau Realisme, a French equivalent of Pop art in America. Shortly after this, Arman's growing reputation led to his inclusion in the important American survey, The Art of Assemblage, which was staged at the Museum of Modern Art. During the show, Arman stayed in New York for several months and became fascinated with American culture, later moving there with his family in 1963.

Late Years and Death

Arman's first solo museum exhibition opened in 1964 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, followed by his first retrospective in Brussels two years later. In 1971, Arman married Corice Canton after divorcing his first wife. They settled in New York permanently and gained American citizenship, Arman legally changing his name to Armand Pierre Arman. In New York, Arman continued to produce variations on his earlier art, and he also worked on a larger scale, creating monumental sculptures such as Long Term Parking (1982) and Hope for Peace (1976). Known for his strong views on politics and human rights, Arman served as the President of the New York chapter of Amnesty International for five years. These humanitarian principles also led him to pull out of his first retrospective in his hometown, Nice, which had hosted a convention during which a Neo-Nazi made Anti-Semitic remarks (the exhibition was later rescheduled for 2002). Arman died from cancer in 2005 at the age of seventy-seven.

The Legacy of Arman

Arman's work is an important bridge between European and American trends in Pop art in the 1960s through the 1970s. His own collection of African Art has been an invaluable addition to institutions worldwide, including the Museum of African Art in New York, where his wife is a current board member. The Armand P. Arman Trust and Corice Canton Arman continue to uphold his legacy, supporting education and research on the artist's life and work. A comprehensive exhibition of Arman's work opened in February 2011 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou, underlining Arman's enduring relevance in the art world today.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Arman

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bande annonce de l'exposition Arman au Centre Pompidou, Galerie 2, 22 septembre. 2010 - 10 janvier 2011.

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