Nouveau réalisme

History

The term "new realism" first appeared in 1948, coined by painter Jean Milhau in the communist-aligned journal Arts de France. He described an emerging current that rejected the dominance of formal research, advocated a return to objective reality and subject matter, and stressed the social content of all reality, while not denying modern culture and technology. André Fougeron launched this movement with his painting Les Parisiennes au Marché at the 1948 Salon d'Automne.

French painters Boris Taslitzky, Jean Milhau, Jean Vénitien, and Mireille Miailhe were among its originators, while Italian artist Renato Guttuso, called the "Italian Fougeron," was seen as starting new Italian realism with works like The Occupation of Waste Land in Sicily (1949). Gabriele Mucchi's painting La Terre, depicting a barefoot peasant holding earth, was also reproduced in Arts de France as representative of the movement. This 1950s new realism eventually lost favor with the French Communist Party, and most associated artists soon changed their styles.

The term was revived in May 1960 by critic Pierre Restany to describe works by Omiros, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques Villeglé exhibited in Milan. Restany had discussed the term with Klein, who preferred "today's realism" and criticized the word "New." After the first "Manifesto of New Realism," a second manifesto, "40° above Dada," was written between 17 May and 10 June 1961. César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint-Phalle (then making "shooting paintings"), Omiros with his "free space," and Gérard Deschamps joined the movement, followed by Christo in 1963. Klein began distancing himself around 1961, disliking Restany's emphasis on a Dadaist heritage.

Ideas and techniques

The members of the nouveaux réalistes group tended to see the world as an image from which they could take parts and incorporate them into their works—as they sought to bring life and art closer together. They declared that they had come together on the basis of a new and real awareness of their "collective singularity", meaning that they were together in spite of, or perhaps because of, their differences. But for all the diversity of their plastic language, they perceived a common basis for their work; this being a method of direct appropriation of reality, equivalent, in the terms used by Pierre Restany, to a "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality".

Artists of Nouveau Réalisme sought out to strip art of previously thought standards that art had to mean something, they could take any object beyond its preconceived notions and present it as itself, and thought it could still be considered art. Many of them also sought to break down the glamorization of artists producing their craft in private, and due to this, often art pieces were produced in public. Thus the nouveaux réalistes advocated a return to "reality" in opposition to the lyricism of abstract painting.

They also wanted to avoid what they saw as the traps of figurative art, which was seen as either petty-bourgeois or as Stalinist socialist realism. Hence the Nouveau Réalistes used exterior objects to give an account of the reality of their time. They were the inventor of the décollage technique (the opposite of collages), in particular through the use of lacerated posters—a technique mastered by François Dufrene, Jacques Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains.

Often these artists worked collaboratively and it was their intention to present their artworks in the city of Paris anonymously. Nouveau réalistes made extensive use of collage and assemblage, using real objects incorporated directly into the work and acknowledging a debt to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. But the New Realism movement has often been compared to the pop art movement in New York for their use and critique of mass-produced commercial objects (Villeglé's ripped cinema posters, Arman's collections of detritus and trash), although Nouveau Réalisme maintained closer ties with Dada than with pop art.

Analyse critique

Nouveau réalisme took the everyday objects of modern life and turned them into relics, powerful symbols of consumer culture. César’s compressed automobiles, for example, transformed a beloved icon of society into something new through geometric forms. The work felt like it was made by a machine, signaling the disappearance of manual skill—once a key measure of an artist’s worth. The movement also abandoned traditional noble materials like bronze and stone, replacing them with industrial stuff like sheet metal and cement.

As the Nice school put it, they wanted to teach us the beauty of the ordinary, turning the consumer into a producer of art. Once you see the world that way, you are rich forever. These artists aimed to take the world and give it to you—you could accept it or reject it.

Arman’s accumulation pieces, like a pile of Renault cars, came from working directly at the car company to get his raw material. His work had no practical use; he was after movement and color, focusing only on plastic effects.

The object wasn’t repurposed but used to create motion, becoming a material itself. César also transformed materials in another way with his polyurethane foam—a nearly living substance that escaped the artist’s control. The matter set its own limits, and the artwork became independent of the original plan.

Gérard Deschamps assembled rags and women’s underwear, which got him censored many times. He also displayed American army signal tarps, armor plates, heat-iridescent metal sheets, patchworks, balloons in plexiglass boxes or nets, skateboards, “pneumostructures” made from buoys or air mattresses, and sailboat sails.

Daniel Spoerri’s work captured the act of eating in a consumer society. He fished leftovers from his neighbors’ and peers’ trash, fixing a key moment of the day in resin and hanging it on the wall like a painting. It was a repurposing of a daily ritual, frozen and brought back into art.