“Le Nouveau Réalisme”
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris.
March 28, 2007-July 2, 2007
Le nouveau réalisme, the new realism, the biggest current art exhibition in Paris, is a collection of welcome nonsense. It is welcome because a day at the exhibition is amusing and entertaining while you are there, and afterwards you leave with a new eye for the grimy or colorful objects that litter that attractively unkempt city. It is nonsense because French artists and critics will insist on talking about its products in a way that is pretentious and muddled.
Le nouveau réalisme began in France in the late 1950s and flourished there and in the neighboring countries in the 1960s. It was a welcome reaction against abstract art. In place of abstraction, the practitioners of the new realism sought art in everyday objects, in the layers of torn and superimposed fly-posters that hold together the crumbling walls of France, in the cubes of tangled metal that emerge from the scrap-dealer’s automobile crusher, in the remnants of a meal now stacked vertically against a wall, in the wreckage of a piano smashed with a sledge hammer. These were then adapted, adjusted, rearranged with the kind of care and eye to appearances that you or I might bring to a collection of fossils or stuffed carnivores. It is the grand-nephew of Dada, the squabbling first cousin of American Pop Art.
The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, whose collection of weird, clanking, eccentric machines makes
