Banded together in 1960 with the signing of a manifesto, France’s emerging avant-garde artists sought to conceptually renew artistic forms. As a vehicle they chose abstraction, breaking away from the preconception of art during the period following the war. In an attempt to challenge reality, Nouveaux Réalistes focused on the human body and everyday objects, assembling them into conglomerations, creating action-spectacles and labyrinths, and even destroying them. Separate from the surrealist Dada movement, New Realism was a fore note to, though not without influence from, the 60’s Pop Art movement within the United States, both founded on the same rejection of the precedence of mass consumption.

Under the roof of the Grand Palais, remnants of the movement have been amassed as evidence to the artistry behind their production. The exposition may serve as an introduction to the many characters, each with their own façon of reverie. Christo wraps things in empaquetages, Deschamps finds already made works of art, Tinguely creates moving sculptures and self destructive machines, César compresses metal, Sainte-Phalle shoots her pieces, and Tinguely drops a snare over a scene. The members of the brotherhood of New Realism each lend a distinctive signature to their work, though themes of destruction and spontaneity are recurrent.

Invited inside, the spectacle begins with a deadpan mannered poet reciting his phonetic poetry by stringing words together into a web of nonsense. “Feminine, chewing gum, merci, garcon,” he says interrupted by the sound of an airplane. The walls are adorned with collages of weathered advertisements. These pieces generated as layer upon layer were torn by passers-by, nameless faces, creating an organic work born as art with Villeglé’s selection.

Beyond a room of monochrome canvases, moving machines and metal compressions are a row of TV sets, flickering black and white pictures of what New Realism was. The living art of action-spectacles invited the audience into the circus. To solicit participation, artists left their studios to find materials in the street and spontaneously create art. Genius resided more in the execution of the performance than the finished product.

For instance, in March of 1960, Yves Klien assembled a well-dressed audience of men in tuxedos and women in pearls and fur. Once in their places, he cued the orchestra before leading a parade of women to assemble before blank canvases. From pots of blue they painted their naked bodies then pressed them onto canvases. The act of creating these body prints became art, while the paintings left behind were only a souvenir, “ashes” of his art. Choosing only to work in this one hue, it was thereafter referred to as Yves Klein blue.

Explained by the founder of the movement, Pierre Restany, the theme of destruction is so heavily laden in new realists’ work because “Painting needs to destroy itself in order to reinvent itself.” As we sit back and become a part of the audience, Tinguely sets his machine into the motion of a “danse macabre.” Keys are tapped, drums beaten, wheels turn, and fire is lit. As the smoke rises on that New York night, the fire department arrives at the scene. The footage captured is the evidence that remains.

Nikki de Saint-Phalle grouped mundane items like plastic toys, guns, a broom, and boots to create a sculpture. Inside a picture frame she arranged the components, hiding cans of spray paint, preferably in red, before white washing the conglomeration. The work, not finished until shot under the public eye, was bathed in the blood of the cans’ explosion. A violent reaction to the childhood abuse she survived, she admits, “I shot at canvasses because that allowed me to express the aggressiveness I felt. A victimless murder…I liked to see the canvas bleed and die.”

Another parlour trick of the Nouveau Realists was the readymade. Decree that an object is art, display it as such, and that is what it becomes. Deschamps rescuing a urinal and showcasing it adorned with his signature is part of what he considers “the biggest artistic fraud of the 20th century.” He sought a “painting in the wild,” not from the painter’s brush but already in existence. In agglomerating everyday objects and organizing them into three-dimensional collages, Arman created art from collections of dentures, dolls and watch faces while Spoerri snared scenes. Tables of dirtied dished and ashtrays of smoked cigarettes were affixed atop red and white checked tablecloths. With legs removed, when hung from the wall, the square of a tabletop was given new life. “What I sought was to simply cut out certain things from reality…sort of like taking a three-dimensional snapshot,” he explained. “Something that you normally see horizontally enters your field of vision. That’s the gimmick that made the snare painting extraordinary.” Digging his subjects out from life’s trashcan, like the fossils we’ve unearthed at Pompeii, his figures are frozen forever in that moment when they were abandoned.

Christo preferred to suspend the world’s obviousness, creating a new face for familiar monuments by enshrouding them. Buildings, bridges, and cliff faces existed as a skeletal structures to be cloaked in skin. In some cases, his projects represent transformation serving as a chrysalis before the butterfly façade is revealed from within. Speaking of his work, Christo uses the metaphor of parents with a newborn child. “The father and mother are very happy, but…they didn’t create that child so that people will enjoy it.” All that is left once bandages are removed are the photographs, a testament to the existence of his vision.

Rayasse doesn’t share the spotlight in this exposition, though he lent his hand to the movement in the modification and simplification of iconic and contemporary images. A green Odalisque, part of the Pompidou’s collection, is an alien recreation of Ingres’ work. His point of view in regard to reality being, “I like to go a little further, even though that involves a certain risk, because, the real can be unbelievable.”

In the final instalment, you are invited into a Dylaby reinterpreted for the exhibition by Daniel Spoerri. Like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, you enter by window into a world that has tumbled over. Standing on the wall amongst tableaux, the ceiling is on your side and the floor in parquet just opposite where sculptures rest atop podiums. Inducing a sensation of Vertigo, the experience of entering mirrors that which visitors were invited to experience half a century before.

Today the legacy continues, as Saint-Phalle’s art has evolved to display the exaggerated female form emphasizing her fertility, primary colors geometrically juxtaposed on the canvas of her skin. Christo clothes building like bodies and streams color in a trail of gateways through central park. New realism is alive today under the same guise it wore in the 60’s, instilling an appreciation in art of everyday objects and their destruction. Restany’s eye in chronicling the events of which he helped to orchestrate encapsulates the movement of New Realism into something digestible. The artistic fraud continues as these artists remain relevant, their brand of reverie more appealing than the sobriety in today’s modern art. Visit the Grand Palais before July 2nd to join in the spectacle or gaze over a few of the pieces that reside in the Centre Pompidou and on the Paris streets.
All quotes are taken from the bilingual magazine Artpress2 #4 Les Nouveaux Réalistes.