KunstenaarFrench-American
Fernandez Arman
4 actieve items
Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice on November 17, 1928, the artist who became known simply as Arman grew up in a household shaped by objects. His father Antonio, an antiques dealer, photographer, and amateur cellist, gave him early lessons in oil painting and photography, and surrounded him with the kind of accumulated possessions that would later define his art. After his baccalaureate in philosophy and mathematics in 1946, Arman enrolled at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Decoratifs in Nice. There he met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal - a friendship that would thread through the most consequential years of the French avant-garde. His name became fixed by accident: a printer omitted the final 'd' from the cover of a 1957 exhibition catalogue, and Arman kept the abbreviated form for the rest of his life.
His first decisive shift came in the late 1950s, when he moved away from abstract painting and began working with the physical residue of daily life. The Cachets series - ink-stamped surfaces leaving repetitive object traces - gave way to the Poubelles, works made from sealed containers of household rubbish. In 1960, he filled the entire Iris Clert gallery in Paris floor to ceiling with compacted garbage, creating Le Plein (The Full) as a deliberate inversion of Yves Klein's Le Vide (The Void) two years earlier at the same address. The gesture announced a complete reorientation of sculptural thinking: the artwork as material excess rather than formal reduction.
In October 1960, Arman co-founded Nouveau Réalisme alongside Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, Martial Raysse, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villegle, François Dufrene, and critic Pierre Restany. The movement positioned itself as France's answer to American Pop Art - not painted simulations of consumer goods, but the goods themselves, elevated and reframed. Arman's contributions to the group's logic were his three interlocking series: Accumulations, Coleres, and Coupes. Accumulations were masses of identical or near-identical objects - watches, spectacles, axes, tubes of paint, musical instruments - arranged in Plexiglas vitrines or cast into polyester resin. Coleres were acts of deliberate destruction, instruments smashed or burned and then fixed in their broken state. Coupes sawed objects cleanly in two and mounted the sections as relief or sculpture.
His obsession with musical instruments, particularly violins and cellos, runs throughout all three series and arguably constitutes his most visually distinctive contribution. The bronze cast violin - sliced, accumulated, or compressed - became a persistent motif that connects his early gallery work to large-scale public commissions. He moved to New York in 1961 and became a US citizen in 1973, dividing the rest of his life between Manhattan and Vence in the south of France. Major retrospectives followed at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1991 and at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1998. His work entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn, the Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim, among others. His largest outdoor work, Long Term Parking (1982), stacks 59 automobiles in 18 tons of concrete at the Chateau de Montcel near Paris. He died in New York on October 22, 2005.
On the Nordic auction market, the 36 items tracked on Auctionist show a spread across art, sculpture, and prints, with top sales including a Trompettes découpées work at 19,512 SEK, a signed violin at 10,550 SEK, and a Rainbow sculpture of paint tubes on board at 10,000 SEK. A 2002 pressed paint tubes piece sold for 8,000 EUR. Crafoord Auktioner, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Pandolfini Casa d'Aste handle his work in this region. Multiples and prints circulate at accessible price points while unique bronzes and larger assemblages command higher results.