Arman

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This article is about an American artist. For the urban-type settlement in Magadan Oblast, Russia, see Arman (urban-type settlement).

Arman (November 17, 1928—October 22, 2005), was a French-born American artist, one of the 20th century's most prolific and experimental creators^{[citation needed]}. Like many, he dared to question traditional views on the nature of art, but stands out as he never abandoned the sense of beauty in composition that has been art's foundation since antiquity. At once industrial and whimsical, Arman's works stand as a tribute to the man who understood the Modern Era like no one else and used his understanding to redefine the place of art in the 20th century.

Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is best known for his artwork, although his life featured many other facets. He was, at times, a Judo master, a spear fisherman, and a collector of antiquities. Though he was a dreamer, he worked tirelessly on his creations; the myriad works which would define his place in the world. His artistic style featured an array of techniques, from the famed accumulations to drawings, paintings, sculpture, casting and even to installations and happenings. Influenced by Dada and later an influence upon much of Pop Art, Arman's works stand out through their aesthetics; Arman was the master of composition and this provides even his most absurdist works with beautifully realized compositions. Whether paint on canvas or garbage in Plexiglas, Arman saw the beauty and relevance of he everyday world and created art to reflect his own imaginative ideas on the world.

[edit] Biography

Arman's inspiration for the arts was adopted early on. His father, an antiques dealer in Nice, was also an amateur artist and photographer, as well as a cellist. From his father, Arman learned oil painting and photography and gained a strong appreciation for music. After receiving his bachelor's degree in philosophy and mathematics in 1946, he began studying painting at the Ecole Nationale d'Art Decoratif in Nice. There he met artists Yves Klein and Claude Pascal. The trio would bond closely on a subsequent hitchhiking tour of the nations of Europe. Completing his studies in 1949, Arman enrolled as a student at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, where he concentrated on the study of archaeology and oriental art. In 1951, Arman became a teacher at the Bushido Kai Judo School. During this time he also served in the French military, completing his tour of duty as a medical orderly during the Indo-Chinese War.

Early in the development of his career, it was apparent that Arman's concept of the accumulation of vast quantities of the same objects; paint tubes, ball bearings, car parts, musical instruments, paint brushes, stamped patterns, was to be a significant component of his later artistic career. Ironically, Arman had originally focused more attention on his abstract paintings, considering them to be of more consequence than his early accumulations of postage stamps. Only when he witnessed viewer reaction to the accumulation did he fully realize the power of such art works. At the beginning of the Post-War age of consumerism, mass-production, and cookie-cutter suburban housing tracts, Arman's accumulation works held the glass to a society which had readily accepted an inundation of ready-made, identical, machine built consumer goods.

Inspired by an exhibition for the German Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, in 1954 Arman began working on Cachets; his first major artistic undertaking. At his premier solo exhibition, held in Paris’s Galerie du Haut-Pave, Arman unveiled his accumulation pieces. These stamps on paper and fabric were to prove a success and were to provide an important change of course for the young artist’s career.

Another important change for Arman came in 1958 when, due to a printer’s error on an exhibition announcement, he changed the spelling of his name from Armand to the now well-known Arman. It was around this time that Arman’s work began its most serious evolution, beginning with his two most renowned concepts: Accumulation and Poubelle. Consisting of collections of identical every day objects in Plexiglas or glass cases, the Accumulations, and their counterparts the Poubelle, which were collections of strewn refuse, were to become two of Arman’s most important works. With a new name and a revolutionary style, Arman began to garner the attention of the European art community.

As the Sixties began, the new generation was ready to take the art world by storm, and Arman was ready to be at the forefront. With Yves Klein, Cesar, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysee, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Mahé, Arman founded the Nouveaux Réalistes, a group of young artists dedicated to redefining the ideas of art and the artist for a 20th Century consumer society by reasserting the humanistic ideals in the face of industrial expansion. Later American Pop artists would continue the trend of embracing the everyday through artistic expression, elevating the banal to the esoteric.

In 1961, Arman made his debut in the United States, the country which was to become his home. During this period, Arman unveiled a new concept; that of creation via destruction. The Coupes and the Colères, which featured sliced and smashed objects arranged on canvas, often in the exact scatter patterns in which they fell, stand out as a glimpse of the aesthetic qualities inherent in chaos. With these works, and the later Combustions, Arman was successful, not only in his career, but also in providing a new way to see art in relation to the destruction, chaos and causality ever present in the natural world.

Enamored with the scene in New York, Arman took up residency in the city, just after his first exhibition at the Cordier Ekstrom. In 1973 he would become an American citizen. In New York, first at the Chelsea Hotel, and later at his more official studios, Arman began work on ever increasingly ambitious projects. There were varied expansions of the Accumulations, their content included tools, watches, clocks, furniture, automobile parts, jewelry, and, of course, music instruments in various stages of dismemberment. Musical instruments, specifically the strings and the brass, would come to form a major constituent of Arman’s oeuvre. Perhaps it was his father’s love for the cello which inspired him, or his own love of the invocative shapes of the instruments themselves, that led Arman to create myriad musical themed works in media as varied as ink and bronze.

While Arman’s creations are varied in their style, composition and form, they are also quite varied in their size. The smallest Accumulations of watch parts are only a few centimeters high, while the largest and most ambitious are the monumental works; publicly commissioned artworks of an epic scale which can be seen in cities across the globe. One of the most significant is Long Term Parking, which is on permanent display at the Chateau de Moncel in Jouy-en-Josas, France. Completed in 1982, the sculpture is an eighteen-meter high accumulation of sixty automobiles embedded in over forty thousand pounds of concrete. Just as ambitious was the 1995 work Hope for Peace, which was specially commissioned by the Lebanese government to commemorate fifty years of the Lebanese military’s service. Standing in once war-torn Beirut, the thirty-two meter monument consists of eighty-three tanks and military vehicles that Arman transformed from war machines into a living artistic vision for peace. Arman married in 1953 to Eliane Radigue (two daughters, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1971). He then married in 1971, and is survived by, Corice Canton (one son, one daughter)