France, despite the fact that it had been overrun by the Wehrmacht in May 1940 and subsequently subject to four years of German occupation, prevailed as a victor of World War II. Accordingly, Nouveau réalisme—generally considered the French version of Pop art—set a tone different from that of Capitalist Realism: not more hopeful, exactly, but more expansive to the extent that Gallic skepticism allowed. Its aesthetics were as Dada as they were Pop, if not more so, alluding to the underlying drivers of mass culture.
Nouveau réalisme was founded in 1960 by the French critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein. Among other efforts, Klein patented his own shade of deep ultramarine, christened International Klein Blue (IDK), and used it to cover objects ranging from canvases dotted with sponges to plaster reproductions of the Venus de Milo. He also employed it during a public demonstration in which nude, IDK-slathered models left impressions of their bodies on blank canvas. This penchant for showmanship was likewise illustrated by Klein’s image of himself appearing to leap from a wall with his body stretched out, chin first, in what was actually a photomontage illusion.
Klein’s fondness for spectacle paralleled mass media’s reliance on the same, a tendency also apparent in the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, a French-American former model and self-taught artist who, as a child, had suffered sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her parents. Her performative “Shooting Paintings” were assemblages of objects—both freestanding and mounted on hung panels—comprising spray-paint cans and pigment-filled balloons covered by a layer of plaster. Saint Phalle would liberate their contents by firing at them with a rifle, resulting in a sort of Abstract Expressionist mess. She called these “crime scenes” and often produced them in public “executions of art” that at once exorcized personal demons and blurred the line between high culture and low.
Others within Nouveau réalisme dealt with the detritus of mass culture. A subgroup of artists called the Affichistes—Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains, and Italian artist Mimmo Rotella—culled torn posters layered and weathered over time from the streets. Two artists going by their first names, César Baldaccini and Armand (aka Arman) Fernandez, fashioned sculptures out of piles of junk. César used a hydraulic press to created blocklike “compressions” out of compacted automobiles and other scrap items. Arman took a gentler approach, compiling mass-minted objects (paintbrushes, violins, watches) into “accumulations” like Bluebeard’s Wife (1969), a translucent resin cast of a female torso embedded with dozens of men’s shaving brushes.
