Arman French-American, 1928-2005
"Arman does not paint the world — he collects it, compresses it, slices it open and makes us see, in the mute accumulation of objects, everything we consume and everything that consumes us."
Arman (1928–2005), born Armand Fernandez in Nice, was a French-American artist and a founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement alongside Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle. He is celebrated above all for his Accumulations — vitrines packed with identical or similar objects, from violins and clocks to rubbish and gas masks — and for his Coupes and Brûlures, in which objects are sliced, shattered, or incinerated. His work is held at the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the MAMAC in Nice.
"My art is the art of fullness — not the void, but the abundance, the excess, the overflow of things."
Arman was born Armand Fernandez on 17 November 1928 in Nice. He studied at the École nationale des arts décoratifs in Nice and then at the École du Louvre in Paris. A close friendship with Yves Klein, whom he had known since childhood, set the direction of his artistic thinking. In 1960, he joined Pierre Restany's Nouveau Réalisme group — committed to incorporating the reality of urban consumer life directly into art.
His signature form, the Accumulation, emerged in the late 1950s: vitrines, boxes, and transparent polyester blocks filled with quantities of identical or related objects — tubes of paint, watches, gas masks, car parts, musical instruments, coffee pots. The effect is paradoxical: individually banal, the objects become, en masse, strangely monumental — both portrait and symptom of consumer society.
His Coupes (cuts) saw objects — violins, furniture, bronze figures — sliced into sections and mounted, revealing inner structure. His Brûlures (burnings) subjected objects to fire, creating charred assemblages that evoke destruction and transformation. His monumental public sculpture Long-Term Parking (1982), at the Fondation Cartier near Paris, is an 18-metre tower composed of 60 cars embedded in concrete.
Arman became a US citizen in 1972 and divided his time between New York and Nice. He died on 22 October 2005 in New York. The MAMAC in Nice holds the world's most comprehensive collection of his work.
Major exhibitions: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMAC, Nice (permanent collection); Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; Fondation Cartier, Paris (Long-Term Parking, 1982).
Works in public collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMAC, Nice; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.
Selected bibliography: Pierre Restany, Arman, Abrams, 1998; Jan van der Marck, Arman, Abbeville Press, 1984; Germain Viatte, Arman: Accumulations, Coupes, Brûlures, Centre Pompidou, 1994.