Pierre Restany Research Articles

Troubling Peripheries: Pierre Restany and Superlund

Summary This article chronicles the French critic Pierre Restany and his 1967 exhibition Superlund at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden. Throughout his life and work Restany travelled the globe and engaged in local art scenes, often described as peripheries. But when did Lund, a town in southern Sweden, become the periphery, and with reference to which centre? When Restany engaged with the so-called peripheries in order to escape the art scene in Paris, he also brought with him Paris as a symbolic centre. This article explores how the critic and his exhibition conflate the dichotomy in art historiography between centre and periphery in the intersection between place, people and art.

„Всекиму неговата реалност“. „Реализмът“ – актуалност на Изток и на Запад в края на 50-те и през 60-те години на ХХ в.

In the decade up to 1968, “realism” was a key ideological notion on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was not unambiguous; it expressed misunderstandings and contradictions, and gave room for manipulative interpretations and diversion of meanings. The visions of “reality” and “realism” were often conflicting in national artistic milieus, as was the case in France. The Neo-avant-garde communities did not stay away from the dispute over the notion and Pierre Restany even appropriated it by using it to name the art group which he unified as an ideologist in 1960. The complex dynamics of the ideas in “the opponents’ field” was closely followed both in the East and the West. At international art forums the notion of “realism” played a role in different critical discourses. The opposing ideologies, through mediation and transfer, mutually modelled both its use by critics and the art practices themselves.

Objectified Gestures? Index and Agency in Arman’s Allures d’objet

Beginning in 1957, two years before his breakthrough assemblages, Arman experimented with found objects in another manner: he inked them and then stamped, dragged, rolled, and tossed them onto and across a support. The results were the Allures d’objets, conceived as “object traces,” or records of each item’s kinetic behavior. What looked like gestural abstract paintings were in fact indexes of the paths traveled by small objects like beads, eggs, shells, and shattered glass. Pierre Restany, Arman’s critical champion, argued that these traces were “objectified” in that the artist’s intentionality was superseded by the will of the objects themselves. This article questions the notion of an “objectified” gesture and considers the implications of the commingling of agencies in the indexing of objects. I argue that Restany’s attribution of self-determinacy to the object reflects his desire to fit Arman’s Allures d’objets into his own developing theory of a new realism. That theory, which would soon be codified as Nouveau Realisme, insisted on the direct appropriation and unmediated presentation of “the real.” As such, it necessarily de-emphasized the artist’s gesture. In this article, I contend that Arman’s work resists this classification, and I recast the Allures d’objets as evidence of Arman’s own vision of realism, one that reveals the impossibility of pure objectivity.

Ideas of Reality: Antonio Dias between Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Milan

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias's emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms simultaneously both change and remain crucial as Dias moves away from Brazil, first to Paris, late in 1966, and then to Milan, in 1968, inflecting the artist's recourse to the English language and his turn to painting as his preferred medium even as he began to circulate amongst artists associated with Arte Povera and Conceptualism in Europe.

Before the Catastrophe: Pop in France in 1963 - Selected Excerpts

Excerpts from the archive of Pierre Restany and Otto Hahn In the foreword to the collection of his articles published in 1992, Otto Hahn explained that, in his early days as an art critic which coincided with the appearance of Pop art, many of his colleagues, who were “retarded in every way”, took him for “an agent of American cultural imperialism”. (p.6-7). There followed the names of Jean Bouret, who wrote for Lettres francaises, Jose Pierre of Combat, and Edouard Jaeger of Phases. A littl...

Crossed Paths between France and Argentina

« Colchones : “Revuelquese y viva” : Nueva formula de arte », Todo, 1rst october 1964 (Clement Greenberg, Jorge Romero Brest and Pierre Restany at the Premio Di Tella) The art critic Pierre Restany’s travels describe a trajectory that can be followed in the articles he published internationally, in his correspondence, and also in the original documents held in archives in France and abroad. Pierre Restany first arrived in Buenos Aires in 1964, where he established professional and friendly r...

François Mathey’s Programme, through the Eyes of Three Art Critics

Francois Mathey (1917-1993), curator then head curator at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs (1953-1985), organized more than 350 exhibitions. The collections of the Archives de la critique d’art trace his hectic activity. With Michel Ragon, Pierre Restany and Gerald Gassiot-Talabot he shared the same tastes and the same desire to promote living art. The three critics all backed him in this adventure. Francois Mathey, in turn, supported them when they championed Nouveau Realisme, Figuration Narrat...

Alfred Schmela, Yves Klein, and a Sound Recording

AbstractFrom the late 1950s until well into the 1970s, the Dusseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela was instrumental in helping German artists and collectors to escape the misery and isolation of the postwar era and to engage with a new international art scene. In 2007 Schmela's estate found a new home in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, which also includes the archive for the exhibition Yves: Propositions monochromes, with which Schmela opened his gallery on May 31, 1957. Besides letters and photographs, the archive contains a remarkable document: what is in all probability the first sound recording of an artists' talk in Germany. This took place in the gallery, with an audience of mainly laypeople, on the evening after the opening and was led by Yves Klein, Norbert Kricke, and Pierre Restany. These archival materials cast a new light on that legendary exhibition, in which the display, the German‐French cultural exchange, and the reception and medialization of Propositions monochromes ...

Waldemar-George après 1945. Le critique d'art et Pablo Picasso, Pierre Restany, Édouard Pignon...

Hidden in the south of France during the Second World War, Waldemar George immediately resumed his activities as an art critic upon the liberation of Paris in 1944. In the weekly Opera, he tried unsuccessfully in 1949 to impose a new « Award of contemporary painting » on the Parisian art scene, in order to rehabilitate a sense of composition among painters. A long time enemy of abstraction, Waldemar George eventually found, in the Informal or « Tachiste » trend of the Parisian avant-garde in the late 1950s, an acceptable form of expression for his tireless quest for the human figure in art. During those years, he met and gave advice to the young art critic Pierre Restany, while allowing himself be moved by the almost abstract paintings of an Edouard Pignon or an Asger Jorn.

The “Derestanyization” Temptation

Pierre Restany died in 2003, fifty years after he embarked on his career as an art critic, and fifty years after his first writings on Lyrical Abstraction. He left behind a considerable number of documents, publications, theoretical writings, manifestoes, and letters, now in the safekeeping of the Archives de la critique d’art. Since 2003, studies of this collection have encouraged new approaches to and readings of Restany’s critical activity, as much beyond France’s borders as within them, w...

Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now

Recent abstract art actively works against the paradigms of purity and autonomy.1 A self-conscious revision of its heritage is a striking feature of its renewed vitality. Commentators have recognized the import of impurities within the founding practices of the field. Briony Fer has revealed the aberrations integral to Piet Mondrian's paintings, for example, as Allan Kaprow did in the 1960s when he wrote that “the impure aspect of pure painting like Mondrian's is not some hidden compositional flaw but rather the psychological setting which must be impure for the notion of purity to make any sense at all.”2 Here I will develop and examine a paradigm of mid-twentieth-century abstraction's resistance to the norms of purity and autonomy in Yves Klein's agonistic reception of the monochrome, that compressed but not so rarefied Russian doll that sits inside abstract painting just as abstraction inhabits the core of modernism.3 Klein systematically took the avant-garde monochrome beyond the frame of painting. Seeing his work as a precedent in this regard underscores Klein's historical importance and connects recent work not usually regarded as monochromatic or abstract to a genealogy in which he is pivotal. Klein scholars and supporters—especially Thomas McEvilley, Pierre Restany, and Sidra Stich—document his legacy for recent and contemporary art, including abstraction. Others are at best ambivalent about the artist and his patrimony. Benjamin Buchloh claims that Klein, in company with Joseph Beuys, has been “overestimated in U.S. reception.”4 Thierry de Duve's writing in this context seems pulled in two irreconcilable directions. On the one hand, he asserts that Klein's “only tangible contribution to the history of painting is the chemical formula that allowed him to fix powdered pigment without diminishing its glow,” yet in an instructive endnote about his reception in the United States, de Duve struggles with the tension between Klein's alleged “failure” and the fact that he “is not a negligible artist.”5 More serious questions about the neo-avant-garde notwithstanding, a (usually) unspoken discomfort with Klein the provocateur and supposedly right-wing sympathizer colors the interpretation of his work.6

Pierre Restany: A Man in Rhythm with His Time

February 01 2004 Pierre Restany: A Man in Rhythm with His Time Jürgen Claus Jürgen Claus International Co-Editor jurclaus@euregio.net Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jürgen Claus International Co-Editor jurclaus@euregio.net Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X © 2004 ISAST2004 Leonardo (2004) 37 (1): 7. https://doi.org/10.1162/002409404772827978 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jürgen Claus; Pierre Restany: A Man in Rhythm with His Time. Leonardo 2004; 37 (1): 7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/002409404772827978 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2004 ISAST2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy

Introduction: art, nationality and national tradition: the case of France from 1937 to 1968 1. Collaboration foretold: French art of the present in Hitler's Berlin 2. Decadence and renewal in the decorative arts under Vichy 3. Vampires, viruses, and Lucien Rebatet: antisemitic art criticism during Vichy 4. Tricolor painting in Vichy France 5. Jean Paulhan and his artist friends 6. The Picasso album: a 1943 landmark of artistic resistance 7. Wartime guilt: French furniture of the 1940s 8. The mature Richier, the young Cesar: expressionist confluences in French postwar sculpture 9. Pierre restany, the French fifties and the Americanization of the everyday Epilogue Hitler equals de Gaulle in a May '68 poster.

Beyond “the Fantastic”

Regarding this Latin America which is split off between West and Not West, in a certain sense halfway between the First and Third World (First World and a Half, Pierre Restany calls it), … it is said that without having reached modernism entirely, it has become postmodern too early.