Nouveau réalisme

Nouveau réalisme was a French avant-garde movement founded in 1960. Its artists incorporated everyday objects, materials, and urban life into art to challenge traditional ideas of artistic representation.

Assemblage: An artwork made by assembling objects and materials, often from everyday life. Artists used assembled objects to make ordinary materials carry new artistic meaning.
Pierre Restany: A French art critic who named and theorized Nouveau réalisme. Restany wrote the movement’s founding manifesto and helped define its shared program.
Yves Klein: A French artist known for monochrome paintings, performance, and works involving the color International Klein Blue. Klein helped found the group and expanded its ideas through immateriality and bodily performance.
Le Plein: Arman’s 1960 exhibition that filled the Galerie Iris Clert with accumulated rubbish and objects. It answered Klein’s empty-gallery exhibition by making excess and material presence overwhelming.
Pop art: An art movement that used imagery and methods associated with mass media and consumer culture. Both movements addressed consumer culture, but Nouveau réalisme more often incorporated actual objects and urban traces.
Décollage: An artistic technique that creates images by tearing away layers of posters or other surfaces. Mimmo Rotella used torn street posters to bring the city’s layered imagery into art.
Nouveau réalisme manifesto: Pierre Restany’s 1960 text declaring a new approach to reality through direct appropriation. The manifesto announced the movement and framed its use of everyday reality.
Arman: A French-American artist known for accumulations and destructive transformations of manufactured objects. His accumulations made mass-produced objects the direct substance of sculpture.
Les Anthropométries de l’époque bleue: Yves Klein’s 1960 performance and paintings made with models’ bodies coated in blue pigment. The event shows how Nouveau réalisme could turn making into a public performance.
Fluxus: An international network of artists known for experimental events, scores, and intermedia works. Fluxus shared anti-traditional impulses but centered more on participatory events and instructions.

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