2023-02-01
New Realism (French: Nouveau Réalisme) was an artistic movement in which artists, through their art, expressed the need for a greater connection between it and everyday life. It was established in the late 1950s in Paris by the critic Pierré Restany. The artists used used used objects, waste of various kinds, and created art objects out of them.
Some of the most important artists associated with New Realism were: Yves Klein, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, César, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle. They often chose to create in front of the audience. They wanted to break with the stereotype of the artist isolated from society, creating in the privacy of their studio. Among the most intriguing activities of the group's members were definitely Arman's stagings; he organized the public destruction of instruments and then arranged their parts into characteristic abstract paintings-objects. Yves Klein, on the other hand, realized in front of an audience a series of works called Anthropometrics, in which naked women were used as human brushes' to smear paint on prepared canvases. It must be said that they all sought to redefine art, they wanted to strip it of the dogma that it must always mean something.
Undoubtedly the most important figure of New Realism was Yves Klein, who between 1955 and 1962 (that is, until his death) created 194 "monochromes", canvases painted in a single colour. This colour was reserved by the painter as International Klein Blue (IKB) and was reminiscent of lapis-lazuli (the colour blue), which was used to paint Madonna's robes in medieval paintings. Of his choice of colour, he said: "blue has no dimension, it is out of dimension, whereas other colours have it. [...] All colours evoke associations of concrete ideas [...] whereas blue at most evokes the sea and the sky, already the most abstract things in tangible and visible nature."